links for 2009-10-28

CLIP: "Companies and executives are finally beginning to really jump on the social media bandwagon, and that’s fantastic. However, for social media to fully work (for everyone), businesses and brands need to be able to evaluate the impact their social media use is having, both positive and negative. Measuring social media ROI isn’t impossible, but it can be difficult because many of the pieces that need to be evaluated are difficult to track. This guide is designed to help you track down those pieces and determine the ROI you’re getting on social media."

CLIP: "A new study from Forrester has found that a third of market researchers are using or planning to use online communities in the next 12 months – but a similar number have never even heard of them.

Forrester’s study, written by Tamara Barber, found growing experimentation with online communities, but warned that most buyers need service, support and encouragement, not just software.

Forrester surveyed 78 researchers and interviewed nine vendor companies, including Communispace, Vision Critical, Vovici, Globalpark and MarketTools.

“Researchers want to partner with trusted providers that can bring a flexible offering, methodological expertise, a superior service to the table,” writes Barber. “Given the number of new entrants into the MROC vendor space, expect to see more choices in service model options, better integration of community research with quantitative projects, and focus on insights from clientside market researchers.”

More on China Phones – some of them look quite neat – can understand appeal for them!!

Aparna Ray is writing a great series of posts on the future of ICTs for development at Global Voices Online. Here's a clip from her post on Mobile phone empowerment – "Apart from imparting business/market information, the impact of the cell phones can be felt when increasing cell phone usage helps to improve distribution efficiency and reduction in search-of-information costs as well as tackling price dispersions across local markets, as was seen in this study conducted in Niger.

In all of this, the end-consumer is also a beneficiary. We get the benefit of convenience–from the basic facility of having an on-call service provider to ordering the fresh catch of the day from the fish-monger on his mobile, right up to using the virtual marketplace on our cell phones to buy fresh produce directly from the local farmer–in addition to enjoying competitively priced goods and products and services in the long run."

Am looking at the Chinese Phone Market – going to bookmark a few things here. CLIP:
"I think chinese mobiles are worth buying as they are cheap and more over i dont think that they would have problmes that much soon and also if a $100 handset stops working after 7-8 month i think it would be okay."

How best to educate the design thinkers and innovators of the future? BusinessWeek's list features promising programs from design and business schools from around the world