Social Marketing Funnel [graphic]

The role of marketing doesn't end in Loyalty. Turning happy customers into Brand Advocates and then amplifying their voice is how marketing creates more awareness and brings new prospects to the funnel.

Your opinions, please.

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[Addition on Mon 04/25 based on comments and discussion so far]

Sales and Marketing Funnels are typically inside-out thinking artifacts that assume our sales/marketing processes (and the entire business process) to be a self-contained closed system. They fail to acknowledge the environonment outside our business and the central role of people.

To capture the dynamics of social business, models need to be more open than the linear picture above. They have loops and bifurcations to model the interactivity and the influence of customers and other stakeholders in the sales and marketing process. A couple of other models have been mentioned (most noted, McKinsey's "Customer Decision Journey").

But I still argue that a modified funnel model is valid as classical marketers start to adapt processes to the reality where social media becomes a major disruption. It doesn't have the illusion of being capable of modeling the market dynamics, but it provides a self-centric model of business on dealing with the need for the extension of the customer lifecycle management in use today.