A good friend is working through her MBA and in the context of her studies is conducting a survey to better understand health insurance from the consumer’s point of view.

The survey takes 5-10 minutes to complete, and is fully anonymous and confidential. Data is gathered only for academic purposes.

Willing to help out?

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/UnderstandHealthInsuranceVI

I just had the wonderful opportunity to present to the students of City University of New York (CUNY) along with Bilal Jaffery on where we see the business value in social media.

You can watch the presentation, which is part of the ongoing Roundtable series here:

CUNY Presentation: The Business Value in Social Networks from Daryl Pereira on Vimeo.

Or rifle through the slides:

Bottom line is that social media is transforming the way we do business: we are realizing massive efficiencies and humanizing corporations by providing employees the tools and knowledge to develop deeper relationships with each other and the extended ecosystem. Gone are the days when communications from a brand only came through the marketing and communications department.

As with any presentation, the following Q&A session was fascinating. Questions ranged from how does an individual make a dent in the social media landscape to how do you expand into foreign markets. We also touched on how we use crowdsourcing here at IBM for feedback on everything from our social media guidelines to the positioning of marketing campaigns.

More on the CUNY Institute for Virtual Enterprise

It’s South by Southwest time and I’m one of the many that just couldn’t make it there.

Still, that doesn’t stop me wanting know what’s going on. And given that I do the majority of reading on my phone these days, a mobile app makes perfect sense. So that’s what we have here. Twoogle is a small mobile web app to keep up with the latest news from down there in Texas.

This is a mobile-optimized website so will run on any handheld device with a modern browser (iPhone, Android, Blackberry). If you have a 2-D barcode scanner, point it at this QR code:

http://bit.ly/twooglesxsw

It’s pretty simple: see either the latest tweets or news/blog articles. Why concentrate on only Twitter and Google? These services combined offer wonderful event coverage: dipping into Twitter occasionally gives you a sense of the general vibe and Google is great for the macro/high level coverage.

Twoogle is built on top of the HTML5 JQueryMobile framework so like any other webpage just go ahead and bookmark and, if so inclined, add a shortcut to your homepage. After the event, just delete the shortcut – no need to worry about installing any risky apps or taking up precious storage space on your phone.

Get back to me with any feedback.

You got those blogging blues? All that time and effort penning wonderfully erudite missives and no one can be arsed to show up and read the damn things? Just too many blogs crowding out your place in the sun on the mighty Google? Might be time to start looking for alternative avenues to distribute your content.

Like Twitter.

We have our own success story here at developerWorks - which happily delivers us over 200,000 visitors a month. Not bad for a 140-character investment every now and again. Twitter is many things to many people, and one thing it is to some people is a channel for distributing your content. What's the easiest way of getting blog posts onto Twitter? There are numerous tools out there that will take up your blog posts as soon as you hit 'publish' and wrap them up into a handy Tweet, complete with a link back to your site.

You may know Google's Feedburner service as an RSS manager, but it has other functions too: like being able to autopost to Twitter.

Setting up Feedburner

Create an account

First step is to login and create an account with Feedburner. Pretty straightforward, especially if you use any other Google service (such as Gmail), as you just enter your existing account.

Get your RSS feed address

Once in, the service will ask you for your feed address (to 'burn' the feed). Here on developerworks you can get this by going to the bottom of the homepage and saving the URL for the blog entries:

If you can't find your RSS feed, try giving it your blog address: Feedburner may well be able to figure it out your RSS feed address for you.

Add the Twitter service to Feedburner

Follow the steps through to the 'congrats' page and at the bottom click directly through to 'feed management'. Choose the 'publicize' tab and select 'Socialize':

Add your Twitter account details and you can tweak the settings if you wish (in most cases the defaults should work just fine). Note that the service uses the goo.gl URL shortener of choice.

Click 'Activate' and you are good to go.

So the next time you put out a post:

You'll see it show up in Twitter a few minutes later:

That's all there is to it.

Although there are reasons why you might not want to automate posting of blog content directly to Twitter. One may be that you want to tailor your message for each audience. What works well as a blog headline may not cut it on Twitter. Still, if you don't have time to manicure your Twitter presence then it makes good sense to use an autoposter like Feedburner to handle this step for you.

More on the value of the Feedburner service.

Welcome any feedback or questions!

Business analytics can play an increasingly important role in academia these days. Recently we heard about how business intelligence could be used to locate students in need of further assistance by mining data on lecture attendance and course performance. This week we see a press announcement detailing how Canada’s McMaster University is using business analytics to make its buildings greener.

So how exactly does the technology help reduce operating costs and cut greenhouse gas emissions?

On the one hand, a series of sensors, actuators and meters collect real-time data on energy consumption and temperature levels. When combined with dynamic-pricing data, this can give an accurate reading of exactly how much it costs to use a certain amount of energy at a certain time of day.

What can McMaster do with all this information?

• Assess how much given building is costing them to run
• Track energy usage and cost across the whole campus
• Forecast what future costs and usage will be based on past performance
• Simulate different environments and scenarios to understand more about energy usage and cost under different climate conditions
• Optimize energy consumption based on the forecasts and simulations

Looking across the 60 campus buildings, the system will be able to identify under-performing buildings and the causes of energy inefficiencies. With the help of IBM Business Analytics technologies, McMaster will improve its decision making process and raise the bar for sustainable, cost-saving building management practices.