Image by Ben Reierson via Flickr

• Avanade Research Paper On SaaS and CRM
  (tags: crm saas Avanade whitepapers business+applications)

• Salesforce Chatter: what a clanger! | Irregular Enterprise
  "Chatter is as bad a term as Social. Execs will love that" – Sameer Patel
  (tags: salesforce+chatter collaboration cloud+computing twitter facebook)

  

• The Social Media Opportunity for CPG Companies – The eMarketer Blog
  "The opportunity for CPG marketers in social media probably does not ultimately lie in paid advertising, or even in building a branded community or fan page on a social network. CPGs can use social media to humanize their brand and create loyalty simply by being available when consumers have a problem, question or compliment."
  (tags: emarketer social+media brands CPG advertising digital+marketing strategy)

  

• The Google Phone Is Very Real. And It’s Coming Soon [TechCrunch]
  (tags: google web mobile iphone android google+phone)

Any company that provides better ROI for media buys will certainly garner some attention these days. Peerset’s approach makes a lot of sense as another way of targeting users. The company pulls streams, profiles and other clusters of data together and applies its "targeting algorithm" to render relevant matches.

"Peerset scrapes data from millions of sites, profiles and status messages and compiles a series of word clusters. While seemingly unrelated, Grey’s Anatomy, John Mayer and Starbucks coffee are clustered together simply because a large number of users have expressed interest in all three topics."

The time it would take to pull together this type of data would seem to easily justify the expenditure. You could hire an analytics or media services firm to try and aggregate this type of data but in the end you still have to make sense of it — which brings you back to algorithms, metadata and other analytical tools. That’s a big reason I like Peerset’s approach.

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• When Your Business Has Nowhere to Hide – Leading Green – HarvardBusiness.org
  "They (consumers) won’t actually have to go out of their way (at least, not much) with easy-to-use product rating websites, green shopping iPhone apps, and — the next wave — eco-ratings on price tags themselves. And shoppers will like ratings that can help protect them and their families from feared toxic chemicals, not just help polar bears survive. These information systems are disruptive technologies, game-changers the past does little to predict."
  (tags: sustainability eco-conscious consumers transparency green)

  

• Real-time search: more contenders flood the field | VentureBeat
  Surchur and XLHit are new to me.
  (tags: realtime search twitter)

  

• Microsoft Defends Its Empire – BusinessWeek
  2010 will be a telling year for Redmond’s online strategy. Just a matter of time before whole Office suite is SaaS.
  (tags: microsoft marketing technology saas office business+week)

  

• Businesses use Twitter to communicate with customers – USATODAY
  These stories will seem silly next year..things like Twitter will be commonplace for interacting with customers.
  (tags: usatoday twitter socialmedia social+networks customer+service)
• Aggregate, Curate, Publish To Create Local Media
  Everyone should be thinking like a media company.
  (tags: media content publishing journalism online aggregator business avc local)
• Where to find journalists on Twitter
  Good list of niche sites and industry-oriented directories.
  (tags: journalism media twitter publishing social+networks)

  

• The end of mobile isolation?
  "There’s a huge untapped opportunity here to move beyond PC to genuinely new forms of collaboration that leverage the unique features of the mobile device such as its portability and ubiquity."
  (tags: gartner technology mobile+computing collaboration voice+apps)