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Let me show you an image and ask you some questions. Do complete the questionnaire and all will be revealed later at the end of this post! ________________________________ Loading... ________________________________ You might have established that I am not a qualified automotive designer, researcher or marketer. But what do you do when you do want to know answers to questions like these? Enter Amazon ’s Mechanical Turk service. Their FAQs describe the service as follows: Amazon Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence. The Mechanical Turk service gives businesses access to a diverse, on-demand, scalable workforce and gives workers a selection of thousands of tasks to complete whenever it’s convenient. ...

The social Web analytics (SWA) field is buzzing, and I’m being contacted by companies in the sector that I didn’t know about when I published The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 on the 1st July. They’re keen to make the 2009 update, and at this rate that will have to come earlier than later next year. The 2008 eBook has already been downloaded over five thousands of times, which I’m sure is more reflective of the heat in the market than the quality of my prose! I define SWA as the application of search, indexing, semantic analysis and business intelligence technologies to the task of identifying, tracking, listening to and participating in the distributed conversations about a particular brand, product or issue, with emphasis on quantifying the trend in each conversation’s sentiment and influence. Here’s a quick look at some of the vendors reaching out to me, then rounding off with a bit of gratuitous data visualisation of the blogosphere (you know how I get my kicks). Techrigy Techrigy describes itself as enabling “organizations to know what’s being said about their brands, products and people across the social media eco-system. Techrigy’s SM2 solution enables organizations to monitor and analyze conversations, including sentiment, across blogs, social networks, wikis, online video and other user-generated content on the web. Ultimately, Techrigy helps organizations embrace social media, manage risk and identify market trends in real time.” ...

You’ve just graduated and you’re looking for your first job in public relations. Your first interview is approaching, and you want to make the second interview stage, of course! You visit the company’s website, polish your shoes and get to their offices half an hour too early :-) Now what? Can you talk about your approach to press releases? No. Can you discuss case studies? No. Can you describe the work environment in which you’ll thrive? Not articulately, without work experience. Should the interviewer really ask you any of these? No. So what goes on beyond the “Tell me about yourself” opener? How should you prepare? Here’s my list of questions you should be prepared for, and the kind of questions you should consider asking. Actually, I’ve just made my co-directors a nice cup of tea to persuade them to contribute to this list too, so thanks to Blaise and Jay . Questions you should prepare for “Tell me about yourself.” A gift. A lovely open question inviting you to present your best facets. If you can’t represent yourself in response to a question like this, then the interviewer will really wonder how you can represent their clients! ...

There’s a revolution coming in public relations… visualisation. [Courtesy Christopher Baker ] Picture the scene You hold an event to gather key stakeholders together, say a couple of dozen, and you want to maximise the positive networking such an event should catalyse. You’re also aware of a few potential personality clashes. But how many one-to-one relationships are you actually trying to manage here? It turns out, your relationship with each of them included, that there’s 300 relationships in that room! Wow, and compared to the big ‘World Wide Web’, or the even bigger ‘World’ come to that, this is a relatively insignificant number of people. Let’s go a step further. Say that there’s just five critical issues facing your industry, each of which has just three positions, say “for”, “against” and “no position”, then each stakeholder can have one of 243 combinations of points of view. To complete this picture, imagine now communicating the dynamic of this group in a report back to your boss say. How do you represent 300 relationships and 243 combinations of positions? Moreover, how do you portray the network evolving year-to-year, month-to-month, hour-by-hour? Welcome to the world of data visualisation. ...

The more stuff there is, the more difficult it is to find the right stuff at the right time. Guess that’s almost Google’s raison d’etre, but have they got it right? Is there a better or alternative search approach for you and your colleagues, and what would this mean for your marketing and search engine optimisation (SEO )? Google’s highly secretive approach to working out what might be more relevant to your search query is called PageRank . Fundamentally, their innovation counts a link to a website as a vote for that website’s content. And a link to your site from a higher PageRanked site is worth more than a link from a lowly site. This approach blew the competition away (remember Alta Vista?), and Microsoft and Yahoo! have been playing catchup since. But when was the last time you hyperlinked to a website? ...

“Broadcasting is really too important to be left to the broadcasters”. So said Tony Benn, Member of Parliament, to constituents in 1968. That same year, the Free Communications Group (FCG) was founded to demand “democratic control of all media”. Lets skip the next forty years’ analysis of broadcasting motives and actions that so preoccupied these politicians, broadcasters and journalists. In 2008, convergence has emerged as a force of nature, irrevocably changing “broadcasting” globally, and the FCG might just be smiling if it still existed. I put “broadcasting” in quote marks because I decided, as chair, to start last Thursday’s Convergence Conversation, titled “Is broadcasting dead or merely taking a break? ”, by seeking to define broadcasting. Not as trivial a task as it sounds, rather a critical task if the 65 conversationists who attended the event hosted by BT Media at BT Tower were going to reach a conclusion. ...

For those obsessed with tags - and what marketer wouldn’t be based on the fact that you want your brand to be a tag as often as possible, and to understand how your content and products are being tagged - check out Wordle . Bringing style to the tag cloud. Here’s one I ran for MarCom Professional just now (click on it or here to see the original), and then a description of Wordle in their own words. ...

Social Web Analytics (SWA) is the application of search, indexing, semantic analysis and business intelligence technologies to the task of identifying, tracking, listening to and participating in the distributed conversations about a particular brand, product or issue, with emphasis on quantifying the trend in each conversation’s sentiment and influence. The advent of SWA is a pivotal moment in the development of the marketing communications industry. It’s just over ten weeks since I posted about my intention to write an ebook on social Web analytics, and now it’s done. The ebook is hosted at www.socialwebanalytics.com , or you can simply click here to download it . ...

We’re just about to go through a complete renumbering of the Internet, and I think some marketing issues and opportunities will emerge along the way. The way the Internet works today means that just less than 4.3 billion different Internet devices can be addressed uniquely… an address being just that, the unique identifier stating where packets of information are sent from and where they should go. So just as my work address is Building 5, 50 Brook Green, London, W6 7BJ, UK - a unique address at which I’m sure to receive anything you send me - my current IP address at this Boston hotel is 209.190.164.35. I know that because I just visited www.whatismyip.com and they looked at the server I was connected to, grabbed the address and stuck it on their homepage for me. Try it. ...

Twingly launches today, “the next generation blog search engine”. I posted about joining the private beta a couple of months ago, and now everyone is welcome. Check it out. I quite like it. www.twingly.com . ...