Open up your mind and say, ahh...

We’re still reeling from the news that Facebook has raised $500 million in new funding at a $50 billion valuation. While The New York Times report has yet to be confirmed, we’ve heard rumors for a while now that Facebook was looking to raise a massive round of funding to fuel its rapid growth further before an eventual IPO.

According to the deal, Goldman Sachs will invest $450 million in the social network, while previous investor Digital Sky Technologies will add an additional $50 million. Not only that, but Goldman Sachs will help FacebookFacebook raise an additional $1.5 billion through a “special purpose vehicle” designed to allow outside investors to indirectly invest in the company.

Facebook had previously raised $800 million, so when all is said in done, the social giant will have raised an astounding $2.8 billion. What will Facebook buy with all that new cash?

The first thing Facebook’s likely to do with its $2 billion in new funding is to cash out some of its existing investors and employees. The social network previously did this when DST bought $200 million in Facebook stock from its employees. Some of its early investors may also reach into the $2 billion pot and cash out.

Once that’s done, it’s all about growth. We’ve heard from a reliable source that Facebook is close to purchasing the Sun Microsystems campus in Menlo Park, California from Oracle Corporation. The deal could be finalized as soon as this week, but it won’t be cheap. The new campus will give Facebook the room it needs to grow for the foreseeable future.

Facebook is also likely to greatly ramp up its hiring. Currently the company has between 1,500 and 2,000 employees, a small number compared to its 500 million users and definitely small for a company with a $50 billion valuation. eBay and Starbucks are worth far less, but have 15,000 and 120,000 employees respectively. If Facebook intends to truly challenge GoogleGoogle as king of the web, it needs to ramp up its hiring in multiples.

The social network is also likely to use the money to fund more acquisitions in 2011.

The new round of funding could be the beginning of Facebook’s expansion into other markets as well. It has stayed focused on social networking since its inception, but it could follow in Microsoft and Google’s footsteps and use its vast reach to launch products in new markets.

At some point, Facebook needs to find new markets to continue its expansion. The company is on pace to serve 1 trillion display ads per year, but it could make so much more money with a competitor to Google AdSense and AdWords, the primary revenue drivers for the search giant.

What do you think Facebook should buy with its new cash? Let us know in the comments.

Toyota plans to unveil an all-new in-car entertainment platform today at CES 2011. Called Entune, and complete with its own apps from popular providers and advanced voice recognition, it’s a shot across the bow at rival Ford’s Sync and MyFord Touch.

The system runs on a proprietary operating system that connects with a driver’s mobile phone to access Toyota’s app store, stream audio, provide safety and telematics data and download software updates.

Mobile apps at launch are Microsoft’s Bing search engine and Clear Channel’s IHeartRadio music streaming service, plus Pandora, Movietickets.com and OpenTable.

Other apps may soon become available, but they’d be vetted by Toyota first to ensure they’re not encouraging driver distraction. “We’re not at a place where it’s a completely open platform, but it’s not completely closed either,” said Jon Bucci, vice president of Toyota’s Advanced Technology Department. “We first want to make sure that the applications we develop are exactly what our customers are asking for, and parallel with that, making sure they can be delivered appropriately in a vehicle.”

Bucci also praised Entune’s voice recognition software, developed by Voice Box Technologies. “During a Bing search, where you’re searching for a location while driving, it will go offboard and use Voice Box conversational voice recognition software to allow easier operation of the search as opposed to having to memorize robotic commands,” he said. “You can talk naturally. The voicebox technology is able to understand utterances like ‘um’ or ‘uh.’”

According to Bucci, another strength of Entune is that it doesn’t require the latest smartphone to run, nor will it become obsolete every model year. “At this point right now, our goal is to maintain compatibility with feature phones that are within the past twelve months,” he said. Cars equipped with Entune will also feature satellite and HD radio receivers.

“There’s a mismatch between the cycle time and development of the car and for a consumer electronics device, and that’s been perplexing us in the automotive industry,” Bucci said. Now, with wireless updates to Entune that work just like a software update on any other platform, even an older Toyota’s system can get an upgrade. “We can push that to the customer wirelessly without having to get software reflashed at the dealer,” he said.

The system will be available on “select vehicles in calendar year ‘11,” said Bucci, and the Entune app will soon be available for download at Toyota.com in addition to iTunes, Android Market and Blackberry App World.

“At this very moment, it’s a little early for us to reveal models and specific positioning by vehicle,” he said, but expect to see Entune in dealerships shortly after CES. We’re looking forward to checking it out.

Images: Toyota

…might actually make them cost less.

What would happen if your organization hired a meeting fairie?

The fairie’s job would be to ensure that meetings were short, efficient and effective. He would focus on:

• Getting precisely the right people invited, but no others.
• Making the meeting start right on time.
• Scheduling meetings so that they don’t end when Outlook says they should, but so that they end when they need to.
• Ensuring that every meeting has a clearly defined purpose, and accomplishes that purpose, then ends.
• Welcoming guests appropriately. If you are hosting someone, the fairie makes sure the guest has adequate directions, a place to productively wait before the meeting starts, access to the internet, something to drink, biographies of who else will be in the room and a clear understanding of the goals of the meeting.
• Managing the flow of information, including agendas and Powerpoints. This includes eliminating the last minute running around looking for a VGA cable or a monitor that works. The fairie would make sure that everyone left with a copy of whatever they needed.
• Issuing a follow up memo to everyone who attended the meeting, clearly delineating who came and what was decided.

If you do all this, every time you call a meeting it’s going to cost more to organize. Which means you’ll call fewer meetings, those meetings will be shorter and more efficient. And in the long run, you’ll waste less time and get more done.

According to data just released by Dow Jones, venture capital had a good year in 2010, showing more exits than we’ve seen since the recession began.

Web-based startups had a particularly strong year, with a grand total of 62 aquisitions worth a total of $4.1 billion — almost double both the number of deals and the dollar amount of all deals in both 2008 and 2009. In both prior years, consumer information services startups saw 34 acquisitions worth $2.2 billion and $715 million respectively.

So, who was making all these big acquisitions? In the web sector Google, IBM and Facebook were the top three acquiring companies, nabbing 10, five and five startups respectively. Zynga also made the list with four companies acquired throughout the year.

Across all startup sectors, 514 companies achieved liquidity in 2010 with deals totalling $39.3 billion, up 25% from 2009 exits and much closer to the 613 exits we saw in pre-recession 2007.

Another interesting area of activity in 2010 was initial public offerings. In 2010, 46 venture-funded companies had IPOs that netted a total of $3.4 billion. That’s almost five times both the number and dollar amount of IPOs last year.

Jessica Canning is Dow Jones VentureSource’s director of global research. In a release, she said, “While it isn’t clear if companies with blockbuster potential, like Facebook and Groupon, will come to market in 2011, there is a healthy IPO pipeline. Currently, 44 companies are registered to go public, up from 25 at this time last year.”

Mergers and acquisitions were also up from 2009. Throughout 2010, a total of 445 M&As raised $33.9 billion, up 17% from last year, which saw 381 exits netting $20.8 billion. Another interesting and hopeful note: The median amount paid for a venture-backed company this year was $46 million — that’s a full 70% more than the median in 2009, a mere $27 million.

Here’s a look at the past four years in M&As for consumer-facing web services:

Image courtesy of Flickr, elycefeliz.

Fishing for compliments is something of a misdemeanor in most social circles — unless your circle is the Internet and you’re fishing with a shiny, new vanity app.

ThreeWords.me is making the rounds this week. It’s a simple app that lets you solicit three-word responses from your friends around the web. Each respondent simply goes to your unique ThreeWords.me URL and enters three words about you.

Your friends can also add comments along with their three words, and you can reply to any entries. In your dashboard, you can see which words people entered the most.

You might get a lot of complimentary words, but be warned, o ye of little self-confidence: The app allows for anonymous commenting, so steel yourself for trolls, profanity and put-downs. You can delete any of the entries at your discretion. You can also choose to make all your responses private.

The premise is ever so grade school, which adds to the app’s charm. While ThreeWords.me is without question a slightly narcissistic game aimed squarely at the perpetually insecure social media scene, it’s nevertheless cute and catching on like wildfire through TwitterTwitter and FacebookFacebook.

Its UI is simple, as well. You get to upload a background image and profile photo; other than that, the pages are decidedly bare-bones and lacking in the design department. Then again, the design isn’t what matters about this app; getting people to talk about — and hopefully compliment — you is what drives traffic to the pages in this case.

*Words blurred to preserve the author’s lingering sense of humility.

You can connect the app to Facebook, but sadly, you can’t use Facebook or Twitter to find your friends who are also using the app. You’ll have to do that part manually, a major shortcoming that’s likely holding the app back quite a bit in terms of adoption and growth.

ThreeWords.me puts us in mind of FormspringFormSpring, Facto and a slew of other vanity apps we’ve been watching lately.

The app was created by college freshman Mark Bao, a teenager who’s been trying his hand at web-based entrepreneurialism for quite some time already. While we don’t see ThreeWords.me as a money-making endeavor right now, we’re sure the exposure can’t hurt.

Have you tried ThreeWords.me yet or seen others in your circle using it? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Maria Ogneva is the director of social media at Nimble, a social relationship management solution that transforms your entire community into business opportunity by leveraging the best of customer relationship management, social media and communication tools. You can follow her on Twitter at @themaria or @nimble, or find her musings on the company blog and her personal blog.

It’s no secret that customer experience is one of the cornerstones of an effective business strategy. In all honesty, it should have been all along, but many companies chose to hide behind corporate walls and only talk to customers when it was convenient for them instead of when the customer needed them. There’s no need to belabor the point that social media has put customers in the driver’s seat. However, companies don’t need to live in fear of the next Kevin Smith or Nestle Fanpage episode. They just need to fix their customer experience to ensure that products and services actually do what they’re supposed to do and the company’s support and service are actually helpful.

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Social CRM Connects Social Customer to Social Business

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Today’s business must address more aspects of the customer experience than ever before. In addition to a stellar product or service, you now have many more channels to listen to and participate in, while keeping the experience consistently excellent. Where it gets complicated is wading through the noise, turning data into insights that the whole company can use, and sharing these insights. Because there is so much data being hurled at you, solutions that help unify and share information in a usable format have become necessary. Analyst firm Gartner estimates that more than 80% of growth in enterprise use of social networking tools will be driven by customer engagement projects and estimates social customer relationship management to be a $1 billion submarket of CRM in 2011.Recall that in my previous post about social CRM, we addressed some key tenets:

• Listen and engage;
• Have a 360-degree view of the customer;
• Adopt transparency and customer service as cultural foundations for your business;
• Share and align with your team; develop necessary workflow;
• Social engagement must be enterprise-wide.

In an effort to see these theories applied to real-life situations, let’s examine some examples of how my personal customer experience was affected by businesses correctly capturing, sharing and acting on relevant information.

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Honeymoon and Teamwork

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For my honeymoon, I stayed at a world-class resort called Tabacon in Costa Rica. Each day was full of thoughtful and personalized details that were carefully orchestrated among various employees of the hotel, as well as external parties. The best part of the experience was a private dinner in a cabana in the rainforest. Let’s dissect the collaboration and communication that had to occur for this experience to happen:

• Our travel planner contacted the hotel to make arrangements and communicate our honeymoon status.
• A reservation specialist received the reservation, captured client (mine) information in the internal record system, analyzed honeymoon suite inventory and booked it.
• The hotel referenced client preferences via my profile for that hotel group (“Leading Hotels of the World”) and discovered my preference for champagne.
• The hotel communicated this preference to housekeeping; housekeeping prepared the room for arrival with a champagne bottle and a personalized note of congratulations.
• The concierge greeted me at the door and offered the private dinner and established a channel in which I could book it.
• The hotel collected menu preferences and desired time; communicated time to chef and waiter.
• The waiter came to pick us up in the room and the chef prepared food to client specification.

At least five people and two systems (internal and external) were involved in making this an unforgettable experience. So why did I use this as an example, even though there was no social media involved? Because social or not, the underlying business principles haven’t and shouldn’t have changed. A finely tuned communication and collaboration system is key if you want to provide an excellent experience, whether it’s via the social web or in-person.

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How Does Social Media Enhance Experience?

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Only when you are confident in your ability to support the collaborative process should you invest in a full-scale social media effort. I recommend following these simple steps:

1. Listen and respond. You should be listening for signals from social media for needs of existing and potential clients. You want to engage proactively: listening at the point of need; as well as reactively: listening for indicators that someone may need help. To provide another personal example, Virgin America effectively and quickly responded to a need I had via social media. Unlike its competitor, Virgin got back to me very quickly, taking care to resolve the issue in the backchannel instead of sending me to an 800 number.

2. Cross-reference social and internal customer data. Is there anything that could have made the Virgin example even better? Certainly! It would have been even better if the company automatically knew my frequent flyer number without me having to message it. To successfully serve someone or give them an unforgettable experience, you need to know what your relationship is with the person who tweeted, your history of communication, as well as purchase history, if it’s a customer. For example, at my company, we help you cross-reference people from the social media stream (either your own or as a result of tracking keywords) to the internal record for a full 360-degree view.

3. Understand context of relationship. Quick caveat: this new level of customer intelligence should be used in context of the relationship. While the customer may want you to get the full scoop on him or her in a customer service scenario, a company should never appear like it is using the personal information of someone who has no relationship with the company.

I once had a sub-par experience with a major financial institution where I couldn’t get in touch with customer service. Exasperated and in a panic, I complained on TwitterTwitter, after which the Twitter rep got back to me promptly. Before I could even write back with details about my situation, she proactively e-mailed me via the e-mail address on record. In this case, it wasn’t creepy and actually provided value, because we had a relationship, and I knew the company had my e-mail address.

Of course, if an existing customer is having a bad experience, your first priority should be fixing the experience, communicating it back to the user and asking this person to keep voicing feedback and opinions. This will increase brand affinity and create an experience worth sharing with others. Whether your customer is having a good experience or bad, it’s key to create a participatory channel in which ideas can be voiced and captured, and progress communicated back to the customer.

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Share and Collaborate, Rinse and Repeat

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As you do all of the above, make sure that your team, as well as key external parties, are on the same page with you. Cross-reference social data with internal data, retain and reference current and prior conversation threads and ensuing actions items. Just like how the Tabacon personnel immaculately shared information about me, delegated tasks to each other, and stayed on the same page, so should any business that wants to provide a superb customer experience.

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Image courtesy of iStockphotoiStockphoto, AndyL