I’ve only twice ever turned to Twitter to clear up a vexing customer service glitch. The results were deeply gratifying: I got a helpful response in a fairly timely manner resolving my ongoing feuds problems with Groupon Italia and Bank of America. Turns out I’m not alone in thinking this is the future of attentive customer service, as new research shows.

With 500,000 merchants on their books, Foursquare has been offering its users daily deals for some time. But without taking a cut from these, and with a focus on growth rather than – gasp – monetization, the app – which recently passed the 10 million user mark – has been bereft of meaningful revenue. Until now.

Venture capitalists are back, funding privately-held firms in the United States alone to a tune of $5.9 billion in first quarter of 2011.
That’s the highest Q1 rate of investment in start-ups in the past three …

Some 42% of online shoppers recently polled “have ‘followed’ a retailer proactively through Facebook, Twitter or a retailer’s blog, and the average person follows about six retailers.” This, according to a Shop.org study on the growth of social commerce. But what’s their motivation in liking/friending/following a retail brand?

Online commerce is one of the few bright spots in retail, once again showing it’s the fastest growing segment in the sector. And what’s the fastest growing part of online commerce? It’s a two-part answer: social- and mobile-commerce, new studies once again show.

LivingSocial is a social commerce service that works on the concept of “group buying” — encouraging users and their friends to buy special deals at, say, restaurants and other local businesses via a daily deals hook.

By any measure, last week was a mega funding week for the social media sector. Last week we tallied $126 in venture capital funding deals for social start-ups as of press time. This week the big story is the social funding deal that hasn’t yet happened: LivingSocial is reported to be in talks with investors to raise $500 milion to take on GroupOn. Yes, $500 million. Moving back to reality… what deals were inked? We have them here.

One of the more controversial pieces of research we’d come across recently was one that showed the phenomenal recent success here in Europe of daily deals sites such as Groupon. Little surprise there. But the researchers concluded that their rise comes at a big cost – the sudden demise of business at eBay and online auctioneers. So we took the question straight to Rajen Ruparell, Director of Groupon UK: are you already writing the obituary of eBay here in Europe?

Another day, another newcomer to the daily deals market. After the New York Times and Axel Springer announced their own Groupon clones earlier this week, Microsoft is saying it too is getting in on the action with Bing deals.

Twitter admitted in its own research a few weeks back that the typical user has to view a hashtag at least four or five times “before it really clicks.” The message was clear to Promoted Tweets advertisers: ratchet up the Tweets if you want to be seen. Is Facebook any more effective?