Until recently, I’ve always hand-coded my online surveys, especially those requiring survey logic or special features (snowball sampling, name-generators, etc.).  Recently, I decided to try the LimeSurvey open source survey software (formerly phpsurveyor) as it looked like it had matured sufficiently to meet most of my needs. I am basing my review on LimeSurvey 1.80 [...]

When I was doing industry research for academia (ten years ago), we would often utilize a quick rule-of-thumb for estimating the annual revenues for a company (which, unless they were traded on public exchanges, were rarely available) based upon the number of employees they had.  The rule of thumb was that for every employee, the [...]

I see the term “case study” used frequently in PR, marketing and management research – but often it is used to describe a very informal and arbitrary descriptive narrative.  To me,  “case study” should refer to a specific research methodology for making consistent comparisons and measurements of two or more subjects, particularly when combining multiple [...]

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 [...]

… 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, [...]

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” [...]

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 [...]