At Enterprise 2.0 this week in Boston, I found a few inspiring moments amid all the activity.  I particularly liked the opening keynote presentations by John Hagel from Deloitte on the first day and Lee Bryant of Headshift  on the second day.  The big takeaway…my number one in social business:  it all starts with a problem that needs to be solved…and that you can affect. Hagel described a simple metrics-based path to finding the right problem to address.  Start with business metrics (e.g., where are you spending the most money or where are costs growing faster than revenues).  MORE >>

Gary Angel recently wrote a great post on Segmentation for Digital Analytics Done Right. He  points out that to properly understand a visitor’s web behavior you must understand who they are and what they are trying to do.  Are they customers or prospects?  If customers are they going to the site because they have a support problem or want to buy something more?  Only after you know the who and the why can a change in a metric, such as visitors, be properly interpreted.  Make up a matrix with visitor types on the left and visitor purposes across the top.   Then What content do you provide? MORE >>

Someone raised the question on Quora a month ago:  Would most users rather have content delivered to them based on interests or by their social connections?  Then Arnold Waldstein started a Conversational Rant a few days ago on his blog, pointing out that he would like to “parse my world by conversations, by topic, by trusted connections daily.” ” Then Romain Goday of Darwin Ecosystem  laid out  five different approaches to content curation : Expert approach: curators. Crowd approach: popularity. User behavior approach: personalization. Relationship approach: social graph. MORE >>

Pawan Deshpande’s post on Crafting the Perfect Content Curation Strategy  raised the important issue of how one chooses the right topic for a content curation initiative. The topic choice drives actions and investments. Moreover, Moreover, the topic lays the foundation for engagement and becomes the focus for reputation building. Pawan points to three factors to consider in selection of the right topic: competitors’ content strategies, the volume of content on a subject, and audience interest.  These three are definitely important. But some refinements are in order. MORE >>

A March 2011 survey conducted by Patricia Seybold Group  and Information Technology Services Marketing Association (ITSMA) found a correlation between leadership in data-driven marketing and increased sales productivity as well as improved market share over a two year period.  Pretty exciting results! Digging deeper into technology factors affecting their success, we found that more than half the data savvy marketing organizations have had a technology strategy and roadmap in place for more than a year, compared with only 12% of the other marketing organizations in the survey. MORE >>