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6 Ways to Use Quora for Research

Neil Vidyarthi — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 11:27:46 +0000

Brian Honigman is the Social Media Account Manager at LunaMetrics, which you can follow at @LunaMetrics. Read more about Brian after the article.

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.

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Take the Black Eye Out of Black Friday — Avoid the Chaos

Kenna McHugh — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 15:40:05 +0000

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.

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Alcohol Companies and Social Media: A Dangerous Combination For Youth According to New Study

Kelsey Blair — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 15:57:26 +0000

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.
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Theia: Research Project to Search Photos on Smartphones in Real-time

Todd Ogasawara — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 20:49:47 +0000

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)

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Mobile Instant Messaging will cross 1.3 Billion Users by 2016

Bilal Hameed — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 15:15:35 +0000

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.

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38 Million in US Purchase Under Influence of Social Media [STUDY]

Neil Glassman — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 13:00:04 +0000

As marketers struggle to define the value of social media to their brands, Knowledge Networks findings officially announced today 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.

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Sentiment Analysis: When Machines Can Beat Humans

Neil Glassman — Thu, 12 May 2011 11:00:15 +0000

Dr. Taras Zagibalov holds a doctorate in Informatics and heads the natural language processing research team at social media monitoring company Brandwatch. His work centers on improving real-time sentiment analysis to deliver accurate and up to date information for brands.

It’s not hard to find criticism of automatic sentiment analysis. Many of the most persuasive examples focus on illustrating how poor machines are at understanding emotions expressed through the complexities of human language. In some ways, they’re right.

Why?

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Can Social Media Data Predict Stock Price Changes? Sentiment Analysis (Part 5 of 5)

Neil Glassman — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 12:46:10 +0000

In yesterday’s post, I ranted a bit about how correlation is often confused with causality — the trap of assuming “A” caused “B” because it’s easily observed that “B” occurred after “A”. Strategy consulting firm Altman Vilandrie & Company conducted a proof-of-concept study to test if there really may be predictive value for their customers in measuring consumer sentiment expressed in social media.

Granted, this was only preliminary research. But 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.

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Applications in Social Media: Sentiment Analysis (Part 4 of 5)

Neil Glassman — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 10:50:38 +0000

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.

For the past few days, this series has explored how sentiment may be derived from text, including issues related to text-as-data, the integrity of that data and the processes that are applied. Now, lets look at some of the sentiment analysis factors brands and agencies should consider when choosing social intelligence platforms.

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Twitter Data Conundrum: Sentiment Analysis (Part 3 of 5)

Neil Glassman — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 11:30:00 +0000

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.

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Purpose and Problems: Sentiment Analysis (Part 2 of 5)

Neil Glassman — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 10:30:18 +0000

Opinions abound in tweets, wall posts, blog comments and documents on other web and social media platforms. We looked at the text elements of these documents that comprise opinions in the first post in this series.

Today, informed by the discussions and presentations at the recent Sentiment Analysis Symposium, let’s examine the business case for sentiment analysis, as well as some issues related to the discovery and analysis processes applied to those documents to mine actionable information for businesses.

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Sentiment Analysis and Social Media Marketing (Part 1 of 5)

Neil Glassman — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 12:55:16 +0000

I dreamed about a device called the emotitonimeter. One inputs a bit of web or social media text and the emotitonimeter instantly determines whether the text is relevant to your brand and generates a smiling, frowning or neutral face indicating the emotional tone of the text by reaching back through the ether and tapping directly into the brain of the sender. Perhaps the deluxe version indicates whether and how we should respond.

Until someone invents the emotitonimeter, we’re tasked with sifting through mountains of available text documents (such as tweets, posts and comments) to uncover what’s relevant to our brands. Then, to guide our actions, it’s beneficial to decipher, among other vectors, the sentiment of the text.

Welcome to the science and art of sentiment analysis.

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5 Must-Know Metrics for Effective Facebook Wall Posts

Neil Glassman — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 09:45:11 +0000

Contrary to the old adage, timing is not everything when it comes to Facebook wall posts. Important? Yes. Tricky? Certainly. But not everything. So says a recent study by Buddy Media that looked at a two week sampling of the wall posts of 200 brands.

Let’s take a look at what Buddy Media found that’s relevant to your Facebook engagement initiatives. There’s at least one finding that caught me by surprise.

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Crowdtap Launches Consumer Research/Activation Platform

Neil Glassman — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 14:30:49 +0000

Using a self-service, pay-per action model, Crowdtap is designed to help brand marketers and agencies tap targeted crowds of consumers for real-time research and peer-to-peer marketing actions that include sponsored house parties, sampling and online content sharing through social networks.

Infused with a generous dose of game mechanics, Crowdtap motivates consumer participation by offering to reward them with status, gifts, donations to charities and product samples when they respond to questions and participate in other activities.

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How New Media is Changing TV: A New Kind of Storytelling [Part 3]

Neil Glassman — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 14:30:57 +0000

This guest post is the last in a series of three authored by Lauren Maynard, Director of Research for Room 214, where she leads the agency’s business intelligence practice. Part one looked at shifts in consumer behavior, while part two examined changes in engagement and content delivery.

Follow Maynard’s conversation on Twitter and the Room 214 blog, Capture the Conversation.

Today I’d like to talk about storytelling, an ancient form of communication that is now highly relevant to the convergence of television and new media. I’m specifically referring to transmedia storytelling.

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