Oliver Young

Trend 1) Brands Heavily Invested in Promoting Traditional Websites Trend 2) Surprisingly, Many Did Not Promote a Call-To-Action Trend 3) Only a Sixth of Ads Explicitly Promoted Social Media Trend 4) Hashtag Marketing Emerged to Stimulate Continual Engagement Trend 5) Cutting Edge Marketers Teased with New Marketing Tactics, including Shazam - Oliver Young

Airbnb’s rapid growth over the last year demonstrates a strong market for this type of service. And with the hefty funding it received last year, Airbnb doesn’t look like its going anywhere. Check out the infographic below for more Airbnb stats. - Oliver Young

Producteev, which is launching a slew of new apps today, comes the closest to being the task management service I’ve always wanted. It works on a multitude platforms, can be used for both group and individual tasks, and even integrates directly with other task services (including some that it’s directly competing with). - Oliver Young

IBM Connections. A new release will combine analytics, real-time monitoring and social networks connecting employees and partners. In a nutshell, IBM is betting its social analytics tools will aggregate unstructured data and find signals to highlight everything from employee sentiment to market trends via unstructured data, SAP applications and Facebook posts. Customers for IBM’s new social enterprise software include Kraft, 3M, Prudential and Caterpillar. Among the key parts of IBM’s social analytics push: IBM Connections is designed to allow for one-click collaboration as well as highlight critical data from wikis, blogs, streams, email and calendars. SmartCloud for Social Business is a SaaS suite for co-editing of documents (IBM Docs), online meetings and enterprise email, calendaring and messaging. Social networking tools for content management systems. Messaging and collaboration software for mobile devices and Web sites. IBM also highlighted the beta of Lotus Notes and Domino - Oliver Young

But Google has further ambitions for Google+ in the enterprise, says Singh, and that involves creating a collaborative environment for businesses. Internally at Google, Singh says that the company is already using Google+ as a collaboration platform and it’s going well. “This can become a new social platform for collaboration across Docs, Gmail, video and other apps,” he explains. Singh explains that there’s a shift towards moving from individual productivity based applications to more social applications, and this is only going to accelerate. Part of 2012 will entail bringing the Google+ social experience to businesses. - Oliver Young

David Sacks is one of the earliest members of the so-called PayPal "mafia,"  a group of PayPal employees who went on to unusual positions of influence and power in Silicon Valley. But his first startup after leaving PayPal, a genealogical site called Geni, didn't exactly conquer the world. Then in late 2008, Sacks launched his second company, Yammer. The social networking service for businesses has since exploded, gaining more than 4 million users and 240 employees, and it's tripling in size every year. It's also fended off a challenge from the much bigger and more powerful Salesforce.com, and now has its sights on the corporate intranet market dominated by Microsoft's SharePoint. - Oliver Young

If Klout and PeerIndex are about trying to measure the ‘socialness’ and influence of people and rank them, Dachis Group basically wants to do the same for corporations, in real time. The company says the Social Business Index is but a lightweight glimpse onto its big data analytics platform. Currently, Dachis Group tracks over 26,000 brands from over 20,000 companies and over 100,000,000 social media accounts worldwide (plus “hundreds of millions” of other sources). Over 300 large companies have signed on as beta participants, including giants like Samsung, Dell, Coca-Cola, Target, Levi’s and IBM. The data used to put together the Index is made up of company, employee, partner, vendor, customer, engaged market and influencer data, and derived from APIs and data obtained through purchases, partnerships, scraping, crowdsourcing and otherwise by its internal data team. - Oliver Young

If you’re not familiar, the stand-out feature of Asana’s mobile experience is that the projects, task lists and individual task windows from the web app now appear as layers within the home screen. The left-hand projects bar forms the bottom layer. If you press on one of your projects, its task items slides in from the right to appear as the next layer. If you touch any task, its pane then comes in to form the third layer. To navigate back from lists or individual items, click on mostly submerged window on the left. The overall feeling is so natural that after a few days of using it I had to stop myself from pressing on my computer monitor to simulate the same experience. The main downside to the mobile experience, at least for now, is that you can’t create or reassign tasks to others. Instead, any task you create just defaults to yourself and you’ll need to change it on the web site later. Expect everything to improve rather quickly, though. The company iterates fast, recently add - Oliver Young

In essence, Engagor enables organizations to monitor and analyze what’s being said about their company, brand(s), competitors and whatnot on social networks, news sites, blogs and forums. Apart from tracking what’s being said across social media services, the Engagor platform also enables individuals and teams to respond to and engage with the people who are saying it. The product is designed to cater to multiple people within an organization handling consumer outreach and support, enabling them to assign tasks, tag conversations, perform sentiment analysis and identify influencers across demographics, and publish across multiple networks and profiles. - Oliver Young

The results in 2011? NewsGator added one million new paid seats over the course of the year, on top of its existing two million. Those additions aren’t just from a few clients who went all in, Holston says, but from among the 300 companies using it now. 100 of them were new last year, he adds, including both the “Global 2000″ corporate customers that normally it targets, as well as medium-sized businesses of 5,000 seats or less who decided to buy in. - Oliver Young

nd here are 101 examples of social business return on investment, roughly 60% revenue generation and 40% cost reduction. Each example lists brand, activity, and source + year. - Oliver Young

more on that in Part 2 - Oliver Young

Wikets, Inc., a young social commerce startup, announced today that it has raised $1.5 million in seed funding from venture firms Andreessen Horowitz and Battery Ventures, as well as from six angel investors, including Robert Davoli of Sigma Partners. The startup will use its seed capital, says Wikets co-founder and CEO Andy Park, to ramp up hiring and prepare for the release of its eponymous iPhone app, which will reward users for providing and sharing recommendations on products and places to their friends — while on the go. - Oliver Young

That middle ground is where YourOfficeAnywhere.com is trying to claim, and while I haven't used it for very long, it has some promise. For $10 per user per month, you get a combination of three separate services: A cloud-based file storage Web conferencing, including Web camera, screen sharing, audio conference bridge and whiteboarding Text chat, group messaging, and activity streams - Oliver Young

Successfactors, the business execution software company, has selected CloudFoundry (previous CloudAve coverage), VMWare’s PaaS offering, as the platform to develop custom applications for their customers. With 3500 customers and their 15 Million employees, this is a big win for CloudFoundry to show that they are a strong enterprise PaaS player. As more and more enterprises move to the cloud based applications, a PaaS offering like CloudFoundry is the right solution for integration needs. This move by Successfactors further legitimizes what I have been advocating here regarding the future of cloud services. - Oliver Young

Mindshare Technologies has raised $20 million for its business of tracking customers with online and phone surveys. The company issues surveys, collects the responses, analyzes them and provides reports in real-time for company management. The growth shows that customer feedback is increasingly valuable. The company completes more than 175,000 surveys each day in 106 countries, 28 languages, and 25 industries. Companies use the surveys to improve operations, foster consumer satisfaction, build customer loyalty, and retain employees. Respondents can use voice and text to supplement their responses to surveys. - Oliver Young