CDP Institute

The European Union fined Google $2.7 billion for anti-trust violations by favoring its own shopping services in search results.

Even as the EU attacks them and they battle each other for customer attention, Google, Facebook, and other social media leaders have announced plans to cooperate on removing terrorist content from their platforms.  It’s more evidence of the powerful role they play in their customers’ lives.  And a not-so-subtle reminder to governments about that power.

Grocery is one of the few retail sectors that remained largely untouched by online competition. Amazon may change that with its Whole Foods acquisition, but in the meantime we have meal kit subscriptions. NPD Group finds adoption is still low – 5% of U.S. households – but will rise as prices come down and more young people enter the market. Subscriptions are a key competitive weapon in the battle for share of customer, since let companies make sales without going through search engines or advertising.

CDP SessionM has expanded its Salesforce integration to incorporate Marketing, Commerce, and Service clouds. The AppExchange app loads Salesforce data, adds predictive model scores, metrics, and recommendations, and exposes the results to Salesforce components. Some other CDPs are listed on AppExchange but it’s quite rare.

Speaking of integration, Salesforce-owned Mulesoft reports that 81% of consumers feel that organizations provide a disconnected experience and 69% would consider changing service providers when that happens. But 72% also believe they receive personalized service – a good reminder that disconnected experience can still be personalized. Interesting breakdowns here of perceptions by industry and across countries.

It’s also good to be reminded that different consumers have different attitudes towards personalization and data sharing. Acxiom and the Data & Marketing Association (DMA) found that U.S. consumers fall into three camps: 58% are pragmatists who decide on a case-by-case basis when sharing data is worthwhile; 24% are fundamentalists who never want to provide personal information, and 18% are unconcerned about data sharing. Lots of detail here about attitudes towards selling data, transparency, personal control, and more.

Customer Data Platform vendor RedPoint Global has added new master data management features to its system, making it easier for business users to review, approve or reject proposed changes. The enhancements join an already rich set of data stewardship features in RedPoint.

Data management isn’t the glamorous part of marketing, but avoiding it has tremendous costs. A study from integration vendor SnapLogic estimates U.S. and U.K. companies are losing $140 billion each year, including lost time, wasted resources and missed opportunities. Lack of collaboration and departmental turf-guarding are the biggest obstacles to integration; lack of technology ranks sixth. Lots of other good information.

I haven’t pestered you recently about GDPR (those new European data privacy rules, now less than a year away).  But this Spiceworks report shows just five percent of U.S. companies have even begun to prepare, so another nudge is in order.  Consider yourself nudged.  Remember that GDPR affects any company holding data on European Union citizens, even if the company is the U.S.

Synthio, formerly Social123, started as a compiler of public B2B data but now positions itself as a Customer Data Platform. That’s not as big a stretch as it might seem, since the technology to gather, clean, and unify public data can also be applied to merging a company’s own data. They just announced a $10.5 million funding, more than doubling the $8 million raised in earlier rounds.

Lithium, which started as a social community platform provider, has also expanded its scope – most notably, by acquiring Klout in 2014. Its most recent extensions are integrations with tools for paid social advertising and social listening platforms. The company positions this as making it “one single platform for digital marketers” but doesn’t hide that it includes only social media. You may recall that Lithium agreed to be purchased by Vista Equity Partners last month.

Using AI to generate insights and recommendations is a hot trend right now.  One example: Engagement Labs has added predictive analytics to measure the impact on sales of different social influence metrics and a simulator to show the sales results of possible changes. Second example: Unmetric has launched an artificial-intelligence-powered system that monitors competitive behavior on social media and identifies what worked best.