Social Media Scholar

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.

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.

Yesterday, Nora and I were lucky enough to chat with Alan Levy on BlogTalkRadio about social media and our research.

A month or two back, Nora and I wrote an op-ed piece for the The Journal of New England Technology. After getting lost in the shuffle, it was finally published on April 6th.

Enjoy:

Hype is real: Fast-growth firms embrace social media

BusinessWeek recently featured Prof. Barnes and my research into social media usage among the Inc. 500 list of companies. Check out the pretty graph!