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For site owners, Web analytics and social media conversations can provide quite a bit of insight into users, how they use the site, and whether or not they're having any issues. However, there is a limit to how much intelligence can be gleaned from these sources. So what's an effective way to get insights from your site's users? Just ask them.

Lithium has changed its game. Once limited to customer communities, the company has moved to become a complete social CRM for the enterprise.

Lithium's new approach creates a flow of information from the social web into your community. The result is the creation of valuable content, community-driven support, and the identification of engaged customers. The only stumbling block may be the ambiguity behind the company's new messaging.

According to a new survey of more than 300 enterprises by Gartner Research, software as a service has failed to impress business users across the board. Both U.S. and U.K. users polled were far from enthusiastic about their experiences with SaaS.

Most telling was that customers gave the most dismal reviews to areas where vendors are making the biggest promises: namely, low costs and high performance. Despite changing attitudes towards its security and reliability, these results suggest that providers are creating some of their own ills by overselling and under-delivering when it comes to key benefits of SaaS.

Gartner released a report today that highlights the different ways that companies are adopting Twitter for business use. Although Twitter was originally intended for communication among individuals, a number of organizations have begun to actively participate on the platform. However, not all companies are using Twitter in the same way. Some are tweeting, some are just listening, and some really savvy companies are doing both.

Finding new ways to reach, engage with, and learn from customers is a cornerstone of Enterprise 2.0. The idea and suggestion management space is one slice of that effort, and in this series we'll review the major players in this space and look at what options your company has for participating in it. The idea and suggestion management space has essentially three types of vendor offerings (with some bleeding across categories).