Gee, I’ve been so interested in talking about all the other books I like so much, I forgot to blog the fact that last month my own book, The Art of Strategic Listening: Finding Market Intelligence through Blogs and Other Social Media was published by Paramount Books.

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 

As part of my time experimenting with what kinds of business research and market research can be effectively conducted on Facebook, I’ve experimented a bit with the Facebook Polls application.

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”)

I’m in the process of looking into how business researchers can best use FaceBook for various market research applications (and there are several–I’ll be reporting on these in the October issue of The Information Advisor), but in the meantime I did come across one site that looks particularly useful for identifying specifically library/library research applications. The site is called iLibrarian, and you can find the listing,which is a 3 part series, titled “Top 10 Facebook Applications for Librarians” .

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.

If you think the most common language in the blogosphere is English– think again.

At least according to Technorati, in its April State of the Live Web report, the language with the most frequent blog posts in Japanese, with 37%, followed by English with 36% and then Chinese at 8%.

In doing some research on how business researchers can effectively find and understand blogs in non-English language (for the August issue of The Information Advisor, and my forthcoming book, The Art of Strategic Listening, Paramount Market Press 2007), I had an extremely enlightening email interview with Michael Darragh, the digital strategist for China and Asia Pacific for Ogilvy PR Worldwide who is based in Shanghai. Darragh generously and insightfully answered several questions I emailed him about the state of Non-English blogging, particularly in China and other Asian countries at detail. His responses, too long to be published in full in these formats, are too valuable to let go waste, so I am posting them here on this blog.

I received an instant education from Mr. Darragh—read through his responses and I know you will as well.

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