Again: Tuesday’s New York Times carried two stories that Facebook is used by bad people, in Libya and the U.S. What’s new isn’t the information but the implication that Facebook should change or be regulated. That’s BadTech.
Social customer care vendor Lithium has merged with social marketing platform Spredfast. The products will be merged into a single platform, according to their announcement. Lithium is owned by Vista Equity Partners, which also owns Marketo and Cvent. Spredfast had accrued $138 million in funding per Crunchbase and 582 employees on LinkedIn; the same sources show $202 million funding and 634 employees for Lithium.
CMOs are also looking to a future where they get more data directly from their customers, according to the Duke Fuqua CMO Survey. Seventy percent expected to use more online customer data in the next two years compared with just 30% expecting to use more third party data. If you’re never seen this report, take a peek: it’s a 73-page trove of data on many topics. And if you want more on the future of third party data, check out this recent post on Customer Experience Matrix.
Adobe is extending its Real Time CDP to support new data partners, look-alike audiences, and import audience segments from other systems. The announcements came at the company’s EMEA Summit. There were plenty of announcements about the company’s other Experience Cloud products, and of course new features powered by generative AI.