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Previously, I shared my research on social media usage by the Inc. 500 and college admissions departments. Today, the third piece of that series, non-profit data, went live. Using a similar methodology to the first two studies, we surveyed the 200 largest charities in the US (as defined by Forbes magazine) about their familiarity with, usage of and attitude towards social media.

On Thursday, Nora and I spoke at DocTrain East in Lowell, MA about our research into social media adoption by the Inc. 500. In addition to giving me a chance to enjoy the Northeast's fall foliage, the audience at the conference had some great questions that I believe truly illustrate the diversity of knowledge levels about social media.

A few examples:

Yesterday, my research partner (Prof. Nora Barnes of the UMassD's Center for Marketing Research) and I were interviewed by a reporter from The Journal News, a newspaper in New York.

In July, my client and I started planning a conference called Finovate to take place in early October in New York. Any seasoned event planner will tell you that a 12-week time line is crazy. We did it anyway.

Last Wednesday, I was invited by Professor Rob Wiltbank of Willamette University's Atkinson Graduate School of Management to speak to his class of 75 first-year MBA students about entrepreneurial strategy and marketing.

My research partner, Prof. Nora Barnes of UMass Dartmouth, and I recently had our research findings about the social media monitoring habits of corporations published in the summer 2007 issue of the Journal of New Communications Research and featured on the homepage of Inc. magazine.

On a recent trip out to Boston, I managed to squeeze in an extra day and meet a few of the podcast interviewees from my 1,000 podcast interview project (Jenerous) in person for the first time.

Nora and I have just released the next major installment of our research into social media usage by organizations. Here's the intro:

It was always our intention to follow up on the high-level executive summary of our research into social media adoption by the Inc. 500 with several academic papers exploring the data in deeper detail. I'm please to announced that the first of those papers was recently published in the Journal of New Communications Research spring/summer 2007 issue.

One of the interesting things about being a consultant is that one's life lacks the structure that comes with things like performance reviews, bosses that pat you on the back, and what not. And every so often, that sort of thing is kind of nice.

A current client of mine wrote recently this about my services and so I thought I hide the humble pie for a few minutes and toot my own horn a little: