I recently polled some proprietary, competitiveness, business-sensitive information from some of the largest investment banking and asset management firms in the US.  The finance/ financial services industry is one of the most conservative and gatekeepered business cultures to begin with, and collecting strategic and sensitive marketing information from senior executives promised to [...]

Of course, it seems obvious when I state it that way, but my recent work in social media has really brought this into the forefront for me.  “Strategy” - strategic insight, intelligence, targeted recommendations - has always been part of what I’ve promoted in my consulting company over the last seven or so years (it’s [...]

If you want to do custom statistical analysis on US Patent applications and awards, there’s no substitute for downloading the raw archives from the US Patent Office (USPTO) and manipulating them in the database of choice. However, in 2005 the USPTO uptdated its XML encoding standard to ST.36 (also referred to as “Patent Grant [...]

Twitter has to be the “noisiest” social media platform I’ve experimented with.  I realize I’m not a typical Twitterer - I tweet to mine contacts and information relevant to my career, and to experiment and play with how Twitter can be used for community building and intel-gathering purposes.  To me - and many else on [...]

… and SurveyMonkey killed the professional researcher.
My wife teaches design for public relations at a local university, and frequently comments how the availability of inexpensive desktop publishing and web design solutions has transformed and utterly devalued the graphic design industry.  Now, everybody who can afford a computer is told that they too can produce stunning, [...]

OK, I have to post about a growing pet peeve.  I’m a very, very small lone voice against the vast and growing trend of referring to online social networking applications / platforms (MySpace, FaceBook, white label platforms, etc.) as “social networks”.  While social networking applications contain, and are a type of human social network, “social [...]

Recently, I was called to document quality control / quality assurance steps for a public relations / communications research proposal. I thought it was a useful topic, and worth summarizing some of what I’ve learned over 15 years of scientific research administration and working as a PR / marketing research consultant. In no [...]

Last February, I posted about an automated sensor/logger device by researchers at MIT for the purpose of automated real-time discovery of human social networks. As interesting as that device is - and the implications for smaller, cheaper successor devices - I believe that the trend toward increasing computing power, location sensitivity, and “friend discovery” [...]

Recently, Wired posted an article that demonstrates that the USDOD’s struggle with social media continues unabated - “Air Force Backtracks on Social Network Ban“.
Part of the problem is generational, and part of it is organizational. The generational part is the military is coming to a crash realization that the latest wave of recruits are [...]

The concepts of “betweenness centrality” and “structural holes” are some of the most powerful in the social network analysis toolset (pun intended - but forgive me for lumping the two concepts together for this post). In a nutshell, high betweenness indicates that the overall network is disproportionally reliant on an individual for [...]