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Importantly, companies are using social media to do things that go way beyond just chatting up existing customers on Facebook. Sales departments use social to nurture leads and close sales. HR posts job openings and vets applicants. Community and support squads mine networks, blogs and forums with deep listening tools.

Sales teams use social media to generate leads and track clients as they move through the sales funnel. Operations and distribution teams forecast supply chains, while research and development squads brainstorm product ideas.

Salesforce's Chatter is what convinced me that the company understood what is going on in the enterprise; this was the biggest attraction for me. I saw that Salesforce understands social.

We need to figure out how to connect people to jobs.

Being a salesperson prepares you for just about everything in business: how to listen, empathize, and persuade; when to back off and when to step in; and, of course, how to close.

Social media has shaken up the world of sales, with Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter offering new ways to hound leads and unprecedented insights into clients.

Great salespeople are relationship builders who provide value and help their customers win.

We use social media as an adjunct to my total media/market outreach.

It is time to create new social science departments that reflect the breadth and complexity of the problems we face as well as the novelty of 21st-century science. These would include departments of biosocial science, network science, neuroeconomics, behavioral genetics and computational social science.

I'd like to put together a think tank of people - economists, futurists, city planners, a few department-store people - to discuss reinventing the department store.