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One of the issues facing social business and social CRM strategies is the issue of whether customers want to use social media as means for getting customer support. As of now, the phone is still the most common way to provide support. But would customers be willing to engage in other ways?

An infographic from customer experience analytics firm ClickFox organizes research on the subject and finds that two in three customers would be willing to use social media for customer service if they understood the tools better. The infographic also breaks down the cost per interaction of various types of engagement, and finds website visits to be the cheapest by far.

According to data visualized in an infographic from Techvibes, Canada lags in cloud adoption with only 47% of Canadian business actively using cloud computing. By comparison, 70% of U.S. businesses, 68% of U.K. businesses and 61% of German businesses use cloud computing.

The number one reason for avoiding the cloud? Security concerns.

Socialcast (which was recently acquired by ReadWriteWeb sponsor VMware) ran an interesting infographic these week visualizing, among other things, a social media study conducted by the Center for Marketing at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth on the use of social media in Fortune 500 companies (we covered part of this study back in 2008).

The majority of companies studied found social media - such as blogging, social networking and online video - to be successful. Even as far back 2007 (why does that seem like so long ago?), a majority of the companies surveyed found social media to be at least somewhat important.

Data visualization is a medium for understanding information that had previously been the domain of scientists and researchers.

Today, due to the amount of data available, there is an increasing need to find new ways of understanding what information means that is available through social networks and throughout the Web.

Engaging Online Communities is a report we published this week that explores ways to engage with customers. It looks at the tools available to engage, collect and analyze information.