MIT Sloan Management Review

A research report titled “The Use of Social Media in B2B Marketing and Branding: An Exploratory Study” studied tech companies in the U.S., Europe and Asia and found that several B2B companies were using social media strategically to position themselves as thought leaders, drive the market, and build key relationships with stakeholders. The researchers found that B2B firms in the U.S. were leaders in this area but found that adoption of these tools by B2B firms is “by no means universal.”

That ideas can go viral is now a given in corporate marketing. But new research suggests the term “viral” marketing does not describe well what happens in the market.

Sharad Goel, senior researcher at Microsoft Research, and fellow researchers wanted to see whether messages spread via social networks virally, “like the common cold, some sort of biological contagion. One person gets infected and their friend gets infected and a friend of their friend gets infected.”
That wasn’t what Goel found.

Image courtesy of Flickr user barbtrek

Romantic love, big data analytics and…your personality at work? There is a correlation. And understanding it could help you communicate better with colleagues, bosses and clients. And get ahead.

A biological anthropologist and professor at Rutgers University, Helen Fisher has studied romantic love for thirty years.

MIT Sloan Management Review is preparing to launch a redesigned version of our desktop/laptop website, coming in a few weeks. Watch our video for a sneak peek.

Experts agree: Business and technology are on the cusp of a management revolution, brought on by big data and data analytics. A healthy dose of skepticism — and intuition — are required arsenal.

What can companies do to help fill their data scientist gap? That was the topic at a recent conference hosted by the MIT Center for Digital Business.

The very largest corporations in the country are showing “the first signs of really embracing a range of social media tools” says a new study from the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth.

A cluttered email box can be as distracting as a cluttered office. One way to tame the email beast: “delete, delegate, respond, defer or do” each time you open a message.

When can a CEO’s Facebook post get his or her company in trouble? The SEC is investigating whether a Facebook post by Netflix CEO Reed Hastings violated its Fair Disclosure Regulation.

The Internet Revolution has so far not produced the kind of long-term productivity growth seen during the Industrial Revolution. Digital technology drove U.S. productivity growth above three percent annually only between 1996 and 2004. Since then, productivity has fallen to about 1.6 percent a year. General Electric argues that productivity growth will jump again as the industrial Internet emerges, connecting machines like turbines and jet engines to factories, and using analytics to make better decisions about maintenance and production.

Results of the fourth annual sustainability and innovation survey, conducted by MIT Sloan Management Review in collaboration with The Boston Consulting Group, are in.

According to researchers at Penn State, crowdsourcing works best when the right type of crowd is matched up with particular types of crowdsourcing projects.

Walmart and Google are at work building their own versions of an analytics platform to help answer big business questions.

Ernesto Sirolli, whose sustainable economic development projects are in place globally, says that the key to really helping communities is not to initiate, not to motivate, but to “become a servant of the local passion.”

A new corporate structure requires companies to look beyond the interests of shareholders and to consider the effect of decisions on employees, the environment and the surrounding community.

In the wake of the 2009 earthquake in L’Áquila, Italy, seven Italian scientists were convicted of manslaughter charges for not adequately communicating the potential threat.

Target is among many retailers using social media this year to attract more Black Friday shoppers.
Image courtesy of Target Facebook page.
In the U.S.,

Nate Silver, the New York Times' FiveThirtyEight blogger, used a database of polling statistics to accurately predict the winner of all 50 states on the night of the U.S. election.
Image courtesy of JD Lasica, Socialmedia.biz.

A study by FedEx and Ketchum found that 52% of respondents said social business was strengthening relationships with the general public; 51% said it was strengthening relationships with clients; and 40% said it was strengthening relationships with partners and suppliers.

Does large amounts of data equal large amounts of new knowledge? Sometimes it does. Applying analytics techniques to social network data reveals new things about how people make decisions, say two Facebook researchers. There are also advantages that come from the ability to more quickly find patterns in data than was previously possible, says a scientist at Microsoft Research. But the CEO of Personal.com predicts that many companies will find that data analysis is not a core skill.