An interesting pilot project here completed by HP shows that data from social media can be merged with company data (ticket sales, customer demographics et cetera) to predict customer behavior with up to 90% accuracy.

The pilot shows that collaboration between marketing and IT departments is critical to unlocking the business value of social media.  The system used can correlate social media conversations about specific product features to actual customer transactions in real-time. Read More »

A really interesting talk here given by Genevieve Bell, who leads a group of anthropologists at chip firm Intel, who was speaking at the the Web 2.0 Summit earlier this week and gave a great talk about what would happen if “data were a person”.

Her talk, called, naturally enough, ‘The Secret Life of Data’ looks at some of the different stories and secrets that exist within data. Read More »

Infographics are transforming the way we see data, shifting us away from boring, stuffy tables and towards beautiful graphics which communicate complex ideas in a clear and simple way. If you’re a real data visualisation enthusiast, get ready to drool over Visual.ly. Read More »

There has been a lot of talk of social media being the death of email, especially with the latest developments at Facebook. Sorry, I just can’t see that yet. At Jobsite we are currently sending out over 5,7m job alerts per week (a year on year increase of 33%) which result in over half of all job applications made. And social media delivers not even a fraction of that. What I can see however, is that social media enhances email and email enhances social media -another proof point of the increasing convergence of media channels. Read More »

PepsiCo brand Gatorade is taking its social media strategy very seriously indeed – so much so that it has built a mission control centre replete with screens beaming out brightly-coloured visualisations of what people are saying about it on the likes of Twitter. Read More »

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has reacted to public and media condemnation over the use of its members’ personal data by promising to add privacy controls to the site in the coming weeks. Read More »

This is rather worrying – Facebook and MySpace have been sending people’s personal data to advertising companies, breaking promises to consumers that they do not share information without consent, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal. Read More »