The event will explore the impact that social media has on culture, business communications and society at large.

Among the topics:

• Mining Social Media for Consumer Insight
• Dashboards and Metrics
• Topical Influencers: Who Are They and How Do We Reach Them?
• Creating Social Utilities That People Will Actually Use

More at http://socialmediaweek.org/

Check out some examples:

• Clay Johnston on Total-Impact
• Chad Christine on Total-Impact

It’s fun seeing the various metrics. Chad, for example, has work cited on Wikipedia, and read on Mendeley:

This 2011 entry from Clay’s report doesn’t appear to have any cites from PubMed, but shows interest and activity from a variety of sources, including the PLoS website, CrossRef, CiteYouLike, and Mendeley. Some of his papers have even been discussed on Facebook!

Read more:

• Total-Impact
• Total-Impact: About

The post on Technorati reads:

The Spammers are ingenious. If email administrators block a few words that are common spam words, they send spam as an image instead of text. If administrators block certain domains known for spam, they spoof or hack new domains to send from. Turns out, HIV acts in a similar fashion as it tries to avoid the human immune system.

Perl‘s my language of choice. Perl’s a dynamic computer language, similar to Python or Ruby. There’s very little that you can do in Perl that other languages can’t do as well, but it has one huge killer feature—CPAN, a community-curated archive of tens of thousands of bits of pre-written open source code libraries. Without CPAN, Perl is just another language. With CPAN, Perl is a power tool that lets you deliver results lickety-split.

Perl developer chromatic breaks down the distinction between features and benefits when marketing Perl:

“The high point of the book so far—a technique I’ve used on three projects in the past week to great results—is to distinguish between technical features and customer benefits. In other words, while experienced Perl masters might say “Perl 5 is great because you have access to the CPAN”, that’s a feature. The benefit is that “80% of most programs has already been written”…While the as-yet unlaunched value analysis site a couple of us are launching for small investors has the technical feature “updates analysis after market close every day”, the benefit to customers is “gives you the best advice possible whenever you check it”.…My experience so far has been that the exercise of comparing features to benefits takes some time, but yields great results. Try it yourself; it’s easy. Grab a piece of paper and make two lists. On the left side, write all of the distinct technical features you consider worth mentioning. When you finish, write on the right side a benefit from the customer or user point of view corresponding to that technical feature. Sometimes there’s overlap, and that’s okay.” [via]

Read more:

• Promoting Perl’s Features versus Benefits (Modern Perl Books)

Check this out … looks really interesting!

Here’s the description from the site:

Once a project is approved to participate [to use the Wizard], we send invitation e-mails to all the project members. The Wizard is an online survey that takes about 30 minutes. Each individual involved in the project should take the survey independently. The more project members who take the survey, the better the data!

And yes – it’s free!

At the end of the survey each participant can see a personalized individual report that contains feedback based on their answers and our research. This report is available immediately, and summarizes both the strong points and the issues at risk for the target collaboration.

Expert social proof

Celebrity social proof

Individual user feedback social proof

Aggregate popularity social proof

Friends’ recommendation social proof

Read more:

• “Social Proof Is The New Marketing” (TechCrunch)
• “Social proof” (Wikipedia)

(The 66%) say that connections with family members and friends (both new and old) are a primary consideration in their adoption of social media tools. Roughly two thirds of social media users say that staying in touch with current friends and family members is a major reason they use these sites, while half say that connecting with old friends they’ve lost touch with is a major reason behind their use of these technologies.

Other factors play a much smaller role: 14% of users say that connecting around a shared hobby or interest is a major reason they use social media and 9% say that making new friends is equally important. Reading comments by public figures and finding potential romantic partners are cited as major factors by just 5% and 3% of social media users, respectively.

See the full report for more details, including differences among age and ethnic groups when it comes to what they value most in social media.

Class Differences

“How Online Innovators Are Disrupting Education” is the title of an interesting article published on the HBR blog that describes the rise of online learning in the U.S.

In fact, Education Department data from last year reported that ”students in online conditions performed modestly better, on average, than those learning the same material through traditional face-to-face instruction.”

Other report findings include:

This is sort of off-topic, but I thought worth sharing.

A while ago, someone forwarded this article to me and I just re-read it. Interesting stuff – and some food for thought for how we work and deal with things during the day.

On the work front — the research suggests scheduling meetings in the morning versus late afternoon and not to be low on blood sugar may be the best plan for a good productive meeting.  I guess bringing those cookies to meetings could have a multi-pronged effect.  People love cookies and will be more apt to come to your meeting in the first place if there is food, and the glucose hit may help folks make better decisions.

On a  more personal note, I now know that the “low blood sugar excuse” that I give my kids and husband when I’m cranky has some science behind it.  At the end of a long day, I know to make sure I’m fueled up before the barrage of small decisions thrown at me by the kids when they get home.

No matter how big or small the decisions are during the day, if they all deplete one’s will power, I’ll be thinking a bit more about the advice at the end of this article:  “… people with the best self-control are the ones who structure their lives so as to conserve willpower. They don’t schedule endless back-to-back meetings. They avoid temptations like all-you-can-eat buffets, and they establish habits that eliminate the mental effort of making choices. Instead of deciding every morning whether or not to force themselves to exercise, they set up regular appointments to work out with a friend. Instead of counting on willpower to remain robust all day, they conserve it so that it’s available for emergencies and important decisions. “

• Team Science Toolkit
• 4researchers.org | Practical Advice from Working Researchers