• by David Goetzl  @dgoetzl, December 10, 2012

Evan Shumeyko, global director of CRM for OgilvyOne, said Monday that social media is growing, but “email is still a prevalent and dominant platform.” One advantage is that it offers an ability to capture customer data that outpaces the social space.

He cited a statistic that 82% of people are comfortable sharing personal information over email. “To me that is your competitive advantage,” Shumeyko told email marketers in a keynote address at the MediaPost Email Insider Summit.

“That sharing of information via email is a powerful, powerful moment that you can exploit, and it’s something that your peers in social do not have,” he added.

With social, Shumeyko spoke about a Customer Spring (playing off Arab Spring), where customers have a major influence on brand perception. Social is “more than a buzzword for consumers because they now have the ability to control the conversation,” he said.

Brands are focused on building Facebook likes and Twitter followers, which is a solid strategy for constructing customer relationships in the present, rather than future alliances.

Shumeyko said that with his CRM role, he is interested in “active listening across channels,” where interaction with a customer may occur on the phone, but also via email with the same core message. That allows people to feel as if “you are really truly dealing with an intelligent being, not just a series of one-off touches.”

Relevant content or personalization is critical, he said, because that can help drive “earned” media, which is the most valuable among earned, paid and owned media. “That is that word of mouth, that one-to-one peer recommendation,” he said.