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.
Competitive promotion tracker Market Track has acquired InfoScout, which captures sales information by scanning store receipts from a consumer panel. The combined firm will be able to connect marketing programs with sales results. John Wannamaker would be so happy. Market Track itself was purchased in April by Vista Equity Partners, whose other martech holdings include Marketo, Lithium, and Xactly.
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.
Salesforce announced three enhancements to Salesforce Data Cloud at Dreamforce this week. There is an expansion of unstructured data types it can address including audio and video; there will be a sub-second “real time” layer for data from ingestion to activation; and the connector eco-system has been expanded. Salesforce also emphasized close collaboration between Data Cloud and its new Agentforce AI bots.