Half of retailers can’t aggregate all their data in one place to make detailed reports and conclusions. 45 percent don’t use available data to personalize marketing communications, and another 42 can’t link data together at the individual customer level.

That is perhaps understandable, because 90 percent of the data that’s ever been created has been created in the last two years, and the rate of data growing is increasing quickly.

But it is also a problem, because big data is the key to knowing your customers, and knowing your customers is the key to being able to sell effectively to them. Big data also has its creepy side, as when Target famously used it to figure out that a girl was pregnant before her father knew.

But many retailers are not effectively pulling together tweets, likes and reviews and matching them against customer lists, transactions, loyalty club memberships, and prospects — which means they are using old dumb marketing techniques in a new smart world.

And missing out on sales.

So online marketing optimization company Monetate, which has access to a huge amount of ecommerce information, has put together the following quick guide for retailers using big data:

photo credit: JD Hancock via photopin cc

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Facebook is testing a new feature called “collections,” with a few well-known brands today that will let you buy products featured in enticing photos. But while Facebook calls it a “small test,” Collections, like the recently launched Facebook Gifts, gives us a look inside the company’s business mindset.

Collections isn’t just a facet of the photos feature, it’s a completely separate type of post that appears on a company’s Page. Users can look at these collections and can “want” a product, “collect” it, or like it, as per usual. Anything that is “collected” or “liked” is put into a new Timeline feature called “products.” It shows the things you admire but maybe aren’t ready to whip your wallet out for yet. If you “want” the item, it automatically goes into your “wishlist.” Collected items can also be put into your wishlist, as the screenshot above shows.

The feature is currently being tested with retailers Neiman Marcus, Michael Kors, Victoria’s Secret, Pottery Barn, Wayfair, Fab.com, and Smith Optics.

Even if the feature never fully rolls out, the test will inevitably help Facebook figure out how people interact with products and different kinds of actionable “likes” on the site. This is valuable information in a retail world bombarded by sites like Pinterest that show off products beautifully but don’t have a direct line to purchase. Facebook could take advantage of this by providing that line.

Facebook told VentureBeat in an email:

“We’ve seen that businesses often use Pages to share information about their products through photo albums. Today, we are beginning a small test in which a few select businesses will be able to share information about their products through a feature called Collections.  Collections can be discovered in News Feed, and people will be able to engage with these collections and share things they are interested in with their friends. People can click through and buy these items off of  Facebook.

Right now it doesn’t look like Facebook is sharing revenue with the brands, given that Facebook lets the businesses put in their own product links and purchases don’t happen on the network. But it looks like Facebook is thinking of physical goods as a potential supplement to its business model. The company recently introduced another physical goods-oriented product called “Gifts,” which does act as a revenue product for the company.

Gifts, unlike its predecessor, which allowed you to share little icons of things like a teddy bear or flowers, lets you send these items to a friend. You go to the gift store, pick out something you think is fitting for your friend, and share it with them. You can choose to pay for it before you share, or wait until they’ve formally accepted the gift and chosen a shipping address. Then the gift is sent, and Facebook makes a buck off your kindness.

hat tip All Facebook

Facebook is constantly absorbing our real-life data that we contribute to the social network, but one Brazilian clothing store is taking Facebook’s data and throwing it back into the physical world.

The store, C&A, is putting “real-time Likes” counters on its hangers in retail locations around Brazil. The Like data is taken from C&A’s Facebook page, where the company has listed its various wares for people to interact with. When a person Likes an item, that Like shows up on the hanger. It is meant to help customers with purchasing decisions. If they are unsure of one item, they can see how many people online think the product is a good buy.

The problem is, so much of online shopping is based on a picture. An image online says nothing about the fit, fabric, or quality of the clothing. If you’ve got a poorly made, ill-fitting shirt, you’re probably not going to be swayed into buying the piece just because it has 482 likes on Facebook. Similarly, if the item has only two likes, but makes you look like you’ve done nothing but get massaged on a beach in Bora Bora, you’re probably going to buy it regardless of its online popularity.

The Verge notes that C&A is not doing well in its European establishments, but hopes the Facebook integration in its Brazil stores will help it keep up with the times. It’s a funny way to integrate social, but it shows how stores are finding new opportunities to use Facebook’s data in marketing outside of the digital world.

via The Verge; image via C&A’s Facebook Page

Started in January last year, the service enables anyone to sign up and spread endorsements of products they like. Users select desirable products and “Like” them on MyLikes, which then spreads them as endorsements on their social networks — Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and others — and pays out a per-click rate to the user. 200,000 publishers, including celebrities like Khloe Karadashian and Snooki as well as niche tech personalities like Robert Scoble, have signed up to the service.

In addition to the funding, the startup is also announcing the addition of Gmail creator Paul Buchheit, who recently left Facebook to join startup incubator Y Combinator, to its board.

Last year, MyLikes raised a $630,000 seed round consisting almost entirely of former Google employees. Other investors in its Series A round include Lightspeed Partners and Metamorphic Ventures.

Nonetheless, I proceeded to spend the rest of the day “like-ing” stuff I came across in the real world: someone brought cupcakes into a meeting — “like”; I heard an awesome company pitch — “like”; I colluded with marauding investors on seed valuations for Y Combinator companies, “like” (and tweet cc @arrington). Every time, it was as if I had given myself a virtual high-five and couldn’t wait to share it.

Clearly Facebook has trained me well.

Do I sound crazy? Maybe, but I’m not alone. According to All Facebook, last July more than 65 million people were “like-ing” stuff on a daily basis. That’s more than 17.5 billion “likes” over nine months (assuming a constant rate and no growth of Facebook traffic). In September, Mashable reported that the “like” button is now present on over 2 million sites around the Web. That’s a lot of new data about user intent, and it’s growing. Not bad for a feature that rolled out only nine months ago.

If 2010 was about gamification, then 2011 will belong to people who can figure out what to do with what we like.

Like-ification of the Web

“Likes” and the social graph that creates them represent a new contextual layer on top of the existing web. It’s a layer that brings new opportunities for discovery and personalization in a world where noise is expanding much faster than signal (see last week’s fire in the blogosphere about Google’s losing battle against spam). This has significant implications in areas like search. Bing and Blekko have already announced integration of “like” data into search results to help improve discovery and relevance. Expect better utilization of this data and new discovery services to follow suit.

Like-ification of advertising

The holy grail in advertising is when the content is the advertising and vice versa. “Like” data gives advertisers the ability to personalize their message to an audience of one and target messages only to those that have expressed intent and interest. While Facebook itself is in pole position to leverage this data, in the rapidly expanding display advertising business, like-ification also has big implications for other stakeholders in the space. Retargeting vendors like AdRoll, Retargeter, and TellApart are already using your click history as a proxy for consumer intent, and data vendors like BlueKai and eXelate are building intent data about consumers all around the web.

While I expect to see continued vigorous privacy debates as consumers lobby for the proper controls over their data, imagine the value of explicit social expressions of consumer interest as the display ad market continues to heat up in 2011.

Like-ification of the real world

Finally, “likes” are coming out of their digital cage and into the analog world. Digital metadata is being layered onto the physical world. And ubiquitous access to sensor-laden mobile devices means that user data and intent is now being captured about physical locations like “check-ins” on Foursquare and Facebook Places, personal activity with Nike Fit and FitBit, the things we buy on apps like StickyBits, and even the stuff we see (it’s not just TV — remember this awesome Word Lens translation demo?).

Smart devices are growing in number and even more stacked with real robotics capabilities (Near Field Communications chips, image recognition) embedded at consumer price points. Our personal devices can increasingly perceive the physical world, and it’s not hard to imagine the physical world increasingly recognizing us. My Xbox Kinect already authenticates my face and pairs it with my player profile. Imagine what that could mean for your status updates.

Big changes are afoot in 2011. I think entrepreneurs are going to heart them.

Saad Khan likes his day job as a seed investor at CMEA Capital and giving love to his portfolio companies Blekko, Pixazza, Evolution Robotics, and Jobvite. You can follow him on Twitter.

Facebook’s like pages, previously termed “fan pages”, comprise of pages on the site representing artists, movies, and brands — some officially managed, some not. Over time, they’ve become a popular way of expressing interest and showing support for one’s tastes, and conversely, for page managers to keep fans and interested users updated.

Upon opening the tool, tabs of categories are shown at the top, ranging from “Musicians” to “Brands,” and within each category are thumbnails of page recommendations. When a thumbnail is clicked upon, that page is automatically “liked” by the user. On the right hand-side is a useful box titled “Friends similar to you”, which shows a ranked list of friends with whom users share the most mutual likes.

Liked pages appear in the “Likes” section of a user’s profile, and are broadcasted to friends’ News Feeds, thus having a viral mechanism of spreading throughout the social network.

For Facebook, the launch of the discovery tool represents another way of increasing user engagement and activity on the site. Also, it helps in building a more accurate representation of a user’s interests, undoubtedly useful when it comes to targeting users through advertising.

The tool was accessible by a small number of users on the site earlier in the month, but has now been rolled out to all its users, although it is not officially being promoted on the site (the only way to access it is by going directly to the link.)

The word “open” — like “green” or “eco-conscious” — is one of the more amorphous concepts floating about the tech industry. Google touts openness while keeping its advertising and search algorithms secret. On the opposing side, Apple regularly faces heated criticism about the barriers it has erected to the app store.

The truth is, both proprietary and purely open systems have their flaws. Most companies lay somewhere in between despite their rhetoric.

Facebook’s grand idea this week was the “Open Graph.” It’s a fundamentally different way of mapping the web via people’s real social relationships and affinities toward things like music, books and local venues, instead of hyperlinks between static pages. The project involves spreading “Like” buttons around the web that record people’s preferences and having companies add metadata to their sites so Facebook can treat them almost like Fan Pages housed within Facebook’s site.

The moves sparked criticism that the company was collecting data on people’s preferences without giving them the power to port that information elsewhere and that it was compelling publishers across the web to reformat their pages to Facebook’s liking.

“Rather than using data that’s already on the web, everyone that wants to play Facebook’s game needs to go and retrofit their pages to include these new metadata types,” wrote Chris Messina, a longtime open source advocate who now works for Facebook’s much bigger rival Google. ”When … Facebook gets to hoard all of the metadata and likes around the interactions between people and content, it depletes the ecosystem of potential and chaos.”

Both of Facebook’s moves carry big implications for startups that don’t want to play by the company’s rulebook. So a few have already launched counter-initiatives. Hunch co-founder and prolific angel investor Chris Dixon has helped form OpenLike, a way for people to share their preferences with multiple services. Another competitor Meebo has partnered with Google and other companies to launch XAuth, a system that lets web site owners figure out which social networks a person uses and allows them to log-in with the network of their choice.

Facebook’s own openness advocate, David Recordon, argued that the company’s moves were open. Developers can now store Facebook user data for more than 24 hours and subscribe to changes in user data in real-time. He added that any developer could make use of the new metadata that publishers add to their pages. Plus, the company has adopted OAuth, a way for users to share parts of their data like friend lists, photos or status updates, without handing over their IDs or passwords.