Wellness Obsession

Updated from 2007... Social Media in the 2009 Inc. 500: New Tools & New Trends Conducted By: Nora Ganim Barnes, Ph.D., Eric Mattson CEO, Financial Insite The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth recently conducted a new in-depth and statistically significant study on the usage of social media in fast-growing corporations. This new study revisits the Center’s study of Inc. 500 social media usage for the third consecutive year, making it a valuable and rare longitudinal study of corporate use of these new technologies. The new study compares adoption of social media over three years (2007, 2008 and 2009) by the Inc. 500, a list of the fastest-growing private U.S. companies compiled annually by Inc. Magazine. For details about the 2009 Inc. 500 and the complete directory of the included companies, please visit Inc. Magazine's website at www.Inc.com. Social Media in the 2009 Inc. 500 - Center for Marketing Research - University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

Catching up on some old news. What I like about the SaS approach towards social networking, is that the company is applying it to real business scenarios that are complex and process-centric (e.g., fraud and other scenarios ). Besides, when a vendor mentions Simmel, I can't help but smile. How do social groups affect your business? From identifying influential consumers to nabbing fraud rings, social network analysis digs into social group dynamics and presents a clear picture of connections While the study of human relationships has existed for centuries, it was not until 1908, when Georg Simmel presented his network-based analysis, that social systems were depicted through graphs that used nodes to represent individuals and ties to represent the relationships between them. Known as social network analysis, the types of relationships that make up a network can be diverse, including friends, classmates, deposits, purchases and personal interests. Social networks allow us to recognize and understand customer behaviors that, as isolated behaviors, might otherwise seem ordinary. A closer inspection of customer behaviors is now possible through advances in computer systems and through historical data about customer transactions. In many cases, these tools allow us to identify the relationships that customers maintain by way of their transactions, contact information, addresses, telephone numbers, acquaintances or referrals. How can social network analysis be applied to your business? Here are a few examples: Banks use it to detect money laundering. Telco marketers use it to identify the most influential members of a social community. Credit providers use it to better assess the risk of individual applicants. How do social groups affect your business? | SAS

Reading through the patent application itself , I wonder if this also proposal has applicability to Cisco Pulse (in an expanded view of what a search engine might be), given that the language also mentions a "webgraph". Perhaps this information also might describe how Cisco could possibly examine social graph connections as people-to-people connection requests traverse a network. Worth reading the article below: Will Cisco gear become search engine toll collectors? | NetworkWorld.com Community Cisco has filed a patent application on a method that seeds search engine crawlers using intercepted network traffic. Cisco's method includes monitoring data packets exchanged in a computer network over which documents having respective location identifiers are distributed, so as to detect a request to access a given document. A location identifier of the given document is extracted from the request. The location identifier is provided to a search engine that searches for data in a set of the documents, so as to cause the search engine to add the given document to the set. Will Cisco gear become search engine toll collectors? | NetworkWorld.com Community

Hmm - I think it matters more that the the Office of the Privacy Commissioner in Canada says ... what the EU says and so on - than what Facebook itself would prefer to believe. Once you're classified as a data controller things change as institutions and other advocacy bodies become involved in the affairs of business organizations. I would also point folks this a recent post by Bob Blakley on the notion that privacy is gone. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a live audience yesterday that if he were to create Facebook again today, user information would by default be public, not private as it was for years until the company changed dramatically in December. In a six-minute interview on stage with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington , Zuckerberg spent 60 seconds talking about Facebook's privacy policies. His statements were of major importance for the world's largest social network - and his arguments in favor of an about-face on privacy deserve close scrutiny. Zuckerberg offered roughly 8 sentences in response to Arrington's question about where privacy was going on Facebook and around the web. The question was referencing the changes Facebook underwent last month. Your name, profile picture, gender, current city, networks, Friends List, and all the pages you subscribe to are now publicly available information on Facebook. This means everyone on the web can see it; it is searchable. I'll post Zuckerberg's sentences on their own first, then follow up with the questions they raise in my mind. You can also watch the video below, the privacy part we transcribe is from 3:00 to 4:00. Zuckerberg: "When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was 'why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?' "And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time. "We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are. "A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they've built, doing a privacy change - doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner's mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it." Facebook's Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over

CES Coverage and a Few Finds This content from: Duct Tape Marketing As many of you may have noted by some posts here and on Twitter I attended the recent CES show in Las Vegas as a participant in the AMEX OPENForum booth. I gave presentations on social media and was joined by Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends, Guy Kawasaki of Alltop, Adam Ostrow , Barb Dybwad and Ben Parr of Mashable and Tony Hsieh of Zappos. I thoroughly enjoy working in a live environment with small business owners and loved getting a chance to work with and hear what this great group of speakers had to say. For those who could not attend the event, the presentations were recorded and will be available at OPENForum’s CES page. I walked the floor a bit, although it’s total sensory overload, and wanted to share two of my favorite finds. Bing Application overlays on Bing Maps. Melissa Powell, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft explains Bing Map Apps You have to download Silverlight, Microsoft’s Video tool, but it makes for a much richer experience than other mapping tools. Here’s the link to the Bing Maps beta. I also found a nice option for recording live interviews on the iPhone from Blue Microphones. The iPhone built in mic works pretty well up close but the Mikey has settings that make it much more sensitive when conducting an interview in the field. I use a Blue Snowball USB mic to do my podcasts and really love their design. Related Posts: Some Video Thoughts on Social Media Google Adds Wonderwheel Search Results Option Platforms Change, Marketing is the Same TweetDeck Adds Lists and LinkedIn Real Time is Big Time Like this post? Share it with others

Weekend Favs January Nine This content from: Duct Tape Marketing I’ve added a weekend post routine that I hope you enjoy. Each weekend I write a post that features 3-4 things I read during the week that I found interesting. Generally speaking it won’t involve much analysis and may range widely in topic. (Flickr image included here is also fav image of the week) Image credit: Tim Dobson Enjoy! Good stuff I ran across this week: TweetFunnel – great Twitter tool for managing tweets from a team environment. Allows for some control and approval Groupon – very interesting collective buying and discount program grouped by city. Interesting for a user and for small businesses wanting to spread the word through coupon like concept. 30 bloggers to watch in 2010 – Great list of blogs from ProBlogger. Some that I know well, some new to me – and no, I’m not on the list Related Posts: Weekend Favs October Thirty-One Weekend Favs December Nineteen Weekend Favs October Eleven Weekend Favs September Twenty Weedend Favs November Fourteen Like this post? Share it with others

Last year, my favorite work-related book was Identity & Control: How Social Formations Emerge (Harrison C. White). This year I will have to find time to sit back and read this book - along with Brokerage & Closure (same author). Neighbor Networks: Understanding the Power of Networks Research by Ronald S. Burt Ronald S. Burt is Hobart W. Williams Professor of Sociology and Strategy at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. A surprising finding on the value of colleague networks leads to an even more remarkable revelation of how networks truly work. Is it who you know rather than what you know that really matters? People hope that they will be rewarded for their ability and effort, but fear that rewards actually go to those with well-connected friends. That suspicion does not seem so far-fetched. Look around the office. Those who are doing well tend to be colleagues who know people who have an extensive network of contacts. Thus, it would be quite reasonable to assume that the success of a well-connected neighbor could somehow spill over to them. Just how much of an advantage a neighbor’s network provides is the subject of Neighbor Networks , a thoughtprovoking book by University of Chicago Booth School of Business professor Ronald S. Burt. The answer turned out to be not quite what Burt expected: There is no advantage at all to having well-connected friends. Although Burt found a strong correlation between the performance of managers and their affiliation with well-connected colleagues, the relationship disappears when the manager’s own network is held constant. That is, if two people have well-connected friends, then the person who is herself well-connected performs well and the person who does not have her own network of valuable contacts does not do well. Well-connected people have their own interests and need not associate with those who contribute nothing to the relationship and only seek to use them. What really matters for performance is a person’s own network and not that of her friends. This finding has strong implications for business policy and for understanding the process underlying the value of networks. Information and behavior are almost never observed directly and so are inferred from the way relations are structured. In particular, those who were accustomed to thinking of networks as pipes through which information travels between people might be disappointed. “We seem to have misunderstood how networks work,” Burt says. Capital Ideas: Selected Papers on Organizations & Markets - October 2009 - Neighbor Networks