Before you can pull insights from your data, you need data, but I'm hearing more concerns about data quality in social media analysis lately. Before, people asked about the traditional tradeoff in text queries: finding relevant content while excluding off-topic content. Lately, I'm hearing more about social data that's intentionally tainted. If you're looking for meaning in social media data, you may have to deal with adversaries.

Yes, and you've been playing without an opponent, which is, as you may have guessed, against the rules.
— "Anton Ego," Ratatouille

Ask a company with three initials as a name how many three-letter... Read the article

It's a statement that I hear often lately, as more traditional software vendors start to invest in cloud computing, that they're "late to the cloud". Of course many of those who are saying it are "pure play" SaaS vendors that are no doubt starting to feel some competitive pressure as more vendors start selling SaaS applications. I also hear it from colleagues and I suppose that it is a true statement of fact but to me there's a little more to the story than that. I think the bigger question might be whether being late to the cloud is "bad".

The general perception is that being early to market with a product gives the vendor first mover advantage and lets them capture market share and mind share before any competitors get into the game. There's certainly a lot of ... Read the article

I am sure that this may have just happened to everyone out there and on a rather regular basis, too! Specially, if you are a blogger! Just as I was putting together a blog post on the topic of the 40-Hour Work Week (- “The Magic of Sustainable Growth”), which I published a couple of days ago I happened to bump into another really interesting and worth while watching video clip that touched quite a bit on the very same topic that I covered on that article: work life balance, although, like I said in the past, I have grown to be more fond of the concept of Work Life Integration, instead. The video itself comes from the Ignite series (Ignite Philly, this time around) and it’s a rather thought-provoking 5 minute-long inspiring speech by Pam Selle that tries to share with each and everyone of us how whenever we reach the tipping point of stating “Get a life!” we may as well ... Read the article

Setting up a structure in an intranet can be a tricky business. Many organisations follow the organisation tree and decide to structure sites, folders, etc based on the established hierarchy of the company. Others let it grow organically. In most cases the results of the former approach is that it turns into a data coffin because the only people who think along the lines of the org chart is the HR department. The latter approach, while encouraging adoption, just turns into a mess where no-one can find anything. Instead of being a functioning society of information it turns into little pockets of activity which no-one outside of the people using it a) know...

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Quiz: A government agency wants to monitor social media in the course of performing its function. Is that an obvious use of public information, or further evidence of a dark conspiracy? Oh, good, I see lots of hands for both answers. Let's look at what's really going on here.

You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.
—Scott McNealy (1999)

When people hear about social media monitoring by a government agency—such as the recent news of FBI, DHS, and CIA programs—the usual response is outrage about the perceived violationof privacy. People are living their lives online, and they don't want the government listening in.

Superficially, that's completely understandable. Most of us don't want people eavesdropping on us, even if we aren't hiding anything and don't harbor conspiracy theories. We just like our conversations to be kept within the group we think we're talking to. The usual response makes intuitive sense, even if we realize that these online conversations are, technically, public.

(By the way, I'm assuming that we're talking about governments in free, democratic countries here. Events over the last few years have clearly... Read the article

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Having just returned from Lotusphere in Orlando, Florida and just about shaken off jet lag, I have started to reflect on what was certainly for me the best ever Lotusphere.

Apart from the glitz, glamour and energy around, I was surprised by the number of people I knew. Most of them I had never met in person, but I was familiar with because of their online presence in Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and...

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Businesses need to make smarter decisions, quicker. The smart business of the future will correlate and compute a mix of demographics, psychographics, web analytics, social analytics and business intelligence to create predictive scenarios that can be delivered in real time at the point of need; this will enable those with access to make better informed decisions that more accurately impact performance in a positive way. This creates vital brand differentiation in the market place and sustains real competitive advantage. ... Read the article

e been keeping tabs on the rise of social business in healthcare, McKinsey's 5th annual survey on the way organizations use social tools & technologies finds that they continue to seep into many organizations, transforming business processes and raising performance.

In fact, McKinsey reports 72% of 4,200 global execs said their companies now use social tools.  So with the rising level of adoption, it is no surprise Forrester Research predicts the Enterprise Social Software Market will become a $6.4 billion market in 2016.   Given the increased utilization and...

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