Research from Gartner Group (Customer Service)

Link to Gartner Group's thoughts on Social CRM:

STAMFORD, Conn., March 3, 2011— During the next two years, 30 percent of leading companies will extend the goals of their online community activities to the design of enhanced service processes, such as social CRM, according to Gartner, Inc. Social CRM for customer service has the potential to bring new and dynamic methods for improving customer service, and in doing so is creating opportunities for new and existing providers in the customer service and contact center infrastructure markets."Social CRM for customer service has only recently entered into the realm of contact center infrastructure and customer service software components, where it has been met with significant hype despite a limited number of field deployments," said Drew Kraus, research vice president at Gartner. "There is strong corporate awareness, including at corporate executive levels, of social networks and their potential impact on corporate brand management and customer service perception. We expect the high-profile nature of social networks and social CRM for customer service to rapidly advance adoption from early adopter to mainstream deployments despite the volatile and rapid evolution of social networks in general."

Pattern is a fast, robust, general-purpose Python library for web mining

Pattern is a fast, robust, general-purpose Python library for web mining, text analysis and (upcoming in 1.1) graph visualization.

Extensive documentation can be found here:
http://www.clips.ua.ac.be/pages/pattern

http://www.clips.ua.ac.be/news/version-10-of-the-pattern-web-mining-module

A Recent Google-Slap (Overstock.com)

Recent News (SEO)

Google Inc. is penalizing  Overstock.com Inc. in its search results after the retailer ran afoul of Google policies that prohibit companies from artificially boosting their ranking in the Internet giant's search engine.
Overstock's pages had recently ranked near the top of results for dozens of common searches, including "vacuum cleaners" and "laptop computers." But links to Overstock on Tuesday dropped to the fifth or sixth pages of Google results for many of those categories, greatly reducing the chances that a user would click on its links.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704520504576162753779521700.html?mod=WSJ_hp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsFifth

Google Social Search, a Recommendation Engine

Google Social Search is not a new feature, but it wasn't that important until now. Google used to display at the bottom of the search results page a few links to pages created or recommended by your friends and social connections. The feature automatically obtained data from Google Reader, Google Buzz, Gmail Contacts, Twitter and other sites linked from your Google profile.

Google's blog announced that Social Search will be used to enhance Google results and will become a ranking signal. Social Search borrowed Hotpot's interface that annotates results with messages like "Dan rated this place 5 stars", so you can see why a page ranks so high.


http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/02/google-social-search-recommendation.html

Digging Deeper into Facebook Pages: 11 Things You Need to Know.

(Updated for clarity:  This post is an excerpt and link to another blog...)

Now that I’ve had a few days to play around with the changes Facebook has
made in its Business Page product, and also to process those changes, I thought
I would share a few things that you should consider as you move forward. Overall
I like the changes, and I think you will too. But just remember: this is
Facebook. They aren’t done yet. More changes are on the way.

This is a rather long post, but here’s what you need to know. In some cases,
I’ll explain ways to use the new features, along with ways you should avoid
abusing them:

1) Check your business category – When you click on the
“Edit Page” button you’ll have access to a number of new behind the scenes
features. Now, for the first time since you created your page, you have the
chance to make sure you have categorized your business properly under “Basic
Information”. Facebook has added quite a few new categories and subcategories.
Having worked with a lot of clients I know that sometimes the old categories
didn’t quite fit a lot of businesses, or the person who created the page
mis-categorized the business.  And once you set it up, you weren’t able to
change it.


Read more: Digging
Deeper into Facebook Pages: 11 Things You Need to Know http://inklingmedia.net/2011/02/14/digging-deeper-into-facebook-pages-11-things-you-need-to-know/#ixzz1DyhaigcI

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ATTENTIONOMICS: CAPTIVATING ATTENTION IN THE AGE OF CONTENT DECAY

The essence of this deck is that attention is linked with economic value creation. However, with infinite content options (space) yet finite attention (time) and personalized social algorithms curating it all for us, it's going to be increasingly challenging to stand out.

Let's  consider Twitter, for example. They are seeing a staggering 110 million tweets per day. And the volume is growing. But therein lies the challenge. Each tweet decays almost as soon as it is released. Some 92% of all retweets (and 97% of replies) are within the first 60 minutes according to Sysomos.

The situation in some ways is worse on Facebook where a highly personalized algorithm called EdgeRank curates our feed based on personal affinities, content formats and timeliness. There's not just one Facebook but 500M Facebooks. And, according to Vitrue, the majority of us participate at top and bottom of the hour. This means that anything you post to your Facebook page needs to create a social surge well before then.

http://www.steverubel.com/attentionomics-captivating-attention-in-the-a

The Dirty Little Secrets of Search

2/14/2011 Update:  A reaction to this article:  http://battellemedia.com/archives/2011/02/this_is_news_jc_penney_and_link_farms.php

PRETEND for a moment that you are Google’s search engine.

Add to Portfolio

• Yahoo! Inc
• Time Warner Inc
• Penney, J C, Co
• Google Inc
• Bed Bath & Beyond Inc
• AT&T Inc
• Samsonite
• eBay Inc
• Macy's Inc
• Home Depot Inc
• Wal-Mart Stores Inc

Go to your Portfolio »

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Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

Doug Pierce of Blue Fountain Media examined J. C. Penney’s ranking on Google. His analysis suggested a world of intrigue in the search business.

Readers' Comments

Readers shared their thoughts on this article.

• Read All Comments (156) »

Someone types the word “dresses” and hits enter. What will be the very first result?

There are, of course, a lot of possibilities. Macy’s comes to mind. Maybe a specialty chain, like J. Crew or the Gap. Perhaps a Wikipedia entry on the history of hemlines.

O.K., how about the word “bedding”? Bed Bath & Beyond seems a candidate. Or Wal-Mart, or perhaps the bedding section of Amazon.com.

“Area rugs”? Crate & Barrel is a possibility. Home Depot, too, and Sears, Pier 1 or any of those Web sites with “area rug” in the name, like arearugs.com.

You could imagine a dozen contenders for each of these searches. But in the last several months, one name turned up, with uncanny regularity, in the No. 1 spot for each and every term:

J. C. Penney.

The company bested millions of sites — and not just in searches for dresses, bedding and area rugs. For months, it was consistently at or near the top in searches for “skinny jeans,” “home decor,” “comforter sets,” “furniture” and dozens of other words and phrases, from the blandly generic (“tablecloths”) to the strangely specific (“grommet top curtains”).

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html?_r=1