I’m writing this from 30,000 feet as I fly back from Chicago to SF, it took nearly 2 hours to clean out my inbox, and that’s not even my personal one.

Thank you for all the wonderful suggestions and kudos for hitting my one year mark, without a doubt the demand for social computing research, inquiry (client calls) and vendor briefings is increasing.

If you can’t tell, we’re working overtime to make sure our clients are happy and we’re completing research. Frankly, I’m a bit behind on where I need to be, and am putting in extra hours to get caught up on the wave report, take excellent care of my clients (I really love helping folks), being part of the conversation, and watching –and commenting on the industry.

You’ve probaly noticed a decrease in my blogging and believe me, I’m learning so much and have a lot to share, but things are getting pretty busy, I’m getting close to the burn out stage.

Some vendors are getting impatient with me as my briefings dates are getting pushed back to Nov, travel has been heavy, and I go to Japan, then Dallas this month for Forrester’s Consumer Forum.

So, to be upfront, I want the market to know I’m not the only guy, in fact, Forrester takes this space very seriously, (learn about our first team meetup), and with the recent acquisition of Jupiter Research, and I’d like to introduce to our other analysts focused on this space:

Josh Bernoff: Do I really need to introduce him? He’s one of my favorite people at Forrester, and we’ve become friends, if you’re looking for the strategic view, he’s the guy, and has a long background in media. Like me, Josh serves Interactive Marketing professionals

David Card: Hailing from Jupiter, David has a strong background in media, and when we had drinks a few weeks ago, it was quickly apparent he’s very quick and will speak his mind –as an analyst should.

Laura Ramos: With a strong focus on B2B Marketing, Laura gets how companies (esp tech) need to approaching social computing in a strategic web, we’ve done a few projects together, and have more to come.

Emily Riley: The reports I was the most impressed with from Jupiter were Emily’s, she and I have covered quite a few of the same topics but our insight and recommendations were very similar.

Steven Noble (APAC): Having recently joined the Forrester team, Steven is in Australia and covers the Asia Pacific space, covering marketing, and has a strong focus on social computing. Also like me, he serves the Interactive Marketing professionals

Oliver Young: Is one of the top minds when it comes to Enterprise 2.0, and we frequently talk in the Foster City office. He’s a strong analytical mind, and can spot weaknesses quickly, if you’ve enterprise focused products, talk to him esp if your a Vendor Strategy Professional.

Rob Koplowitz: Also covers the Enterprise 2.0 space, and has a strong background in serving the Information & Knowledge Management professionals

Gil Yehuda: Also new to Forrester, Gil has impressed me with his passion for enterprise 2.0 and how it impacts internall communications. He practices what he preaches and coordinates many of our internal discussions on the topic of social computing. Gil serves Information and Knowledge Management professional.

Mary Beth Kemp (EMEA): Her coverage succint, her wit and charm impressive, Mary Beth has a strong focus on serving Marketing Leadership professionals.

Rebecca Jennings (EMEA): Has done quite a bit of social computing research from a European aspect –and has quite the cool accent. She serves the Interactive Marketing professionals

Nate Elliott (EMEA): Although I’ve never met Nate, we chatter on Yammer, Twitter, and the occasional email. He’s an expert at marketing and advertising, and has a strong nose for social media, Nate’s based in Germany as I last recall.

Suresh Vittal: Although he serves the direct marketer, Suresh is now picking up the brand monitoring space, which would of course include companies that are measuring, monitoring, and reporting on social media.

Barry Parr: When I have questions about media, I’ll turn to bay area local Barry, as a former media executive, Barry knows how media –and technology are intersecting. I hear he also cooks an award winning cheesecake.

Mike Gualtieri: Mike and I started Forrester at the same time, and as an analyst serving the Application Development & Program Management professional, he’s published research on Software, Mashups, SOA, and website infrastructure. I remember our white board talks on AJAX when we were in training, I’d turn to him first if I had questions on the technology side of the space.

Many other analysts: I’ve noticed that the social computing topic is crossing over to other analysts that cover other roles, most recently, I was impressed with Sarah Rotman Epps report on the intersection of social media and traditional media companies. It doesn’t stop with her, there are over 300 reports with the keyword social computing, and over 600 reports with the keywords web 2.0.

There’s a ton of other folks that I didn’t mention, such as researchers, consultants, and our management team, inquiry team, briefing team, marketing, pr, and of course helpdesk!

Also, did you know our CEO George Colony is blogging? He’s on Twitter too, and as I’ve mentioned before, we’ve hired a community manager, John Cass, find him on Twitter.

Hmm who did I miss? I’m sure a quite a few others.

Some have commented to me that I link a lot to Forrester (I recently learned that I’m the fourth top referrer to Forrester.com) , but I link to many other firms too, and point to any research that’s relevant in my space.

Key takeaways: I’m doing all that I can to serve the industry, but I’m just one guy, that’s having a hard time scaling. While I may be very visible, Forrester takes this space seriously and has the all-star team that’s watching this space, get to know us!

Above Photo (Click to view notes): The combined Forrester and Jupiter Social Marketing and Social Computing Research teams (missing: Christine Overby, Nate Elliott, Tom Grant, Laura Ramos, Peter Burris, Steven Noble, Rebecca Jennings, Lisa Bradner, and Tom Cummings.)

The last time I participated in an acquisition I was part of the company that was getting bought, it was exciting –yet very scary.

The last two days, I’ve been relatively quiet online (despite my trying to start some rumors on twitter) as Jupiter and Forrester research teams met for the first time at Cambridge HQ. We had folks travel from Amsterdam, Paris, NY, Silicon Valley, as well as teleconferenced in from London and dial in from Silicon Valley.

Although this is just the start of a long road, this is significant in a few ways: 1) This is perhaps one of the largest research teams assembled at an analyst firm that’s primarily focused on the impacts of social computing to marketers. Although there are 16 analyst that we’ve identified as covering some aspect of the social space, not all focus on it full time as I do. 2) This was the first group of many within Forrester to integrate and ‘mashup’. It only seems fitting that a group focuses on ’social’ would be the first to try. 3) The combined brain power yielded some interesting insights to where this market is currently and where it’s headed, while size doesn’t always indicate quality, with this larger team we can dig deeper into very specific areas of social media.

Many of us are going to blog our perspectives (I’ll link to them below) from both Forrester and Jupiter sides, so I’m just going to speak for myself. The key takeaway for is that we’re more alike than apart. While the Jupiter analysts would often approach the problem at a different angle than we were used to thinking about, almost always we would end in ‘head noding’ when it came to insights, findings, and recommendations. It was good to get to know Emily Riley, Michael Greene, David Card, Barry Parr, (Nate Elliott wasn’t able to join us) as well as some fellow Forrester colleagues I don’t get to see that often. I was particularly glad to meet Emily Riley, who’s research on communities, influence, and marketing were both impressive –yet strangely familiar in insights (and confirmation) as our own findings.

Aside from the fact that we got to know each other and were able to share a common bond for analyzing the same area, we were able to focus in on future research topics, take inventory of our areas of coverage, and socialize the POST process, Technographics, and learn about each research culture.

Now back to my story about getting acquired, it was at the tail of the dot bomb in Santa Clara, right in the heart of Silicon Valley, I was a junior web professional, working on the UI for the enterprise intranet at Exodus Communications, the company was falling at a rapid pace after a meteoric climb. We were snatched up by British Cable and Wireless, and spent the next few months integrating and filtering people, tying together systems, and eventually becoming one entity that is now still in existence. I remember so many questions being unanswered, uncertainty and my boss John Perera constantly telling me to ‘embrace change, embrace change’.

Recently, I’ve spoken with a few clients who’d expressed concern about a few of our very smart analysts moving on, and I asked them what could I do to reassure them that we’re still heavily focused on giving them the same insights as before, and we agreed that we should transparently blog about the two new teams coming together, so I’m making it a point to do just that.

To be clear, this is just the start, and we’re all going to ‘embrace change’, as we’ve identified many areas that we’ll have to work on as a team, there is some overlap of coverage, we all have individual approaches to the same problems, and the mixing of any two cultures will take time to settle. The key that we were able to come together, stand on common ground, and agree to move forward to deliver quality research that will help our clients make the right decisions. Personally, I’m reinvigorated and looking forward to what comes next.

Updates:
I’ll be linking to my colleagues perspectives as they appear. It’s refreshing to hear their honest takes on the last two days.

Aug 29: Emily Riley writes she’s Going Corporate, and observes my silicon valley lens.

Aug 29: David Card changes colors by Going Green, Embracing the Groundswell, etc, First Take, he notices the process too. Yup, but like good jazz, structured chord changes allows for amazing improv solos. The first step is to learn those chord progressions.

Aug 29: Blend master Josh Bernoff declares “It blends”

It was good we all met, I just got a project come in the day after the meeting that needs more than my expertise, I sent an email to David with details.

Below are some picture from the last two days which include some rare pictures of the research team at 400 Technology Square.

Many of these pics were taken by Zach Hofer-Shall, who uploaded to our internal wiki, which I then snagged and put on Flickr with attribution.

Left Image: Here’s some sample data that is derived from NACTAS 2007 North American Social Technographic Online Survey.

Although I primarily rely on the proven Forrester Research methodology, when it makes sense, I tap into my network to discuss concepts and get examples. While only a part of methodology is evident to the public (what you see on this blog, or on twitter) this post will make it crystal clear what works –and what doesn’t.

Forrester methodology
For all of my reports, I follow the research methodology that many other analysts have used before me for the past 25 years. This tested process may involve analyzing Forrester’s large technographic and consumer data banks, work with our data research team, conduct interviews, surveys, talk with clients (buyers), talk with vendors (sellers) discuss with fellow analysts, venture capitalists, and research online –it’s a thorough way to see the market holistically.

A social computing analyst uses social technologies
As an analyst that covers Social Computing for the Interactive Marketer, it’s natural to use the very tools that I’m researching –in fact, it was one of the factors in how I earned the role. Using the tools is a great way to learn what works and what doesn’t, a key step before I make recommendations to clients. Also, this blog serves as a supplamant to clients as well as myself, for example I’m known for building many “industry index” lists in the space, it helps me to keep track of who’s doing what, and since I screen each submission, the signal to noise ratio is higher than a wiki.

In tune with my market: the Interactive Marketer
At Forrester, we’re client centric, and as such, I serve the Interactive Marketer. Recently, we ran a survey of my blog readers, and found out that the largest group of my blog readers (14k subscribed) are interactive marketers or work at an interactive agency. Also having a twitter network of 10k followers is an amazing resource. Fortunately, this audience is a match to the role that I serve, making the following two uses cases possible:

When crowdsourcing makes sense
These tools make it easy to flesh out concepts and find examples –but deeper research is always required, here’s some examples where it does work:

Use Case 1: Fleshing out concepts
I’ve found that asking questions from my blog and from my Twitter account are helpful for certain information gathering, but not for other needs. For example, I used a discussion on my blog and twitter from social media experts to vet a definition for the term “Online Community”, given this is the crowd of experts on this topic (and they are very willing to collaborate), this was an appropriate way to use this. I then scrubbed the answers, and was able to extrapolate the general key ideas (crowd sourcing is often rough on the edges) and come to agreement with my editor. In the endnotes of the report Online Community Best Practices we referenced the crowdsourcing effort. Please note in that report Online Community Best Practices, I interviewed 17 companies, and relied ton Technographic data, a standard procedure in report methodology –less than 5% of the report was crowdsourced

Use Case 2: Finding case studies and examples
Also, Forrester reports are chockfull of examples of companies doing it right –and wrong. Given my network is tuned into what’s happening with brands and social media, I can easily get an answer if I don’t know it. It’s a direct example of using a social computer (and since my coverage is on social computing) this is a good fit. Of course, finding the examples is just the start, often, I need to understand the case study, and that often involves a typical research phone interview.

For both of the above use cases. additional follow-ups and analysis are required.

Traditional methodologies are core
Asking my blog readers and twitter followers to provide broad responses that represent mainstream North America, Europe, or Asia isn’t effective. Fortunately, Forrester has a great deal of Technographic data (we’ve large data teams) at my disposal around user behaviors and consumer preferences –I don’t need to crowd source crowd source to get this, and rely on this for my data collection. I’m currently focused on a Forrester Wave of the online community platforms, this particular methodology does not call for any social media use –I’m using a tried and true methodology, learn more about it on the Forrester site.

Sometimes, I engage in discussion on twitter that appeals to me personally: movies, music, events, art, sports, and occasionally politics. Being the curious individual I am, I’ve been known (before Forrester) to ask questions of my network and get responses –if’s a fascinating use of social media. Although some may not see the separation, it’s important to note that these discussions often have nothing to do with my role as an analyst.

Summary:
I primarily rely on Forrester’s data, process, and methodologies that have been tested and refined over the last 25 years. This includes input from our large survey data, interviews, client meetings, vendor briefings, and talking with fellow analysis. When it makes sense, I can rely on my large network of Interactive Marketers and Social Computing experts to flesh out concepts and find examples –although additional analysis is almost always required.

As I discover new ways to use these tools, I’ll update this post, I’d love to hear your responses

If you’re a Forrester client (many readers here are) I’m encouraging you to exercise your right as a customer.

If you’ve read the Groundswell, then you’re familiar with the term Embracing, in which employees and customers work together to build next generation products and services.

For each report (one of our products) we’ve a rating system, and the ability for customers to leave comments. Quite frankly, I only see a few, and I’d like to get more feedback. Why? I want to improve and make sure that I’m doing everything I can to help our customers answer questions about my coverage area in social computing.

So, if you’re a client, and have read my reports, I’d love your feedback: rate and/or leave a comment on the report of what you liked and what could be improved. I promise to read and respond to any questions to the best of my ability.

We’ve made a two-way channel for you to respond, I’m listening. Here’s a list of my reports on the Forrester site.