ReadWriteWeb

Conventional wisdom dictates that existing customers are valuable, but sometimes that wisdom becomes the baby tossed out with its bathwater when customer acquisition hikes its way up the priority list. Social media marketing service Flowtown (our review) thought it would be interesting to see just how valuable those customers are, so they put together some noteworthy data summaries.

The takeaway? Don't toss the baby. It's your moneymaker.

Understanding your market is a crucial part of planning your startup. But traditional market research can be both expensive and time-consuming, taking weeks or even months to develop, execute and analyze and eating up dollars that many new companies just don't have.

Ask Your Target Market is an online self-service market research platform that tackles those obstacles, helping startups and small businesses assess their markets while avoiding both the high price and lack of agility associated with traditional market research.

In the first generation of the social Web, the marketing groups and public relations teams would develop reports to provide metrics for a particular campaign. They were pretty much the sole users of "social media," technologies.

That's a problem as far as WiseWindow is concerned. Social media is a poor label for describing how comments, blog posts, updates and other opinions can be leveraged to gauge views across social networks and thousands of Web sites.

"Labeling of it as social media has limited its potential up to now," said Marshall Toplansky, president of WiseWindow. "That is why we are calling it mass opinion business intelligence and not social media analytics."

We started tracking VC funding in October 2008, as the financial markets were melting. What caught our eye in those dark and gloomy days was True Ventures' announcement of its Series A investment in Syncplicity. The more we looked, the more we found that the headlines were wrong. It was not all doom and gloom, not in our corner of the universe: early-stage Web tech ventures. So we figured that getting (and passing on to you) good reliable data on a timely basis would be a good idea. Searching for that turned out to be harder than we thought, and herein lies a tale.

The fact that 10% of users create 90% of user-generated content on any given social media site has become a standard trope in discussions around social media. Because of this gap between mainstream users and the enthusiasts who contribute frequently and tend to dominate the discussion, many companies have decided that participating in online communities is not worth their time, as these companies assume that it doesn't allow them to reach their average consumer. According to a recent study by Rubicon Consulting, however, they do so at their own peril, as these active users are also the most likely to influence their peers' buying decisions.