You can link and download the copy free here

Enjoy!

The surprise is that the final decision here was to exempt firms from having to tag their narratives: eg the management discussions, executive compensation etc. From a researcher’s standpoint, that’s too bad, as this means less potential for precision searching. However the SEC says it may revisit this, and/or make this kind of tagging “optional”. We’re doing a full report on sources for searching both the EDGAR and XBRL tagged filings in the March and April issues of The Information Advisor.

He also mused that the Thomson Corporation, which really relies on the financial services industry as clients for its products and services must be feeling this downturn acutely.

This all makes me wonder what the impact of the recession and the collapse of the Wall Street financial services industries have on the information industry as a whole?

It’s a succinct and readable discussion not only of some of the possible downside of living so much of our lives on the Net, but also a nice mini lecture on some of the positive and negative impacts of technology on culture, going all the way back to Socrates’ classic concerns that writing would reduce all of our abilities to remember, and to devalue oral communications.

I’ve been thinking of a related issue for a little bit of time too–what does the Google mindset do to the serious researcher? Is it making us lazy, more passive, more willing to define research as tapping a few words into a search engine and accepting the top 10 results as our result?

Librarians and information professionals, academics, grad students (I hope) and truly savvy searchers know that good research is much more that this of course. But I know I’m as guilty as anyone out there when I turn to lean back in my desk chair and call up my home page Google to find an answer, source, or piece of information to a research question I’m pursuing.

The key to me it seems is to remember to be mindful that good research is (or at least begins) as an inner directed process. That is: taking the time to figure out what you really want to discover, why you want it, what you’re going to do with it, what is the most likely place to find it/who would know (including sources off the Net), and taking the steps and process you need to do the work to find the best sources, most efficiently. It’s not tapping words out into a search engine, or even worse, relying on an automated or “intelligent” solution that sends you articles, blog postings, news etc. that the system thinks or assumes you want, based on some algorithm, past search behaviour, etc.

Even in the age of the Net and Google, to truly perform research still means making an effort and taking an ACTIVE not passive approach to the process. It still means thinking.

It’s basically a book on why today good market research means paying attention and monitoring what’s going on in social media forms: eg. blogosphere, Web forums, social networking sites like Facebook etc., where to find relevant conversations, and using the best tools and strategies to find, filter, evaluate credibility of what you turn up, and make sense of it all. The idea is by attending to those near real-time, authentic discussions, you can better find out what your current customers like/don’t like about your firm and products; where to find potential new customers; get early warnings about trends that will impact your industry and so on.

One interesting thing about this book is that the publisher has also put together a hotlinked PDF version of the book too (not free though), that includes live links and onscreen video tutorials.

For more information on the PDF version, link here

Let me know if you like it, or if you have any questions (either before or after purchasing)

business research

market research

social media 

 Twitterment and TweetScan

Of course there’s more to a good research tool than the ability to conduct a search–the content has to be valuable and useful too…and there is a possibility that Twitter could be used for near real-time and archival business intelligence, and competitive intelligence as well as for identifying trends–maybe! That’s what I’m looking into now.

It’s OK in that you get fast results–and is obviously useful if you want to do a survey about social networking users or Facebook users in particular.., but you’re limited to a single question with 5 close ended responses, and there are very limited demographic slices available. While it’s not expensive by any means, it’s not free either (how quickly our expectations have been raised!). I did a Facebook poll asking 13-17 year olds how often they use the library to gather information or do research, and the results were predictably depressing (if you love libraries that is), as the top image below illustrates

All in all, I didn’t find it any better than the free Web based survey instrument I’ve used several times with some very good luck, Zoomerang.

However, Facebook allows all sorts of third party applications on its site too, and one simply called “Polls” by Pollection was at least as good as Facebook’s, if not better, and it was free.

I did a survey using “Polls” of my Facebook “friends” along with some other Facebook users on the question of whether Facebook could ever replace Google as the leading Web search engine (following up on Robert Scoble’s controversial posting:

“Why Mahalo, Techmeme and Facebook are going to kick Google’s butt in four years”

(And it turns out that few if any Facebook readers, at least, agree with Scoble’s prediction, at least according to the 107 voters who took my poll. The blue line with the most votes represents the answer “never”; the tan line represents the answer “possibly only for finding information about people”; the red line represents the answer “within two years” and the green “within five years”)

Another excellent site for learning of library related and research applications for FaceBook and other social networks is called Friends: Social Networking Sites For Engaged Library Services, run by Gerry McKiernan, Science and Technology Librarian Iowa State University in Ames Iowa. Search the site for “FaceBook” to find posts specifically related to just FaceBook.

I’ll be reporting on some specific market research applications for FaceBook shortly.

Well, while I’m here so to speak, I thought it might be worth mentioning a recent discovery: if you track comments on consumer generated video (eg YouTube, etc), I recently found out that an excellent way to do advanced keyword tracking of the title and description of a wide selection of consumer generated videos can be performed on the excellent audio video search site Blinkx



There are some particularly useful and valuable features too for creating really effective keyword feeds on Blinkx. For one, you can use an advanced search option to create more precise searches, using phrases, “all the words” and a “without the words” semi-Boolean search.

Furthermore, you can even limit the videos in your search to only the consumer generated ones if you so wish, which Blinkx calls the “Viral and Garage” videos. See the above screen shots for examples of how I set up an RSS feed on Blinkx to alert me to any “viral and garage” videos (which includes YouTube, as well as other popular consumer generated video sites) that contained the word “freegan”

In doing some research for a wrap up of trends in the market research report aggregator business, I came upon a fascinating new site, out of Lyon France, called ReportLinker. ReportLinker is a subscription based site that calls itself an “open source market research search engine.” It has created a crawler to find and index over a million market research reports from governmental agencies, trade associations, research centers, and others with open source reports, and made them fully searchable on its site. ReportLinker’s crawler even is customized to perform deep web searching on specified sites discovered by the firm as containing valuable market research studies.

The site is very new—it was just launched this past March—and I’m in the process of testing it for an article in the July issue of The Information Advisor. So far I’ve been impressed with ReportLinker’s advanced search capabilities, as well as the quality of many of its reports. There are some small problems too (including some translation issues), and the service is not cheap, but I think this is a very significant development for market researchers and is an example of new types of open source document aggregation sites we may see in the near future.

One issue that I wonder about is how some of the market research publishers will react when they discover that the reports that they are publishing for free are being resold by a profit making firm. ReportLinker’s CEO Ben Carpano told me that the fees subscribers pay cover use of its value added search engine’s functions, and not for the reports itself, and that so far the firm has not received any complaints, but will certainly honor any requests not to index reports.