In what may well have been one of my most popular posts ever, I discussed how Twitter needs less talkers and more listeners. This hasn’t changed, and it’s truly the key to being successful with social media from a business perspective (on a personal level, the same rules don’t always apply, although they don’t hurt, either).

I caught this Ad Age article yesterday and simply couldn’t resist sharing it. The article discusses a new job function at many Web-savvy companies today: “Chief Listener.” It sums up the point of this new role in only two sentences:

The big task? Data mining — and figuring out who needs the information.

As I’ve said over and over, the trick over the next decade is going to managing the sheer amount of data thrown our way each and every day. Nowhere is this more important than with social media. Some have called it the Social Data Revolution, pointing out that in 2009, there was more data produced than in every single year preceding it–combined. The key to managing this incredible amount of information? Listening.

And it’s not just listening, period; It’s all about listening well. Listening efficiently. Listening to the right people, at the right time, in the right medium.

Anyway, read the article, shout out your thoughts in the comments or on Twitter (@alexpriest), and expect plenty more on this topic from me in the future.

This is a quick piece I wrote for one of my marketing courses, but thought you might enjoy reading it here as well.

Chapter 5, “Kenna’s Dilemma,” in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, is a fantastic bit of insight into market research and the challenges there are in really figuring out what people think—because often they don’t really know what they’re thinking either.

The chapter takes on a number of different case studies where market research has failed to beat the experts and where consumers have simply been wrong about their very own preferences. This is all framed around the story of Kenna, a young musician with a unique sound that the critics loved, but listeners couldn’t quite wrap their heads around. While everyone from Fred Durst to U2’s manager loved his sound, he didn’t test well and suffered because of it. Gladwell puts this in context, comparing his situation to the “Pepsi Challenge,” the development of the Aeron desk chair, and even a couple classic TV shows. These were products that never tested well and no one expected to succeed, but beat the odds because research failed to capture the market’s feelings accurately, or because companies failed to interpret that research correctly.

There is one line in the chapter that I think really sums up the lesson to be learned most succinctly: “The problem with market research is that often it is simply too blunt an instrument to pick up this distinction between the bad and the merely different.”

Without a doubt, this is the most important and interesting insight to take away from this chapter for marketers, and for anyone who wants to understand how revolutionary products often succeed. Whether it’s the disaster that was New Coke, jam tasting, or Kenna getting screwed over by the record companies, market research is by no means an exact science, despite its appearances.

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Facebook is a smart company. Possibly one of the smartest companies we’ve ever seen, or will ever see in our lifetime. It’s for one simple reason–they want to be important, and they’re good at it.

Facebook thrives on being important. And now that they’re the largest social network in the world, they can proudly proclaim themselves “the most important.” Without a doubt.

But in the past year a new social media ecosystem has sprouted up–location-based services, e.g. Foursquare, Gowalla, and the like. And tweeting back and forth with my good friend @bigguyd just now, I realized that Facebook’s strategy is much larger than either of theirs. They don’t want to put them out of business, or buy them out, or pound them into obscurity. They want these other services to thrive, but only if they play by Facebook’s rules.

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Twitter’s recent release of a contentious new feature–“Who To Follow”–has some users pretty irritated. But it also shows Twitter is taking a page out of Facebook’s playbook: ignoring their users.

Good for them.

Say what? you might be thinking. Companies should always listen to the customer, right? No. Quite the opposite in the case of social media, actually, and the success of Facebook and failures of Google tell the story pretty convincingly.

Facebook grew to be the world’s largest social network, because it did what it wanted to do, when it wanted to do it, regardless of the backlash from its users.

Whether it was the advent of the news feed, the introduction of a new UI or privacy concerns, Facebook has been firm with their “f#$% you” to their users’ opinions. But they’ve also been right. The news feed was the smartest move the company has ever made. And from a privacy perspective, Facebook will always be fighting a losing PR battle–it’s best to just suck it up, do what you want, and let it blow over.

And blow over it has. Every time. Not once has the outrage of the users grown to amount to, well, anything. The great “Facebook Quit Day” of 2010 was a joke, and Facebook gleefully announced their 500 millionth user only weeks later. Everyone has some reason to complain about Facebook, but no one will quit and they will continue to grow, barring any absolutely extraordinary circumstances.

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Around this time last year, I was a fairly timid yet ambitious rising college junior, finally venturing out to my first real networking event. It was a Mashable-hosted tweetup on Capitol Hill, and I wandered in feeling totally overwhelmed. I’d just begun to get into social media and finally feeling like a real adult, but I’d never been to a networking event outside of American University.

Oh my how times have changed.

Tonight is Mashable’s DC “Summermash” event. That means this is also the one-year anniversary of my becoming a networker. Networking has changed my life–I’ve realized opportunities I could’ve never before imagined, and I’ve made some of my best friends in the world through online social networks. In honor of the occasion, I figured I’d offer a few tips on how I’ve managed to get where I am and how you can be well on your way, too.

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