Great point. I have always considered customers to be those you have or want to have a relationship with. For example a key influencer of your customers may never purchase from you but you want a relationship with them. When you form a relationship they are a customer although not by the traditional definition. What we are seeing is that members of our customer insight networks are inviting their own trusted advisors , “non-customers”, market watchers, influencers, etc to the conversation, which is creating a rich source of content and interaction data from relevant constituents.

Finally, the link you sent misses a key component for customer driven intelligence. The social interaction data. By using the data that is wrapped in the social relationships, (sharing, posting, inviting, influencing, et.) and combining it with the content source, results in the richest set of customer insights and arguably a highly accurate longitudinal Market IQ.

I’ve written a post called “What’s Your Market IQ?” (http://www.achievemarketleadership.com/?p=200) that discusses a different way to get at much of the information you and Dan discuss. The primary difference is to do a lot of what Dan is talking about, but do it with full-market panels which include customers and non-customers. In addition, these full-market panels enable more valuable results related to competitive comparisons, market trends and performance trends.