The Stanford and Microsoft researchers compared how individuals use search in Twitter versus traditional Web platforms like Google and Bing. What the researchers found:

• Web search can leverage social search to discover additional search queries that are temporally and contextually related, thus delivering a more relevant set of search results
• Social search influences the perception of online reputation
• Web search can leverage the hashtag and tagging concepts central to social search (especially Twitter and del.icio.us) to identify and deliver non-spam results that deep link to further relevant results
• Web search can leverage social search to understand what issues are trending, the nuances of these trends, and then relate these discoveries to search queries and thereby deliver a more relevant result

We’re already seeing these types of things integrated into Google’s search platform through its integration of G+ . And now Twitter and Google are engaged in a PR smack-down .

Similarly, these findings above suggest there is increased opportunity within CRM systems. The researchers found that individuals bounce between social and Web search as they narrow their queries. If a brand is leveraging a social platform (via Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, etc) and focused on SEO, and consumers find consistent redundancy in results for their queries via both search platforms, the likelihood that this consumer will reach out to this brand increases. And if this brand is capable of tracking the source of the lead (what platform delivered the lead) in conjunction with tracking the query that generated the lead (what was actually searched), then the brand can engage the consumer with a higher level of insight. This type of process necessarily promotes high consumer satisfaction (and increased likelihood of lead conversion).

Photo credit: visualpanic

Interactive digital advertising versus interactive community (download). This article focuses on what motivates individuals to participate in social networks and what causes these individuals to respond to social advertising.

Advertising on Facebook. This is a well-written article on Facebook advertising best practices, strategies and tactics.

Customer engagement and Facebook pages. This is an in-depth article focusing on many nuances of how to leverage Facebook business pages to increase customer loyalty.

Value-based CRM. This article explores the relationship between marketing, IT, and finance to deliver an effective CRM solution. The authors make some great recommendations as to how finance departments can work with marketing and IT departments to set proper metrics tied to corporate business objectives.

[F]ocusing just on the ability of IT to support strategy and processes bears the risk of not utilizing the full potential of innovative technologies[.]

It’s clear there is a critical interdependence between both marketing and IT departments. As marketing seeks to “engage,” “relate with,” and “delight” customers in the continuous battle for share-of-mind and share-of-heart, relegating IT to the sidelines as bench support is not a good strategy. Rather, incorporating IT vision is a critical component in setting strategy. The complexity of consumer interactions with a firm’s brand, demands increasingly sophisticated infrastructure and data management tools to ensure that a firm can meet the needs of these consumers.

Similarly, firms ought to align financial management goals within this marketing-IT milieu. Financial concerns, in this context, center around setting proper marketing metrics to measure ROI and lifetime value of a customer. The paper points out that

[A] number of financial concepts (e.g. capital asset pricing model, portfolio theory, and real option approaches) have recently been transferred to customer portfolios…Such “marketing metrics”, based on these approaches and thus taking a future-oriented, long-term, cashflow oriented, and risk adjusted perspective, allow for an identification and measurement of the economic value contribution and the ROI of marketing[.]

To enable such penetrative insights, firms need to leverage data mining tools to create timely (i.e., near real-time) metrics to be shared across business to ensure uniform adherence to meeting clients’ expectations.

• $12.5 billion in 2005 to $22.7 billion in 2009: The amount of advertising dollars spent generating leads
• 2,241 U.S. companies: The number of companies measured in the study to test lead response time
• 37% of the companies responded within one hour, 16% responded within one to 24 hours, 24% took more than 24 hours to respond, 23% never responded
• 42 hours: The average response time by all companies measured
• 7X: If you try to contact a potential customer (i.e., a “lead”) within one hour of receiving a query, you are nearly seven times as likely to qualify that customer as those individuals who wait two hours
• 60X: By contacting a potential customer within one hour of a receiving a query, you are more than sixty times as likely to qualify that lead than individuals who wait 24 hours

Take-away: The fastest to respond wins the opportunity to serve a customer. Insight: Once you’re earned that opportunity, keep delighting that customer by remaining responsive.

Below is a curated list of articles from this week of innovative social analytics and business intelligence initiatives.

In this article from O’Reilly Radar, we learn that social network analysis is amalgamation of social science analysis such as sociology, political science, psychology, and anthropology combined with traditional mathematical measurements. At it’s core, social network analysis measures relationships between people and organizations. But cutting edge research is also looking at ways to leverage social network analysis as a form of early warning system for natural disasters. Much social network analysis has been regressive in nature, the future will focus more on real time analysis.

And speaking of real time analytics, the article from the Washington Post makes the argument that real time results may have a significant influence on the up-coming 2012 elections.

Perry is done,” came a Twitter posting from a viewer called (at)PatMcPsu, even while the Texas governor struggled to name the third of three federal agencies he said he would eliminate as president. Another, called (at)sfiorini, messaged, “Whoa? Seriously, Rick Perry? He can’t even name the agencies he wants to abolish. Wow. Just wow.

The key point to remember is that the “real time citizen” is no longer content to remain passive. Additionally, will the “real time citizen” quietly wait for poll stations and voting counts to close in other states before announcing the results of his/her own state? Will be interesting to watch how quiet or loud Mr. and Mrs. Real Time Citizen will react in 2012.

Finally, social app analytics start-up Kontagent snagged $12 million in a Series B round. According to an interview with Kontagent’s founder, what makes Kontagent unique is that does not perform “traditional” social analytics function (such as conversation monitoring, tabulating likes, etc) but performs deep analytics, with a focus on teasing out profitability KPIs, and has a team of data analytics and data visualization scientists working to help clients understand, interpret, and make informed business decisions based on Kontagent’s proprietary data visualization techniques.