There are three major ideas on the brain as of late. Ideas might be a dime a dozen. When I spend several hours thinking about each though, they become worth more. I can’t and won’t talk about the first. (Nod.) The second revolves around frustration with the difference between ‘design strategy’ and ‘business strategy’. Specifically – there being too much rigor in the one, and too little in the other. There are issues with the heuristic-based way of thinking, and with the algorithmic. I’ve finally just understood enough about the problem to be able to articulate it, and now going through that rage-phase where the more I research and the more I learn, the more I become upset about the[…]

The Marketing Science conference was really quite inspiring and informative. The conference generally followed this formula: I spent much of time alternating between Rooms 2, 14, and 25 – so I can only comment on 1/12th of the conference. So I’m not representing the diversity of the conference. A lot was said. I’m saying what I saw. (Preemptive apology aside to all those who spoke that I’m ignorant of, okay?) Opinion mining and sentiment analysis brought out the most flood of insults. Though, image macros were sorely lacking, it really did seem like insults were being thrown. The presenter would put forward a model and test it. Most of them are engaged in creating predictive models. It’s what they do.[…]

I’ve been heads down with the team for awhile pounding out a study examining the value of a Facebook Fan. The results of that study were presented at Internet Week on Friday morning and can be downloaded here. I have hopes. I hope it throws some wind into the sails of people who are doing good social media marketing strategy. Absolution is frequently sought in simple numbers. The importance of activation strategy should be very clear in the charts and text of the paper. The second is for the lack of misquotes. It would be really nice if it wasn’t misquoted. The third is that I hope you’ll find it useful. In sum, take a look, and feed on back.

SOCIAL MEDIA DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY!!! Do you remember Morbo from Futurama? Yes. Well, I certainly do channel my inner Morbo periodically, especially around the INFORMS Marketing Science Conference time of year. This the fourth time I’ve tried writing this post – and not make it sound like I really am being Morbo. Here goes. The conference is next week and I’ll be in room 14 – soaking up all the papers at this curious nexus of marketing, social media, data mining, statistics, and modeling. Here’s a flavor: On Thursday, Sabris and Grewal are presenting: “A Blog-eat-Blog World: A Multivariate Poison Process Model of Competitive Performance Implications of User Generated Content”. And of course, I’ll suffer at 4:35 when[…]