Mike MacLeod

Be a Citizen of Your Own Research Community

// December 29th, 2008 // Comments // Journal

Matt tells us five ways to use an online research community:

1. Get customers involved in your business
2. Innovate with your customers
3. Fins out how your customers interact
4. Learn the language your customers use
5. Find answers to questions you didn’t even know to ask.

Nowhere does he suggest you ask them ten pages of grid questions.

Most Popular Links on Twitter

// December 28th, 2008 // Comments // Journal

Twitturly is a service that tracks what URLs people are talking about on Twitter. The site displays the 100 most popular links within the past 24 hours.

Users can use TinyURL, Snipurl (snurl), or link directly to the final URL in their tweets. Each time a link is sent on Twitter, Twitturly takes a note of it. The more times a link is sent, the better it ranks. If it does well enough, it gets promoted to the home page. As the links increase, it gets displayed higher up the home page.

Find the Twitter User Down the Street

// December 28th, 2008 // Comments // Journal

TwellowHood provides a list of Twitter users within specific geographies.  Using a map-based platform, TwellowHood can provide a list of Twitter users within a specific state/province or municipality.  The service currently only lists users that indicate Canada or USA as their home.

There are currently 71 users listed as being from Scranton, PA.  Not surprisingly, a large percentage of those are employed by Dunder Mifflin.

On Demand Sports Stats from Twitter

// December 28th, 2008 // Comments // Journal

StatTweets is a service that allows Twitter users to pull statistics from sports service, StatSheet.com. When the #StatMe tag is sent to any one of StatTweets’ team accounts, a return tweet is sent with a variety of team stats.

When I sent the tweet @PennStateFB #StatMe, I got the following in return:

@MikeMacLeod PPG 40.2, YPG 452.2, TDs 60, Pass% 58.7, PassYdsPG 240.6, RushYdsPG 211.6, RecYdsPG 240.6, FGMade 20, FGAtt 24

StatTweets currently provides stats for the NBA, NFL, and college football and basketball.

There are also a number of options that can be included. By adding additional variables to the initial tweet, users can request rankings, splits, and future schedules. The stats for the previous or next opponent can also be requested.

Individual player stats are coming soon.

What are People Saying About You?

// December 21st, 2008 // Comments // Journal

Who is talking about your company or your brand? Or better yet, who is talking about you? And what are they saying?

Startup SamePoint plans to provide just that information by aggregating results from social networks, Twitter and blogs. It also attempts to hilight positive and negative discussion about a topic by identifying complimentary and critical words.

User-generated discussions are typically not indexed by major search engines, such as Google, as they do not reside on static pages. SamePoint converts these discussions into permalinks and organizes them within a tag cloud.

Displayed here are some results from a search on WPP, who has had a lot of press lately about their acquisition of TNS.

SamePoint has a long way to go in features and aesthetics. However, this type on social media data mining is on the verge of exploding.

More Layoffs – How Can I Help?

// December 19th, 2008 // Comments // Journal

I was really hoping that the first post of my relaunched site would be upbeat. Unfortunately that’s not the case. I wanted to get something up about this, even though I’m still under construction.

Earlier this week, Harris Interactive announced a layoff of 51 people. I believe this is their fourth round of layoffs this year.  That really sucks given the financial situation – not to mention that it’s a week before the holidays.

In addition to my friends and colleagues at Harris, I know of other really great people that have lost their jobs over the last couple of months.

So, please contact me and tell me how I can help. If you need a connection, or a reference, or if you just need to talk give me a shout.

And keep your chin up.  Things always work out for the best.