The Oscars are one brand that still controls its equity from the top down: Winners are chosen by the Academy. But outside of the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, winners are decided by thousands of movie buffs posting their opinions online.

Reactions to the 2010 Super Bowl ads were reported early and often: The tally of mad, mid-game tweets let us know what the digital mavens were thinking. But what about the rest of the country? The folks who prefer to enjoy their social media on work computers in the days after?

Why is it that social-media listening, widely acknowledged to hold great value for marketers, is still not completely embraced by market researchers? Jack Neff writes compellingly on the subject recently in Advertising Age.

Networked Insights is moving into the New Year, literally: we’re packing up our desks, computers, and open-source chess game. Unlike a lot of businesses that went under or downsized this year, we’re happily spending the early part of New Year’s Eve unpacking boxes and setting up shop in a bigger and better space.
Our new office [...]

Questus founding partner and research head Jeff Rosenblum unveiled a new study at the iMedia Breakthrough Summit in October.  How Social Media Users Think: The Hope Beyond the Hype explores the potential for building brands in social media. I was interviewed extensively for a companion video that is billed as an open forum on the [...]

The nimble behemoth lumbers forward. It is only a matter of time before Google owns the brand-monitoring space. Radian6, Scout Labs, Techrigy, are probably looking over their shoulders as they compete for business among the PR firms scrambling to keep tabs on the social web.
Google introduced Alerts in 2004 and became the first true technology solution [...]