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.
If you still think that MCP stands for Male Chauvinist Pig, well, the 1970’s want their disco ball back. Today’s hep cats know that MCP stands for Model Context Protocol, a new-but-widely supported standard that lets large language models access structured data as context for their prompts. Early adopters include Salesforce and Adobe, and search platform Algolia is now using it to feed their data to customer-facing real-time AI agents.