I enjoyed participating in a panel tonight on "Market Research for Entrepreneurs", as part of the Founder Institute’s first series of New York programming.  The other speakers were Nicholas Butterworth, President & CEO, Diversion Media; and Steven Haines, President, Sequent Learning Networks.  
 
My slide deck is below; I’d love to get your feedback.
Free Market Research Read More...

Business.com is running a survey about how businesses are using social media. Survey participants get early access to the results to help benchmark social media efforts and are entered into a $2,000 drawing.
Take the survey
(Disclosure: I’m the Sales & Marketing Community Manager for Work.com, Business.com’s sister site.)

Shocking, but true.
Vickie Elmer at WashingtonPost.com reports on a new Stanford University study which indicates that highly connected individuals may be less able to make the right ethical choices in the workplace. Apparently their well-connectedness makes them overconfident that they know what their colleagues’ thinking will be when it comes to ethical decisions. The Read More...

I enjoyed tonight’s talk by Peter Thiel at NYC Junto, on “How New Technologies Thwart Government and Promote Freedom”. Junto is a libertarian-focused discussion group organized by Victor Niederhoffer. I’ve been following Peter’s writing for a while, since we overlap directly in our interests in investing and in online networks. Peter is President of Clarium Read More...

I’ve recently talked with a few people about ‘social commerce‘—the idea that our online business activities will both reflect and in part be driven by our personal social network. My coauthor Scott Allen recently did a market research study on “Transactional Trust in Social Commerce”, which provides some context on this.
For example, Read More...

There’s a great write-up of danah boyd in Financial Times, which labels her the high priestess of internet friendship. I thought they did a great job, with the exception of not respecting her preference of not capitalizing her name.
In addition to profiling danah, the article also chronicles the development of Friendster and MySpace, and others, Read More...

“People who access the Internet for what have become routine functions — sending emails, writing blogs, and posting photos and information about themselves on social networking sites — do not realize how much of their personal privacy they put at risk, according to Wharton faculty and legal experts. Nor, they add, have the courts fully Read More...

Via Wharton’s newsletter:
It’s always been assumed that when employees leave their companies to join other ones that all their knowledge and experience leave with them. But new research suggests that, at least in the high-tech field, firms can wind up gaining access to the knowledge being generated at their former colleague’s new place. The results Read More...

I’ll be speaking in London next week and hope that you will join us:
Straight from the Horse’s Mouth:
How Professional Investors Elicit Maximum Information in Minimum Time from Industry Sources

Sponsored by the Harvard Business School Club of London
Thursday, September 7, 6:30pm
Offices of McKinsey & Co., 1 Jermyn Street near Piccadilly Circus, London
RSVP and prepayment: http://www.hbsa.org.uk/cgi/hbs?do=index&page=event&event=222

Cost: £10.00
“Interviewing Read More...

From Harvard Business School Working Knowledge:
The researchers identified four successful tactics for obtaining stretchwork that were common to both groups:
* Differentiate competence. Anyone hoping to advance must distinguish his or her performance on the job. This is particularly true, however, for contract workers—because they are paid for each short-term job, their Read More...