Michelle Meyer writes in defence of the Facebook/Cornell study on people's response to the emotional tenor of their Facebook feeds. She argues the manipulation of individuals' news feeds wasn't much beyond the everyday experience of Facebook and, yes, a little ethical review and participant briefing might have been nice but let's not let over-sensitivity get in the way of corporations doing what, apparently, they must.
via Ed Yong
Showing posts with label Tracking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tracking. Show all posts
25 July 2014
20 September 2010
06 September 2010
Commercial analysis of social networks
The Economist describes how patterns of interaction across networks are analysed by companies seeking to find out who are the influencers within networks, i.e. who needs to be retained as a customer, in order to retain their cohort:
"People at the top of the office or social pecking order often receive quick callbacks, do not worry about calling other people late at night and tend to get more calls at times when social events are most often organised, such as Friday afternoons."
It sounds distasteful. The Economist goes on to explain the benefits: similar analyses can be used to track influencers within organisations, both corporate and criminal (it's claimed that network analysis resulted in the capture of Sadam Hussein) and, more speculatively, within unfamiliar cultures:
"... according to Kathleen Carley of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. She is developing a societal model of Sudan with a team of about 40 researchers. Foreign aid workers and diplomats frequently stumble in Sudan because they fail to work out which tribal and political leaders they should work with, and how."
Maybe less distasteful, if it's reliable. But one can't help wondering about the potential for false positives.
[via Mindhacks]
"People at the top of the office or social pecking order often receive quick callbacks, do not worry about calling other people late at night and tend to get more calls at times when social events are most often organised, such as Friday afternoons."
It sounds distasteful. The Economist goes on to explain the benefits: similar analyses can be used to track influencers within organisations, both corporate and criminal (it's claimed that network analysis resulted in the capture of Sadam Hussein) and, more speculatively, within unfamiliar cultures:
"... according to Kathleen Carley of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. She is developing a societal model of Sudan with a team of about 40 researchers. Foreign aid workers and diplomats frequently stumble in Sudan because they fail to work out which tribal and political leaders they should work with, and how."
Maybe less distasteful, if it's reliable. But one can't help wondering about the potential for false positives.
[via Mindhacks]
04 November 2008
De-bunking neuromarketing
Mindhacks has picked up a review in the Washington Post of Martin Lindstrom's popular book on neuromarketing, Buy-ology. Both the WP review and Mindhacks point out that, interesting as mapping the brain's responses to certain stimuli may be (including finding, apparently, that iconic brands such as Harley Davidson elicit similar patterns of neural activity to religious imagery), neuromarketing has limited explanatory power for brand presentation or development. Both suggest it might be more interesting to study why some marketing professionals are so susceptible to neuromarketing. Mindhacks cites two studies showing that bogus or irrelevant images of brain scans increase the credibility of scientific articles to non-scientists. So I guess there lies the explanation.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
