CDP Institute

Digital marketing agency Stirista has introduced StiristaLINK, a service to enrich B2B and B2C profiles with business, consumer, and social data including contact information. B2B profiles are linked to consumer information using proprietary geo-coding methodology. Just in case you didn’t have enough data sources to consider.

Agile development methods may reduce the chances of deploying a central customer database, according to a survey just released by the CDP Institute. But companies that combined agile methods with long term plans had more databases than companies that used either method by itself. Read the blog, download the report, and form your own opinions.

MapR, which combines distributed processing, event streaming, real-time analytics, and enterprise scalability in a “converged data platform”, has released combined software and services solution called Customer 360 Quick Start. The offering packages MapR’s big data and machine intelligence technology with staff for a five week project that assembles data and solves a specific marketing problem such as upsell or cross sell, segmentation, call center analytics, or content recommendations.

I’ve long doubted that serious data privacy regulation will happen in the U.S. It seems that some pretty big businesses agree: according to this story, Verizon is merrily planning to combine online and offline data on its subscribers to allow ad targeting on par with Google and Facebook. If there were much chance for a backlash against data collection, this would be bad news for companies building their own customer databases. But chances are slim.

This story caught my eye because it’s about consumers gathering data about companies, instead of the other way around. Man bites dog, as it were. In this case, consumers are sharing grocery store price and availability information through a new company called Basket. One of the co-founders was an early employee at Waze, which is based on crowd-sourcing traffic information.

I’d love to have made “the customer strikes back” into a theme for the day, but those stories are hard to find.

Let’s look at empowerment from a different angle.

You may think of Episerver as a Web content management system, if you think of them at all.

Here’s a pretty standard acquisition story, but the company being bought is named Little Bird so we can think of it as part of a Thanksgiving theme. Little Bird helps brands find social influences and build communities. The buyer is Sprinklr, an enterprise social media management platform. You might say they gobbled them up.

Speaking of acquisitions, GE Digital recently spent $915 million to buy cloud-based field service technology company ServiceMax, $153 million for Internet of Things data integration specialist Bit Stew, and an undisclosed amount for machine learning expert Wise.io. This is all intended to build its equipment monitoring business but if you don’t think equipment data can be transformed into customer insights, you might want to think again.

Been spending a lot on content, have you? How do you feel to learn that 90% of the engagement goes to just 5% of the items? And that consumption hasn’t increased even though companies are spending 50% more on content creation? Marketing performance measurement vendor Beckon provides these and other sobering facts in a new survey.

Many marketers are confused about the difference between Customer Data Platforms and Data Management Platforms.