Unless you’ve been living under a rock (or lack a Gmail account), there’s no doubt you’ve heard of, tested or been genuinely confused by the launch of Google Buzz. One morning in February, I opened my Gmail account and there it was- 35 “buzz” notifications. “I must be popular”, I thought. After clicking into these messages, I realized I was not very popular, I was just inundating myself with more general useless knowledge about people I would have genuinely not heard from until my 20 year high school reunion. AWESOME.

Social media continues to evolve. As there is really no way to know how this will affect the future, we present our whimsical take on how social media may change life as we know it in 2010. 1. 2010 will be the Year of Privacy; No one likes it when parents crash the party As [...]

Like so many other Coloradans, I love to spend as much of the snowy months in the mountains as possible. How is a girl to decide when and where to go? The proof is in the pudding – snow or no snow will be the deciding factor in whether or not people flock to the [...]

This morning, our own Tim Lefkowicz was featured on Colorado Public Radio’s “Colorado Matters” program. LISTEN HERE for Tim and Ryan Warner’s interview on the rise of social media and what it means to market research, the companies that use it and the future of marketing.

Just as in the wonderful Dr. Seuss book “Horton Hears a Who!”, the world of social media may have started off perceived as a tiny speck of dust, whose participants only elephants with tremendous listening capabilities could hear. Turns out that the speck is actually a world of its own and is a growing source [...]

Traditional market research has a new information channel – social media. According to Forrester, by the end of 2009, more than 85% of US online consumers will be reading or viewing social content. Market research that does not take into account brand- or product-specific online user-generated content – blog posts and re-posts, product reviews, rich [...]

Two terms reside at the center of the ongoing quest for measurable metrics and estimating the return on marketing investment within the social media arena – reach and engagement. The former is a measurement relic of traditional advertising effectiveness such as TV or radio spots while the latter is the latest buzzword (pun intended) for [...]

Came across this post this morning from Jason Falls. It’s a collaborative piece predicting what may go down in social media next year. These are from some of the most active thought leaders in social media. Interesting to see the different perspectives and general impression that social media still has a ways to go in [...]

It’s Election Day, and some pundits are predicting a landslide win for Obama, while others say that McCain has a slim but very real path to victory. In other words, no one knows anything for sure. We decided to apply the same methodology we previously used to predict individual primaries, to gauge social media’s feelings [...]

The recent malaise brought about by this month’s collapse of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and worsening economic conditions have brought into sharp relief the budgeting challenges marketers face in 2009 and beyond. Despite the economic doom and gloom, understanding who your customers and potential customers are and what they are saying about your company, [...]