It has been a month since Facebook released Home, the company’s take on a socialized operating system built atop Android. And at a press event this week, Facebook talked about how the app has done in its first weeks on the market.

The verdict thus far? Not exactly a home run.

Consider this: Home’s project leads Cory Ondrejka and Adam Mosseri said the app was nearing a million downloads as of this week.

Sound impressive? Look at it this way: One million downloads of Facebook Home is less than .1 percent of Facebook’s entire monthly active user base, now topping 1.1 billion people every month. And as the company disclosed in its last earnings call, more than 750 million of those people visit Facebook regularly via mobile device.

Put simply, one million downloads is a drop in the social ocean.

Not that that matters to Facebook, which insists that it’s not that concerned with low numbers, even if some think they should be. “[The number of downloads is] not really important to us,” Mosseri told reporters. “What’s important to us is if people are liking the apps a lot.”

Update 3:15 p.m. PT, with further release context: User satisfaction, in this case, is the thrust of Facebook’s rollout strategy for Home, according to the company. Though Home is available for download globally, right now only five Android devices are capable of installing the software — a small amount compared to the hundreds of available Android handsets on the market. Facebook frames this as intentional; release slowly to select devices, and you can listen and fine-tune the product in future software updates, ultimately making the users happy. (That’s the goal, at least.)

While it might be unusual for Facebook to dismiss download numbers — particularly in the long term — it’s fair for the company to put user experience and uptake first. The problem is that Facebook didn’t break out how many of those downloads actually resulted in installs and prolonged use of the application. Downloads, after all, do not imply continued or even occasional usage. And as many negative Google Play reviews point out, there’s nothing keeping an unsatisfied user from immediately deleting Home shortly after installation.

Facebook did provide some encouraging data: Those who have downloaded the software spend 25 percent more time on Facebook as a whole, and users’ favorite features, they said, were Chat Heads and Cover Feed.

But the latter point is probably moot, considering that Chat Heads and Cover Feed are pretty much the key features of the software. And downloads and even engagement across Facebook as a whole don’t give us a clear picture of how many people are actually using and enjoying Home.

In fact, it’s exactly like Amazon’s continued unwillingness to disclose its actual Kindle sales numbers, or Google’s history of doling out cloudy Google Plus stats. It’s hard to take a new feature seriously if any company is unwilling to provide meaningful metrics on engagement and usage of the product in question.

But, as we’ve argued before, it doesn’t really matter how many folks inside the U.S. are going for Home, because it’s more important as an international play, a way to invade the phones of the myriad people whose primary computing devices are palm-sized. But project lead Mosseri wouldn’t give me the breakdown of international versus domestic downloads.

So, it’s fine that Facebook is listening to user feedback and is willing to improve the product on a regular monthly basis. But until Facebook drills down on just how many folks are actively using and enjoying the product, it’s probably best to postpone any victory lap.

Williams, who founded Blogger and Twitter, and is currently working on a new publishing platform called Medium, said he had been disappointed to see some of the companies that he’d invested in “pivot too early” rather than sticking with what they set out to do.

Projects that are worthwhile often don’t work right away, Williams noted in a conversation at Message Bus’ Serendipity Series. He urged start-ups to be willing to “fight the dragons.”

“I see this mentality that I think is common, especially in Silicon Valley with engineer-driven start-ups who think they can test their way to success. They don’t acknowledge the dip. And with really hard problems, you don’t see market success right away. You have to be willing to go through the dark forest and believe that there’s something down there worth fighting the dragons for, because if you don’t, you’ll never do anything good. I think it’s kind of problematic how data-driven some companies are today, as crazy as that sounds.”

It’s true that it’s increasingly possible for young tech companies to measure themselves. With tools like Mixpanel, Chartbeat and Optimizely, you can know not only how many people visit your site or download your app, but how likely people who signed up on a particular day are to come back, or what pages people are visiting at any particular moment. You can endlessly test which button should go where, and what color it should be.

In a lot of ways, that’s a good thing, because it moves people away from so-called “bullshit metrics” that only really help with bragging rights and toward objectives that will help their businesses be more purposeful.

But all that capacity to instrument and analyze and optimize can be overused. If the possible outcomes are set before the experiment begins, there’s probably not much room for creativity.

Or, as Williams noted, the data can make it look like something’s not worth doing, even when it is.

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Dm_Cherry)

Creative Commons image via toolmantim

But honestly, Web sites that require you to repeatedly click through to see additional pages are often just crappy. Download counts can be easily inflated if an app developer is willing to pay. Registered user counts don’t show whether something is the next big hit or a passing fad.

Analytics company Mixpanel and its investor Andreessen Horowitz are trying to persuade the tech world to be more honest with itself by reporting numbers that are far more informative: Engagement and retention. (Yes, those happen to be the very things Mixpanel measures, but as I’ve written before, they make a lot of sense.)

Some people call page views and the like “vanity metrics,” but Marc Andreessen and Mixpanel founder Suhail Doshi have decided they want to raise the shame level by calling them “bullshit metrics.”

Andreessen told me in an interview last week, “People think they’re richer if they have Zimbabwean dollars than U.S. dollars.”

“We and other investors need to get more vocal,” Andreessen said. “Page views and uniques are a waste of time.”

Andreessen said his firm won’t throw start-ups out the door if their pitches include bullshit metrics — but it’s perhaps something they might consider.

And it’s not only start-ups that try to push big numbers over reality; Google famously obfuscated Google+ user counts as it was getting its social efforts off the ground.

The problem is, once one company reports a bullshit metric — like how many registered users it has — its competitors don’t want to appear smaller by reporting something real — like how many monthly active users it has. So the bullshit metric shaming needs to be a broader movement for it to work.

(To which I say, where are the bumper stickers?)

“We can do better as an industry. We should do better because collectively we’re not benefiting — we’re all just fooling each other,” Doshi wrote in a blog post he’s publishing today.

Bullshit metrics do a disservice to the companies reporting them, Doshi said. When companies focus on numbers that are not meaningful, they aren’t optimizing their efforts for what could really help their business.

As an alternative, Doshi proposes — and he is not the first to do so — that every business has a natural goal that correlates with its success. For instance, Yelp benefits most when it has more reviews, and Instagram when it has more photos uploaded. Measuring that “one key metric” can lead to insights that are particular to that business, and optimizing for it can give the company an edge versus competitors that are not so fine tuned.

Here’s Doshi’s blog post:

Bullshit metrics

Every day feels the same. A fledgling startup tries to appear like the up-and-coming market leader while the market incumbent aims to protect its dominance. It has become exhausting to keep up with how fast everyone seems to grow: 100,000 new users per week here, 20 billion monthly pageviews there, and let’s not pass up a watershed moment like 3 million members total. These are the industry’s most praised metrics.

Sadly, we haven’t moved forward over the past decade despite our whole industry becoming smarter about how it measures and analyzes data. Companies still pitch investors with a cumulative user sign up graph, sell advertisers on how many pageviews they get, and bamboozle reporters with the biggest numbers they can find regardless of whether they correlate to success. We can do better as an industry. We should do better because collectively we’re not benefiting–we’re all just fooling each other.

So, enough with the bullshit metrics.

New metrics for the new world

The internet has evolved in the past decade. Websites are no longer static; they are dynamic. Businesses strive to build products instead of websites because they are more rich, more engaging, and more sophisticated. The web 2.0 era was characterized by its use of AJAX which made websites feel like applications instead of web pages. The concept of pageviews is dying. This is far more pervasive within applications we use on our mobile smart phones. Companies are still pressured to tout pageviews as a metric for success to entice advertisers to spend their dollars with them. And yet, users are not generating more pageviews while flipping through photos on Facebook. Extrapolating this idea further makes you consider what signups really mean. Facebook has done a great job with this. They undoubtedly passed their first billion signups long ago, but they’ve made a point to only talk about getting to their goal of 1 billion users who have been active in the past 30 days.

With any change in an industry, we need a mental model of mapping the old way of measurement to the new way.

Actionable metrics

Companies need to start using a new set of metrics that don’t simply make them feel good. They should use actionable metrics that provide insight, provide guidance, and help businesses make better decisions. I fundamentally believe that actionable metrics give companies a competitive edge.

Today, engagement is the better page view. Engagement is a specific action a user takes and it’s something specific to each business. Twitter can measure engagement by number of tweets and YouTube by the number of views a video receives. For Yelp, an actionable metric would be the number of reviews posted because more reviews likely lead to more users that find more value out of Yelp. More users means more reviews–a network effect. For Instagram, a mobile photo sharing application, an actionable metric would be the number of photos uploaded daily rather than the number of users that signed up and never did anything. Engagement helps us understand how actively people are using our products, whereas a pageview could simply be someone showing up to the product and leaving confused or unimpressed.

The most important metric today is retention. It tells you how often a customer comes back and uses your product again. Retention is an objective way to measure how valuable customers find your product so you can improve it if it’s not valuable enough. The best venture capital firms in Silicon Valley are beginning to expect this metric. Companies are starting to include this metric in their pitch decks to provide transparency into whether they can actually get a high percentage of their 100,000 newly signed up users per day to come back weeks later. The truth is, if less than 10% of people come back, then people don’t find the product valuable. To make matters worse, the percentage of people that come back as time goes on usually declines. Gaming best characterizes this decline because consumers eventually get tired as the replay value of a game diminishes. Now, only a small percentage of the original people who signed up are staying engaged. This particular situation is a reason the number of sign ups a company has attained is not an actionable metric.

But the most important thing is that companies find a specific, actionable metric they can focus vigilantly on.

Your One Key Metric

My experience (I am the co-founder of Mixpanel, an analytics company that helps companies like Airbnb, Khan Academy, Dictionary.com, Match.com, and Path) has shown that companies should start by tracking a single actionable metric that they can literally bet the company on. I call this their One Key Metric (OKM). Companies choosing their OKM realize they must pick an actionable metric because pageviews or sign ups aren’t harsh enough and don’t correlate highly enough with the success of their business.

The best part of OKM is that companies can measure other things related to it, to understand how to improve it. In the case of Instagram, their OKM is likely to be photos uploaded. They can measure the percentage of people that download the app and uploaded a photo, the percentage of people who come back and upload a photo a week later, the growth rate of photos uploaded month after month.

Understanding your OKM often leads to deeper, more valuable questions. The answers often surprise businesses and guide them better than before.

Cutting through

Despite the internet’s evolution, bullshit metrics perpetuate a constant cycle of poor understanding. Let’s strive to understand how our businesses are doing and to pick better metrics–the harsher, the better. Let’s stop fooling ourselves with numbers that don’t represent reality. And let’s push the industry forward as a whole because collectively we’ll all benefit.

Yahoo turned in a meh third quarter, which came as no surprise to anyone. But none of it matters, since all eyes were on what new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer would say on the investor call today.

Here we go! It is Mayer’s first outing as a public company CEO. She’s been an exec at Google her whole career and, while she has been a prominent public figure in Silicon Valley, she has never run the whole show herself.

Until today, that is!

2:01 pm: Finally, we are hearing from Mayer, who arrived from Google in July.

She is “thrilled to be at Yahoo” and the first 100 days at the company have been a lot of fun.

She’s apparently been a fan since her undergraduate days at Stanford University.

Finally, she tries to answer the big question: “Why did I in particular come to Yahoo?”

Why, indeed, given she and others at Google have spent those years since college putting Yahoo directly into the ground. (Did you know Yahoo gave Google its first big search break, a deal engineered by Mayer and others?)

But, says Mayer, Yahoo is “tailor-made for me,” ticking off arenas such as “search, mail, advertising, home page.”

It’s what she built her career on, apparently — yes, in kicking Yahoo’s behind — but now she wants to help the troubled Silicon Valley Internet giant “grow and help redefine” itself.

Still, she stresses, trying to buy as much time as possible from investors: “It will take multiple years to get to where I want the company to be.”

2:08 pm: Mayer, of course, touts her Apple iPhone-and-free-food spending to make the life of Yahoos better (and on parity with the rest of the digital sector).

To be fair, given the past two CEOs, anyone who did not come in and kick the employees where it counts was going to get some claps.

Mayer’s goals are “simple,” she says, “to execute fast, attract the best talent and make Yahoo the best place to work.”

She says she has assembled a stellar world class exec team to accomplish that.

2:11 pm: Now we get to meet one of that team and a Yahoo newbie — CFO Ken Goldman (pictured here). It’s his first day.

He repeats the results that Yahoo has already put in its press release, which is why I usually zone out here and focus on superficial stuff.

Like how much he sounds like former and ousted Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson. Eek!

Goldman touts Yahoo’s recent Alibaba Group deal in China (done not by Goldman, but by outgoing — jacked by Mayer, really — CFO Tim Morse) and notes a $765 million credit facility that Yahoo apparently got this month.

That’s more dough to add to Mayer’s ever-growing pile to spend on fixing Yahoo.

2:23 pm: Mayer is back — Goldman is nice enough, but everyone wants to hear from the former Google wunderkind.

She makes an obvious statement: Yahoo has to “grow at the same pace as the market we are in.” Yep. Yahoo’s growth has been practically non-existent, while the industry has seen robust increases for years.

Mayer is now hitting all the high points on what needs to be fixed.

Search, communications, a desperate need to invest in mobile. “Our top priority is a focused, coherent” mobile strategy, she says. It’s everybody and their mother’s top priority in the Internet space, but it’s gotta be said.

So Mayer says it again: “Yahoo will have to be a predominantly mobile company.”

She also name-checks “delighting users,” improving advertising and personalization.

2:27 pm: She also underscores that Yahoo will now hold onto its ad tech business.

“No one wants Yahoo to grow more than the people who work here,” says Mayer, who says she is going back to Yahoo’s roots. “We believe Yahoo’s best days lie ahead … and we intend to win.”

It sounds very good, but Mayer has been relatively unspecific overall.

Now to Q&A to see if she will drill down more.

2:30 pm: The first question is about Mayer’s vision as compared to others.

Apparently, it does not mean a “pivot” into different and new businesses. It does mean improving what Yahoo has done well.

“I don’t think this is a situation where there’s a giant pivot and we go into a completely different business,” Mayer says flatly. In other words, no string of Yahoo diners in the offing.

In addition, Mayer says that Yahoo occupies a unique spot that does not put it into “channel conflict” with other rivals and, presumably, can be a better partners.

Also asked about search versus display, she’ll take both, but found display “more compelling.”

The next question is about international markets and the local ones.

Growth, says Mayer, although Yahoo will be narrowing the offerings to be more compelling.

She refers to the recent closing of Yahoo operations in Korea. “We had a very hard time finding a growth story moving forward,” says Mayer.

As to local, which Mayer worked on at Google right before she left, Yahoo’s efforts are merely “good” and it’s not slated for investment going forward.

The next question is about metrics to judge progress. Yahoo left out user numbers it has usually provided in the past and Mayer is not giving up any data now either.

Instead, she is going to rely on internal data and not use third-party data any longer. (It makes some sense since the numbers have been not so pretty over time.)

2:37 pm: Mayer did not want to go into acquisition strategy, which came in a question about its giant pile of dough.

No billion-dollar buys for her, she claims, so cancel that Tesla order for Foursquare, Dennis Crowley!

Mayer noted that most acquisitions will be smaller scale and under $100 million. She noted she had done about 20 of those in her career at Google.

A question about Microsoft.

While there has been “disappointment,” Mayer says the goal is to work with the software giant. In other words, she’s not calling her old pals at Google quite yet (she hasn’t yet, in fact).

The next question is about mobile, with Mayer noting once again that the company has to be primarily mobile-focused going forward.

She’s going to hire as many mobile peeps as possible, especially via smaller-scale acquisitions.

2:44 pm: Goldman gets a little awkward in noting that his young-adult kids think Yahoo is all happening. Hmm, I suppose since he comes from the deservedly defunct Excite@Home and the successful but security-dull Fortinet, that makes sense.

In fact, getting back the young folks is one of Mayer’s top challenges.

A very good question — these are all good ones on the call — is how Yahoo can compete without a mobile operating system, such as Google Android and Amazon Kindle and Apple iOS.

Mayer notes that Yahoo has compelling content that others do not.

Another question on search and, specifically, on mobile search.

Mayer is unspecific, except to note that Yahoo has the ability to be pertinent and competitive.

She is a little more clear on the issues with the Microsoft Bing search relationship. Mayer does know this stuff well, and it is clear there is some serious low-hanging fruit to be plucked by someone who knows what they are doing.

Mayer knows search, to be sure, so I am thinking she will make some bank here.

A question about “overmonetizing” the Yahoo site — i.e. cluttering it up with icky ad units that drive consumers nuts.

Mayer notes that cutbacks in ads to improve user experience will only be done to increase traffic, which is a dicey proposition as it can also kill revenue.

A question about content and where that us going.

Mayer touts the Olympics programming — hat tip to former interim CEO Ross Levinsohn — as something unique to Yahoo. Interestingly, the media folks at Yahoo are still wary of pro-engineering Mayer.

2:55 pm: Another question about her interest in content and investment focus in ad tech.

“I am very product focused,” says Mayer, who uses the term “low latency,” a term that no media person ever would use as a hallmark of success.

She is much more comfy talking tech and that’s an area she knows better. Still, she says little about possible investments.

Mayer is then asked about goals for growth at Yahoo. She does not just want to grow at industry rate, but beyond that! But she’ll take industry rate for now (actually, that would be a huge accomplishment).

Goldman says little on the stock buyback, using the Alibaba dough, except they are buying.

3:01 pm: There are a lot of questions today for Mayer — which is no surprise — but now they are beginning to repeat.

(Plus, I have LOLcat’s Ben Huh waiting for me in the ATD Global HQ lobby — and you all know how I feel about them cats!)

Ah, the last question: It’s about data and personalization and what’s been lacking at Yahoo in not taking advantage about the pile of data it has about .

Yes, that should happen and it will under the regime of Marissa Mayer.

Mayer ends by noting, “It’s time for Yahoo to execute and bring our results back to growth.”

So it is written, so it shall be done.

As Chief Creative Officer at Zynga, Verdu oversaw a number of the company’s game studios in L.A., Dallas, Baltimore, New York, Boston and San Francisco. During his three-plus years at the company, the EA veteran also managed the company’s creative process, working closely on such games and Empires & Allies, FrontierVille and CastleVille.

Verdu’s departure closely follows a handful of other exits, including a recent restructuring that led to the departure of the company’s Chief Operating Officer John Schappert.

Other recent employees to leave include Alan Patmore, general manager of CityVille, who left to work at Kixeye. Bloomberg also reported that Erik Bethke, a general manager who oversaw Mafia Wars 2; Ya-Bing Chu, a VP in Zynga’s mobile division; and Jeremy Strauser, a general manager, had also left the company.

Earlier this month, I reported that morale was sinking at the company as its stock hit an all-time low. Shares continue to bounce along the bottom, valuing the company at a mere $2.3 billion.

Verdu says his exit is bad timing, but that he’s leaving for different reasons.

“I personally don’t want to add to the noise level,” he said. “I think this will be a good thing for me and for Zynga. … I’m concerned about how this might be viewed with what else is going on, but it’s not a function of anything else going on at the company.”

Verdu said he will be leaving Zynga effective today to start his new venture. He declined to disclose the name of the company, but said that Zynga will both invest in it and that Zynga will be the publisher of his games on its third-party platform.

He’ll be focusing on developing mobile games, he says, which is one of Zynga’s weak spots.

Verdu said one of Zynga’s challenges is in navigating the shift in player behavior from the Web to mobile, and coming up with games — from a creative point of view — in which people use touch and swipe, rather than the mouse.

While Verdu will obviously continue to work closely with Zynga, his presence will undoubtedly be missed as what he calls the company’s “creative conscience.”

“I represented the creatives at the senior management level and I was always careful to make sure their voices were heard, so when the company made the decision about products, I made sure the creatives had a role,” Verdu said, adding that it can be a delicate balancing act, given the company’s metrics-driven approach.

Three of the company’s other creative types — Brian Reynolds, Tim LeTourneau and Bill Jackson — will take over some of Verdu’s responsibilities along with other people.

In parting, Verdu had nothing but good things to say about his colleagues, including CEO Mark Pincus: “I love the guys that I work with; I would go to war with these guys at my side anytime. Leaving them is hard.”

In a statement, Pincus said: “Mike has been a good friend to me personally as well as professionally, and has been an influential creative leader to us all. I’m proud of the legacy that Mike has helped build and the deep bench of creative talent and leaders who will carry the torch and shape the next wave of creativity at Zynga. Zynga will be on the ground floor with Mike on his next venture as an investor in his new start-up. We are excited for Mike in this next chapter in his distinguished career and we are grateful for his contributions to Zynga.”

Here is the full text of Verdu’s goodbye post: 

During my three years at Zynga, I’ve seen the company grow from a small, scrappy start-up on the frontier of interactive entertainment to a large, world-class organization with 20 development studios around the world and a deep well of amazing talent. With just the right mix of Web 2.0 and game DNA, Zynga blends art and science to deliver game experiences that are played by tens of millions of people every day on their computers and mobile devices.

I’m very proud of my part in building this remarkable company, especially in growing and nurturing what has become a vibrant community of game designers, producers, and creative leaders. These are the people who will create the entertainment experiences of the future.

Now, however, it’s time for me to try something new. Being at Zynga in the early days reminded me of how much I love being an entrepreneur. After a lot of soul-searching, I have decided to go back to my roots and start a new company.

It’s tough to leave people I admire and respect - and something that I have helped to build. I thank Mark for his leadership, friendship, and unwavering support. And I thank the people of Zynga for making my time at the company some of the best years of my career.

Flipboard is arguably the most prominent third-party company put in an awkward position (so much so that, as I’ve reported previously, Flipboard CEO Mike McCue stepped down from Twitter’s board earlier this year). Due to the way the company displays tweets, I’ve heard from multiple sources that it is in line to hit Twitter’s chopping block in the not too distant future.

All that said, Flipboard doesn’t want to sit back and let the rumors swallow it up. Coming off its second birthday, the company released a slew of new stats on how well it has fared over the past year. It’s most likely a bit of wagging the dog, hoping press outlets and Flipboard enthusiasts take the growth and numbers at face value without considering the implications of what a Twitter-less Flipboard may look like in the future.

Still, the numbers are impressive for a young, mobile-only start-up. The company has added 15 million users over the past eight months, a 300 percent increase from the end of 2011, and is now up to 20 million total users. That includes 1.5 million people using the Flipboard apps daily across more than 200 countries around the world. Not bad.

What’s unclear, however, is whether or not that 20 million number means registered users or actual active users. If it’s just the number of folks who have signed up, it isn’t that impressive — after all, a service is only as good as its retention rate. But if it is indeed 20 million active users of the service, it’s a nice surprise, a seeming answer to the “Is Flipboard dead?” question that is on many folks’ minds. I’ve asked Flipboard for clarification, and I’ll update this if they get back to me.

Update, August 29, 5:47 PDT:A Flipboard spokeswoman got back to me, saying that the 20 million figure is the number of people who have actually used Flipboard, rather than just installs or downloads. Still unclear how many of those are active, but the consistently active (and most revealing) metric that Flipboard notes is the 1.5 million user number. (/end update)

If (or should I say, when) Twitter chokes off Flipboard’s API access, the momentum of its large user base could keep the app afloat for some time. But McCue and his team will need to figure out another stream of content to make up for the loss of tweets. It seems Google+ is where Flipboard is aimed at the moment — we’ll see if that’s enough.

The survey, which tracked 641 small-and medium-sized businesses during three time periods over the past year, found that the industry is performing better based on at least a couple of key metrics. In particular, it noted two areas of improvement: consumers are more willing to spend beyond the deal’s value and the amount spent by repeat customers on their next visit has increased.

The report was conducted by Utpal Dholakia, a professor of management at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business.

Most notably, his findings are in contrast with a study he conducted in June, which revealed a number of red flags, including a relatively low numbers of buyers who were spending beyond the deal value.

But in the report published last week, it was his goal to find out whether the industry’s performance was deteriorating as questions arose on the long-term viability of the business model. Dholakia explained the survey’s results in a video, saying: “We were concerned because of negative publicity that many of these daily deals sites have received that performance might be deteriorating.”

Indeed, over the past couple of years, there have been a number of recurring issues brought up in the media, ranging from deal fatigue (the phenomenon in which consumers become less enthusiastic about purchasing offers) to stories about merchants becoming overrun with deal-seekers to the point of exhaustion. Additionally, Groupon’s public offering was fraught with a number of problems, and the company continues to trade at more than half off. Today, its stock fell 5.5 percent, or 48 cents, to trade at $8.31 a share.

Despite all that, the professor added this surprisingly positive message: “On most measures, performance has remained the same or has improved.”

Both Groupon and LivingSocial have spent the past year or so fine-tuning the experience and working more closely with merchants to ensure that each deal is a success. Looks like the extra effort is starting to pay off.

Here’s some of the findings from the report, along with Dholakia’s video:

• Almost 80 percent of daily deal patrons are new customers, even for businesses running their seventh (or more) daily deal. Businesses continue to see equally stable conversion rates for both repeat purchasing and spending beyond deal value.
• The most profitable daily deal sectors in order: Photographers; health and fitness services;  tourism-related services; and doctors and dentists.
• The least profitable deals: Cleaning services; restaurants and bars; and retailers.
• The percentage of businesses making money remained fairly stable in Spring 2011 (55.5 percent) and October 2011 (54.9 percent), but jumped by 6 points in the May 2012 to 61.5 percent.
• Smaller businesses were able to retain customers better: Businesses with annual revenue below $500,000 enjoyed a 41 percent retention rate compared with larger businesses, which had a 15 percent retention rate.
• Daily deal site loyalty levels are low for businesses running multiple daily deals. For a business’ second deal, 54 percent used the same daily deal site they used the first time. By the time they have run seven or more deals, only 8.6 percent of businesses have used the same site for all their daily deals, whereas 27.5 percent have used four or more daily deal sites.

What’s sad to me is that Google used to pride itself on the speed with which it helped you find the information you want, and then get out of the way. “Time on site” is a terrible metric for an information utility!

– Tim O’Reilly, in a Google+ post

Even more interesting, though, is Experian’s finding that Bing’s success rate–the number of searches that result in a visit to a Web site–is better than Google’s. Significantly better. Bing’s success rate: 81.68 percent. Google’s: 65.57 percent.

Must have been all those searches on hiybbprqag and torsorapy screwing things up for you–right, Google?

It was a complaint that Sunny Gupta heard often around the time that the company he was working for, Opsware, was being acquired by Hewlett-Packard. “CIOs kept pulling me aside and telling me their jobs were changing,” he said. “A job that used to be about managing technology was quickly becoming one of managing costs.”

It was a rare opportunity to launch a service that numerous big companies were clamoring for. His response is Apptio, a cloud-based service that tracks IT costs and other metrics for CIOs who are constantly under pressure to justify their budgets to CEOs. Backed by $41 million in venture capital funding from Greylock Partners, Madrona Venture Group, Shasta Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz–the venture firm run buy Gupta’s former Opsware colleagues Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It’s growing like crazy, and customers include Cisco Systems, Starbucks, Facebook and J.P. Morgan Chase. Cisco liked it so much it joined with the venture firms in a $16.5 $20 million Series C round of funding that closed last November, and it also resells Apptio to its customers.

I caught up with Gupta by phone while he was on a trip to London to talk about Apptio’s business and how it’s shaping up.

NewEnterprise: Sunny, let’s start at the top. What does Apptio do?

Sunny Gupta: IT has a lot of raw materials like labor, hardware and software. A lot of these things are tracked at the company level. But the CIO’s job is managing the IT products. We aim to help the CIO really understand the cost structure of all their IT assets. We do this by producing what we call a Bill of IT. It captures the supply and demand of IT resources to the business. It helps the CIO show what the levels of demand and spending really are. We also help them with planning and budgeting and forecasting. And then we help them make cost-reduction decisions and benchmark their performance against other companies in their industry.

How many customers do you have?

We have about 60 customers, and we are managing more than $50 billion in IT spending.

So every company does a return-on-investment analysis on its IT spending. This sounds like it’s a lot more detailed than that.

You can think about it as a detailed ROI, but the way our customers think about it is as an ongoing management system that tracks the fully loaded cost structure of the products and services they provide to their businesses on a month-to-month basis. It tracks costs, but also utilization, so you can see how the resources are being used, and whether or not it makes sense to, say, consolidate a data center.

You said Facebook is a customer. Can you tell me a little about how it’s used there?

The CIO there uses Apptio to track monthly telecom expenses, and to help understand costs and to make decisions around getting the most out of what they spend.

A lot of companies are struggling with decisions about moving their IT to the cloud or keeping it on-premise, or some mix of the two. How does Apptio fit in a situation like that?

We’re seeing a lot of hybrids. At the large companies, the biggest portion of their costs are still in-house. Without naming names, some of our largest customers have 50,000 or 100,000 servers. These are systems that have been in use for a long time and they’re critical to the business. But we also see large enterprises adopting external cloud services. It may be Amazon Web Services or something from Rackspace, or they may be using a software-as-service like Salesforce.com. The trick is to get a handle on what the costs are and if you think it might be time to move something to an external provider so you can make an objective decision.

A lot of the time a CIO has to decide between something that’s really good and really expensive or something that’s good enough and less expensive. Can you help in cases like that?

That’s one of our prime use cases. If you talk to Rebecca Jacoby, the CIO at Cisco, she says she’s stopped asking “Why not IT?” and started asking “Why IT?” If what you have is good enough based on the cost structure and utilization, you get the granular visibility into all those metrics so you can make decisions. For example, it may be that you don’t need as much storage as you think you do, and so the best move isn’t to switch to the cloud but to stop paying for some of the storage that you’re not using. For the first time, executives are able to make business decisions around technology based on true business metrics. We find on average that customers are able to save 5 to 6 percent of their spend, and over 12 to 18 months they can reduce it by 10 to 15 percent.

What’s involved? If it’s a cloud based service, I presume there’s nothing to install at the customer site.

It’s fully cloud-based, so there’s nothing to install. It takes the financial data from enterprise resource planning software, like SAP or Oracle, and it also takes IT operational data, support tickets and other data. It combines them with the financial data. Once you have all that data you can start working on what-if scenarios and make decisions about what to do–or not do–next. If you want to control or reduce costs, having that detailed visibility is the first step.

The street is looking for revenue to jump more than 20 percent, and profits to grow at just a slightly smaller pace. If you’re a bottom-line person, the consensus calls for net revenue of $6.05 billion and earnings of $8.07 a share (or more–some “consensus” numbers I’ve seen go as high as $6.06 billion and $8.09 a share).

Those numbers reflect the strength of Google’s core search business, but as usual, Wall Street would also like to hear about mobile, video and display ads.

And, as usual, it shouldn’t expect much: Last quarter Google made a big point about unveiling a few limited metrics for those businesses. But they were…limited.

Still, it’s always worth listening to Google’s call, which I’ll be doing this afternoon. Check back then for a link to live coverage.

And who knows, the Google guys might tip their hand! Last quarter, analysts asked what the company thought about daily deal sites like Groupon, and product SVP Jonathan Rosenberg allowed that the industry was “a very exciting and hot space.” Turns out it was $6 billion–but not more–worth of exciting!

And as always, here’s the helpful “cheat sheet” that Citigroup’s Mark Mahaney thoughtfully provides. Click to enlarge:

Think of it as the equivalent of iTunes for Android.

Developers will be able to upload apps–including games and other digital content–to Amazon, which in turn will promote and distribute them on Amazon.com and also on mobile phones. (I can hear the promotions now: “If you liked that app…what about this one?”)

In a blog post aimed at developers, Amazon writes that it’s trying hard to get developers recognized among the hundreds of thousands of apps out there: “Amazon’s innovative marketing and merchandising features are designed to help customers find and discover relevant products from our vast selection, and we’re excited to apply those capabilities to the apps market segment.”

For the past few months, Amazon employees have been reaching out to developers to find out pain points and drum up support for this day.

So far, it looks like Amazon has listened to concerns. The developer portal looks insanely easy to use–anyone with a regular Amazon username and password can access it. Right now, the annual fee of $99 has been waived, and once you agree to a seven-page app-store distribution agreement, you can start uploading applications to the network, and eventually see metrics on how well they are performing.

Much of it sounds like iTunes.

Amazon will share 70 percent of revenues with developers, and the distribution agreement hints it will go worldwide. For now, it will be limited to the U.S. Amazon will handle all the bill processing, which is complex, especially on a global basis. Google learned this the hard way, and continues to support only paid apps in some countries. Amazon will also have some sort of approval process, but it’s unclear how rigorous that will be.

Launching an app store is not a stretch for Amazon. It’s been selling MP3s on phones for some time and has a large digital catalog, spanning books and videos. It also has a built-in payment system and access to tens of millions of Amazon customers, many of whom have their credit card information on file, as with iTunes or PayPal.

The one question is whether the business will provide enough scale for an e-commerce company of its size. After all, most applications today are free, or really cheap. And at least for now, Amazon is limited to the Android operating system.

True, Android is quickly gaining on Apple, especially in the U.S. According to Nielsen’s latest figures, the iPhone’s market share is 28.6 percent vs. RIM’s BlackBerry and Google’s Android platforms, which are essentially tied in second place with 26.1 percent and 25.8 percent, respectively.

There are two potential scenarios that will help pencil this out: The app store could help drive more sales of other content or products on the phone for Amazon. A more farfetched scenario is that Amazon does such a good job that other platforms or handset makers, like BlackBerry, Windows Phone, HTC or Samsung, will choose to outsource or adopt Amazon’s platform for a cut of the revenues.

SMS GupShup (a Hindi word that translates to “chitchat” in English) is a 200-person start-up that has created a host of SMS-based services that, all told, account for more than 1.5 billion text messages a month.

The company’s biggest service is a text-message-based social network that lets individuals or companies send text messages to large groups of followers that want the updates. The service has taken off with 100 of the most popular feeds topping 100,000 subscribers to things like jokes, religious messages, sports scores and other information. Smaller groups might have as few as 10 or 20 followers. The service is somewhat similar to GroupMe, a U.S.-based group messaging service.

One tribe based in Northeast India uses the service to allow its 65,000 members–some of whom live far away from the area–to keep tabs on tribal goings-on.

“If someone has a child, someone gets married, someone dies, it all goes up there,” said CEO Beerud Sheth, who recently moved to Bombay after spending many years in Silicon Valley. His past work includes launching Elance, a company that matches freelance talent from around the world with people who need to hire for projects.

SMS GupShup has become a significant player in the text message market in India, accounting for roughly 5 to 10 percent of all SMS traffic, Sheth said.

But, while there is money to be made in text messages, SMS GupShup is not exactly raking it in. Some standard industry metrics on how much a company could make off text messages would suggest that the company is on pace to bring in about $10 million a year in revenue.

“That’s in the right range,” Sheth said.

Nor is the company yet profitable, but Sheth said the company hopes to turn the corner sometime in the first half of next year. Among the company’s costs is buying the bandwidth needed for all of the text messages sent by its users. Although it pays anywhere from a quarter to a tenth of what consumers pay for text messages, that still adds up. Fortunately, India is one of the cheapest places in the world to send text messages, with consumers typically paying anywhere from half a cent to a penny per message and bulk users paying far less.

To help recoup the costs, the company limits message length so that the last little bit of space can be used for sponsorship or advertising.

While SMS GupShup is the largest purely SMS-based service in India, Sheth said he does find himself competing with Facebook and Twitter in India and elsewhere, but said the strength of his service is that it is built around SMS, rather than using text messages only as a basic option for status updates.

“For them, SMS is sort of a stepchild experience,” he said.

Sheth said the company isn’t limiting itself to the social networking service. Among its other products are bulk SMS services for businesses. Companies can use the service for everything from messaging to customers to managing inventory. A text-message-based CRM application is in the works as well.

The company is also working directly with carriers in several countries to create a “reply all” feature that would allow people not only to send bulk text messages, but also to reply to a group of anywhere from 7 to 10 people, depending on the country. That’s particularly useful in small groups that may want to schedule events or do other tasks via text message, Sheth said.

“One way to think about text messaging is it is the Internet in the developing world,” Sheth said. “In this part of the world, that is a big part of how people communicate.”

According to Goodman, who obtains his data from independent wireless retailers, 80 percent of smartphone sales at Verizon in November were Android devices (46 percent of those were Droids). Which is astonishing for two reasons. 1.) That’s a huge percentage for a relatively new mobile OS in a very competitive market. 2.) In December of 2008, RIM was touting the BlackBerry as Verizon’s best-selling device. In two years, it’s gone from a flagship to a johnboat.

And with Android continuing to lead smartphone sales growth at Verizon, it seems increasingly unlikely that the BlackBerry will ever reclaim its lost title. With sales of the Tour/Bold series dwindling and no Storm refresh in sight, BlackBerry sales at Verizon are in serious decline. They dropped 45 percent year-over-year in the third quarter of this year, and Goodman sees them trending down 49 percent YOY in the fourth.

An ugly and humiliating decline, and worrisome. Because if the BlackBerry is faring this poorly against Android at Verizon, how will it fare against Android and the iPhone, which is widely expected to debut on the carrier’s network next year?

No wonder Verizon doesn’t think the upcoming launch of BlackBerry 6 devices on its network will have a “material impact” on sales. Why would it?

Incidentally, if you haven’t yet checked out our coverage of RIM Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis’s appearance at D:Mobile earlier this week, you should.

Presenting at the webinar will be Myspace CEO Mike Jones–-who has been pitching Myspace as “a social entertainment destination” rather than a social network–-and Dan Rose, VP of Partnerships and Platform Marketing for Facebook.

Here are my live notes:

Mike Jones says the launch today is called “Mashup with Facebook.” Users can share a stream of entertainment content with one-click setup.

One million users engaged so far with Myspace Facebook through initial partnership of “Sync with Facebook,” which was launched in August to push user streams on Myspace to Facebook. Adding Facebook Like button soon.

Image to the right is Myspace’s special branding of its integration with Facebook Connect: “Mashup.”

Dan Rose: Every day 10,000 Web sites integrate with Facebook Connect, but this one is special. Adding users into the experience works when it’s naturally social in the offline world, and entertainment is social.

Rose says Facebook users will be able to take their Likes to Facebook as well.

Jones says this feature will be rolling out to the full Myspace audience today.

Rose says, “There’s nothing different about this implementation than any other Facebook Connect implementation or any other implementation of the Facebook Like button across the Web.”

Jones says, “We think this is a complementary offering to Facebook and other social platforms.”

Rose says it’s good that Myspace is focused on entertainment and Facebook is focused on being a social platform, and those things are different.

In the last couple of days (since the Facebook Connect option was rolled out on the Myspace signup page), metrics for people connecting with Facebook look good, says Jones, but he doesn’t specify. (He keeps saying things are good questions, and then not really answering them.)

There is no financial component to the relationship.

And that’s it! Pretty mellow.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

• 13.7 million Macs sold in FY 2010
• That’s 3 times the number of Macs Apple sold just five years ago
• The Mac’s installed base is 50 million
• Mac sales accounted for $22 billion in revenue in FY 2010
• That’s 33 percent of Apple’s revenue
• And it’s enough to make the company’s Mac business No. 110 on the Fortune 500–if it were a standalone business
• Quarterly Mac sales grew 2.5 times faster than the rest of the industry (according to IDC)
• The Mac has outgrown the PC market for 18 straight quarters
• The Mac claims 20.7 percent of the U.S. retail market (according to NPD)
• There are 600,000 Mac developers
• The above number is growing by 30,000 per month
• Mac customer satisfaction is the highest in the industry
• It’s No. 1 in customer satisfaction (according to ACSI)
• It’s No. 1 in tech support for the last seven years (according to Consumer Reports)
• It’s No. 1 in customer support (according to PC World)
• There are 318 Apple retail stores in 11 countries
• Apple retail stores sold 2.8 million Macs last year
• 50 percent of them were sold to first-time Mac buyers
• Apple sold 2 million iPhoto photo books in the past year
• There are 5 million GarageBand users

For the four weeks ended Oct. 2, 2010, Bing accounted for 10.10 percent of U.S. searches, up from 9.87 percent in August, while Yahoo accounted for 13.54 percent, down from 14.28 percent. Taken together, those two metrics mean that 23.64 percent of the U.S. search market is Bing-powered. That’s nearly a quarter of the market claimed during the first full month of Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo’s (YHOO) fledgling search partnership, which kicked into gear in mid-August when Microsoft’s Bing back end officially began handling Yahoo’s U.S. search results

Sadly, that’s less than the combined 24.2 percent the companies had last month (thanks, Yahoo!) and pales beside the 72.15 percent share controlled by rival Google (GOOG), which doesn’t seem to be suffering much at the hands of Bing-powered search at all. According to Hitwise, its share in August was 71.59 percent, which means it saw 1 percent month-over-month growth from August to September.

• 300 Apple Stores in 10 countries (soon to be 11)
• More than 1 million visitors to those stores on some days
• 120 million iOS devices sold since the first iPhone debuted
• 230,000 iOS devices activated each day
• 6.5 billion apps downloaded from the App Store to date
• 200 apps downloaded from the App Store each second
• 1.5 billion games and entertainment downloads to the iPod touch alone
• 250,000 apps currently available in the App Store
• 25,000 of those are iPad apps
• 275 million iPods sold to date
• 160 million active iTunes accounts
• 12 million songs in the iTunes store
• 11.7 billion songs downloaded from iTunes
• 450 million TV episodes downloaded via iTunes
• 100 million movies downloaded via iTunes
• 35 million books downloaded via iTunes
• The iPod touch is the No. 1 mobile gaming device worldwide, outselling the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP combined
• Apple’s share of the portable gaming market: 50 percent

Impressive, to say the least, though what’s more striking is how that growth breaks down. In desktops, CAGR is expected to be just 2.4 percent through 2014. But in laptops and netbooks, it’s expected to hit 22 percent and 15 percent, respectively.

What about tablets? In tablets, CAGR should range between 73 percent and 88 percent between now and 2014.

That’s a pretty staggering metric, though I suppose it’s to be expected in a nascent category that’s been picking up quite a bit of traction recently. That said, the Intel (INTC) chief expects tablets to remain niche devices for the next few years, with sales hitting 50 to 60 million units a year by 2014.

“In terms of the scale of the PC industry, the tablet is relatively insignificant,” he said. “Tablets like netbooks are additive. They’re a new usage model for computing and they are probably good for Intel long-term, but I don’t believe they’ll take market share away from other devices.” (Click on charts below to enlarge.)

That puts it within two percentage points of Yahoo (YHOO), whose share fell to 14.1 percent from 14.5 percent and, heh-heh, within 52.7 percentage points of Google (GOOG), which also saw a decline from January to February. The company ended the month with 65.2 percent share, down from 66.3 percent in January.

It’s slow going, but Bing is clearly whittling away at both Google and Yahoo’s search market share. Of course, the flip side is that with Yahoo in decline, the search side of the Microsoft-Yahoo partnership isn’t showing all that much growth.

Industry analysts, at least in the case of the Altimeter Group, are ultimately becoming market catalysts.

With today’s news, this is of course, only fortified.

The Altimeter Group released a new report on social customer relationship management, and while analysts release reports all the time, this is different. The report is free to read and share under creative commons, and this is a big disruptor, one that reflects the socialization of information and the spirit of social media. By giving away insight, Altimeter ignites change and thus brings its report to life.

As such, the Altimeter Group is demonstrating how new models are needed to thrive in the social economy and concurrently putting into practice the ingredients of an effective social CRM framework.

The New Rules of Relationship Management

The essence of the new report by Altimeter’s R “Ray” Wang and Jeremiah Owyang is putting the customer first. While that seems like a simple principle, it’s easier said then done. The case the duo make is rooted, of course, in social media and the self-actualization of personal influence.

As the report notes in the beginning:

“Rapid adoption of social networking enables users to connect with individuals and communities who share mutual interests, increasingly leaving organizations out of the conversation.

Simply hiring more people to keep up with social marketing, sales, and support will not be sufficient, as consumers and their new channels will always outnumber employees. As a result, companies need an organized approach using enterprise software that connects business units to the social web–giving them the opportunity to respond in near-real time, and in a coordinated fashion.”

And indeed, they’re right.

Social media didn’t invent conversations, it simply amplified and connected them to audiences and the actions that are triggered as a result. With the right tools, and more important, mindset and resolve, we can now uncover these incredibly valuable, insightful and prominent conversations where and when they happen. Listening is only the beginning however. As in anything, we need a little less conversation and a little more action.

As the report notes, social CRM does not replace existing CRM efforts, it complements them with an outbound extension to connect with the very social beacons that shape and steer perception–those previously untouched with inbound-only infrastructures. Essentially the “s” in sCRM should be viewed as a verb…as in socialize. Actions speak louder than words and thus, sCRM transforms words and intent into action.

As the “godfather of CRM,” Paul Greenberg, notes, “We’ve moved from the transaction to the interaction with customers, though we haven’t eliminated the transaction–or the data associated with it….Social CRM focuses on engaging the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment. Social CRM is the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.”

The Socialization of an Entire Organization

The social customer is only one part of the equation. As any listening program will reveal, conversations map specifically to departments within an organization and as such, all units affected by outside activity will socialize over time. This is why I believe that over time, we should focus less on the “C” of sCRM and focus our attention, energy and ingenuity on the aspects of SRM–social relationship management.

The social Web is distributing influence beyond the customer landscape, allocating authority among stakeholders, prospects, advocates, decision-makers, and peers. SRM recognizes that whether someone recommended a product, purchased a product, or simply recognized it publicly, in the end, each makes an impact on behavior at varying levels. Therefore customers are now merely part of a larger equation that also balances vendors, experts, partners, and other authorities. In the realm of SRM, influence is distributed and it is recognizes wherever and however it takes shape.

“SRM is a doctrine aligned with a humanized business strategy and supporting technology infrastructure and platform. SRM recognizes that all people, no matter what system they use, are equal. It represents a wider scope of active listening and participation across the full spectrum of influence mapped to specific department representatives within the organization using various lenses for which to identify individuals where and how they interact.”

But we must begin somewhere and for many businesses, the evolution from CRM to sCRM is in fact, revolutionary.

After months of study and interviews with over 100 organizations, Altimeter Group identified 18 use cases for Social CRM to help businesses assess, adapt, and create new programs and processes to socialize their brands.

As the report notes, social CRM programs start at the departmental level, but require corporate support to transform fiefdoms into united efforts. The challenge lies in mobilizing and organizing resources around distributed conversations and building the connectors that link CRM systems to social networks. And, organizations must set priorities based on market demand and technology maturity.

Customers have already migrated toward new channels and in the process, companies that are not in pursuit are quickly falling behind. Relationships between organizations and customers might be better defined simply as “relations” as the existing framework was traditionally optimized around the organization and not the customer.

“Traditional CRM projects have failed to grasp the complexities of the customer-company relationship. Though these CRM programs started out with the goal of providing a single customer view and 1:1 relationship management, early efforts quickly refocused on automation of front-office tasks and improving management visibility across marketing, sales, service and support. Because these programs have often failed to support the front-office worker’s needs to manage relationships, internal adoption halted as users grew to resent, and in some cases revolt, against CRM.”

To begin at the beginning, businesses must deploy social CRM for business value and not get caught up in the hype of Twitter and Facebook. We have to go where our customers seek, discover, and share information. Alitimeter suggests focusing on bite-sized entry points as today’s tight budgets, limited resources, and little time will ensure that companies get the most bang for the buck initially. (Click graph below to enlarge.)

In the report, each one of the 18 use cases brings definable metrics that should be incorporated in each Social CRM program.

- Begin with the end in mind

- Metrics should be aligned with an organization’s entry points

- Quantify the baseline and determine the effort

- Adjust ROI targets to align resources with efforts to move the needle

- The goal–drive business value

The 18 recommended use cases are organized in seven categories and in order of operations. As observed, most organizations start their initiatives by building out the “5 M’s” and deploying a customer insight program that matures with experience and earned intelligence. I previously discussed the maturation of social media infrastructure in business usually evolves in at least 10 stages. (Click table below to enlarge.)

Social Customer Insights form the Foundation for All Social CRM Use Cases–Everything begins with listening

1. Social Customers Insights

Social Marketing Seeks to Achieve Customer Advocacy

2. Social Marketing Insights

3. Rapid Social Marketing Response

4. Social Campaign Tracking

5. Social Event Management

Social Sales Enables Seamless Lead Opportunities

6. Social Sales Insights

7. Rapid Social Sales Response

8. Proactive Social Lead Generation

Social Support and Service Drives Sustainable Customer Satisfaction

9. Social Support Insights

10. Rapid Social Responses

11. Peer-2-Peer (P2P) Unpaid Armies

Social Innovation Streamlines Complex Ideation

12. Innovation Insights

13. Crowd-sourced R&D

Collaboration Reduced Organizational Friction and Stimulates Ecosystem

14. Collaboration Insights

15. Enterprise Collaboration

16. Extended Collaboration

Seamless Customer Experience Sustains Advocacy Programs

17. Seamless Customer Experience

18. VIP Experience

The Customer (R)evolution
The methodologies, systems, and people that entwine CRM are unquestionably forcing a historical (r)evolution from the outside in. As customers earn prominence online and ultimately in the marketplaces they define, CRM is far more consequential to the prosperity and relevance of businesses, than perhaps ever before.

This is about earning a prestigious position in the hearts, minds, and ultimately, decisions of customers, prospects and those who affect their actions, today and tomorrow. Essentially, with the socialization of media and the redistribution of authority and influence, we are competing for the future simply by listening, responding, learning and adapting.

Social customers are disrupting the balance of power and actively exerting their new found eminence within every social network and community that thrives off of shared experiences. The socialization of CRM is effectively measured by the dedication of resources and resolution the organization commits not just to social media, but to all existing channels where customers, influencers and prospects seek help.

Divided we share…united we change.

Among Palm (PALM) device owners, the ratio was lower: One in nine. And among people who own smartphones running Google’s (GOOG) Android OS, it was lower still: One in 17 (see chart; click to enlarge).

So iPhone owners appear far more likely to purchase an iPad. Not much of a revelation, really. But it does lend a bit of credence to Apple CEO Steve Jobs’s claim that the iPad, though a brand new category of device, already has a market in the millions of iPhone and iPod touch users.

Other findings of note from Admob’s report:

• iPod touch users download an average of 12 apps a month–37 percent more than their iPhone and Android counterparts. They spend far more time using them, too: 100 minutes a day–25 percent more than iPhone and Android users.
• 91 percent of iPhone users and 88 percent of iPod touch users said they would recommend their device to a friend, compared with 84 percent of Android users and 69 percent of Palm webOS users. Interestingly, AdMob found that owners of webOS smartphones are more than three times more likely not to recommend their devices relative to iPhone OS users.

In a TPS report filed today (TPS here referring to “tweets per second” and not “Test Program Set” from the movie “Office Space.” Ha ha, what a funny coincidence.) Kevin Weil of the Twitter analytics team points out that tweets grew 1,400 percent last year. He also notes that the 50-million-tweets-per-day figure does not include posts generated by accounts that have been identified as sources of spam.

Further evidence that the microblogging service has pushed through the growth ceiling it hit last fall. As I noted last week, the latest metrics from comScore (SCOR), show Twitter.com with 73.5 million unique visitors in January, up eight percent from the 65.2 million who visited in December 2009.