Have you ever used Quora before to solve an unanswered question or start a conversation about an interesting topic? As a platform, Quora allows its community to post and answer questions about anything of their choosing to gain collective knowledge. One way to take advantage of this question and answer based feedback is using it for your day to day researching needs.
Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews. 
Unlike the primitive nature associated with Black Friday– stampedes, trampling, and general chaos– modern technological advances such as QR codes, apps, and tablets have given retailers the opportunity to accommodate shoppers from multiple mediums to leave Black Friday without a black eye. A survey conducted by the National Retail Federation revealed that social media and modern technology will play an especially significant role in holiday shopping this year, which gives shoppers the upper hand in finding the best deal available while also avoiding as much of the chaos as possible.
Half of smartphone owners surveyed reported intentions to use their devices for upcoming holiday purchases, whether in the form of accessing the Internet through the device or utilizing newly released apps to shop around for the best deal and navigate the store with interactive maps. Aside from making purchases directly from the mobile device, shoppers will be able to shop in a more effective manner by knowing which store to visit for the products they need.
Social media is an exceptional advertising tool, and alcohol companies have benefitted from increased marketing opportunities, but a new study from the UK suggests youth are being negatively impacted by the combination of social media and alcohol promotion.
You’ve probably seen or read about apps and services that aggregate photos to get multiple perspectives of a single place or event at a place. You may also be familiar with projects that rely on people donating a portion of their computer’s time for massively difficult problems like detecting an extra-terrestrial signal or protein folding. Researchers at Rice University have combined these concepts to provide a way to search photos stored locally on smartphones to find objects (including people) in collections of crowd sourced photos in near real-time.
Unlike the services we have today, these photos remain on the smartphone. The photos are not uploaded to a central server for processing. The search processing itself takes place on the smartphone too. This system, named Theia, requires an app to be installed on the smartphone. So, this is not something that would just go through all of your photos without your knowledge. While it definitely has privacy and personal security aspects that should be of concern, it also has the potential to visually find things for good outcomes (like a missing person).
The researchers have a prototype running on Android phones. This is not a production application or service at this time.
Search the world’s smartphone photos (I Programmer)
Opportunistic Content Search of Smartphone Photos (arXiv.org)
Juniper Research, in a recent report has projected that the number of mobile instant messaging (IM) users will exceed 1.3 billion by 2016, marking a 300% increase from 2010. The growth is expected to be driven by the continued growth of services like AOL’s AIM, Blackberry Messenger, Microsoft’s Windows Live, Skype and Yahoo! Messenger and Apple’s iMessage.
As marketers struggle to define the value of social media to their brands, new Knowledge Networks findings demonstrate that consumers are much more likely to discover new products and brands or refer to social media before making purchase decisions than they were just a year ago. In fact, the purchase decisions of 38 million 13 to 80 year olds in the U.S. are now influenced in various ways by social media — up 14% in just six months.
But that’s not all the research reveals. More, after the jump.
Guest blogger Dr. Taras Zagibalov of Brandwatch addresses criticisms leveled at automatic sentiment analysis used for social media monitoring. Humans, he posits, often struggle to determine the sentiment of a piece of text because, just like the machine, they do not have the relevant knowledge available.
Have current developments in machine analysis improved the process when compared with human analysis? And what of its own, inherent limitations? One perspective — after the jump.
Strategy consulting firm Altman Vilandrie & Company conducted a proof-of-concept study to test if their really may be predictive value to their customers to measure consumer sentiment in social media. The results warrant further exploration of social media as a proxy for actual sentiment. And the study exposed what might be a skew in news media sentiment.
Details after the jump
Brand marketers and agencies engaged in social media are applying social media “intelligence” using offers from a growing number of application and service providers in an increasing differentiated field. Sentiment analysis is just one set of business intelligence vectors we can discover and analyze in social media data.
Now, lets look at some of the sentiment analysis factors brands and agencies should consider when choosing social intelligence platforms.
It probably goes without saying that complete and accurate data make for better analysis. While good data is relatively easy for a brand to obtain from its owned media, assuring the integrity of data from earned, yet-to-be-earned and just plain “in-the-wild” text documents has a higher degree of difficulty.
Twitter data was specifically cited as problematic by several presenters at the Sentiment Analysis Symposium. After the event, I asked some questions of those who are “in the know” about Twitter data to get some clarity on the issue.
