Sunday, March 07, 2010

Turning Social into Cash

Almost two years ago I had a talk to a friend of mine about online communities and mechanisms that can be used to analyze relationships between them and their preferences to products and services. The principal idea was based on the fact that social communities consist of people who has common preferences, points of view on some facts, etc. This gives a field for market analysts how to find out the most effective advertisement for the target audience.

Today I looked through some research papers searching for a comprehensive description of sales opportunity estimation. I found a site of Claudia Perlich, a former IBM researcher at Watson Research Center, who has become a chief researcher at Media6Degrees recently. The company makes a bridge between social networks with tons of private information and ads providers. The company holds a number of patents allowing them to make decisions without direct access to user data.

Didn’t you know what social networks are needed for?

http://www.us-venture-partners.us/usvp/news/releases/20090626.pdf

2 comments:

Claudia Perlich said...

Hi Nick,

This is Claudia. Thanks for your interest in my work - I am flattered and would love to know more about you. BTW: As you may know - it was also me who developed and did the work for IBM that was covered in the TechReview article.

Regards,

Claudia

Nick said...

Hi Claudia,

Nice to meet you here.

My name is Nickolay Medin, I'm a system architect at Materialise where I'm engaged in MRP system redesign and development.

I graduated from the Institute of Applied System Analysis in 2005.

I'm also interested in the AI, machine learning, operations research, etc.

I read the article in MIT review with a great interest since applications of math in the area of marketing and organization structure optimization are new and not widely used before. Currently I'm thinking over the conditions when such an approach can be adapted to the needs of a medium sized company, whether it is reasonable from the point of view of its business value.

Once again thank you for your feed back, I'm glad to meet you here.

You can contact me using email nmedin[at]gmail.com