Who else is considered a social media scientist like Dan Zarella?

Craig,

Dr. Michael Wu IS a scientist and applies scientific analysis to what happens inside of Social Networks, mostly Lithium's Communities. Let me know if you need an introduction.

Also, check out Valdis Krebs on Social Network Analysis.

Let me know what else you are looking for and I more than happy to help.

Here are some real ones:

https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/facseminars/events/marketing/documents/mktg_03_0... (Duncan Watts)

http://cs.stanford.edu/people/jure/pubs/lim-icdm10.pdf (Jaewon Yang and Jure Lescovec) - links are studies on online influence.

With, like, real data and stuff. :)

The answer to this question depends on how you define science. I like to think of science as a search for repeatable, observable patterns. Very few people, if any are doing this in the social media space including Dan Zarella. If you take a broader view of science and define it in a way that looks similar to research, there are a lot of people who can be called social media researchers. Some of the better ones include:

Clay Shirky
Danah Boyd
Vladis Krebs
Mark Pesce
Michael Wesch
Mimi Ito
Alessandro Acquisti
Cameron Marlow
Genevieve Bell
Elizabeth Churchill

Finally, people who anoint themselves scientists by including the word scientist in their title usually aren't scientists at all. And the social media uber-analysts definitely aren't scientists.

John Gerzema, Seth Godin, Brian Solis, Charlene Li and Jeremiah Owyang

It seems we have a consensus here.

Dan Zarella is not a scientist. Attempting to pretend that he has has backfired with many of the people here, who see him as a charlatan for pretending he is something he is not.

Yet, if his own stuff is to be believed, thousands of people attend his webinars and read his blog. Large numbers also involve themselves with deceptive programmes like the Eloqua University and Marketing Automation Institute, which also confer status they don't deserve.

Three questions come to mind:

Where in your marketing career do you get above all this stuff and stop being conned?

Do people go with the flow if it helps them to pretend within their company that they are more legitimately educated than they are?

Shouldn't we as an industry be self-regulating and stop these snake-oil salesmen in our midst from ruining the credibility of the whole industry?

Another good one: Bernardo Huberman has done some terrific work on influence. Here's his paper on "Predicting the Future with Social Media" http://arxiv.org/abs/1003.5699

No-one. This is self aggrandisement.

It pretends that Dan have the peer review of true science. It is covering yourself in the cloak of academia without actually doing the work and submitting to the procedures (peer review etc.) to get there legitimately.

Universities have rigorous processes to get real research checked - Zarella just puts out a blog based on some subjective statistics (people asked what they think is not scientific). He ignores confidence levels and make quite unjustified assumptions based on highly skewed data (for example responders to a survey are not representative of the whole - they respond because they think they have something to say).

It is part of an attempt to hoodwink gullible marketers. It seems that it works!

Other similar examples are the Marketing Automation Institute, Content Marketing Institute and Hubspot University. None of them are legitimate.

In the UK this sort of thing is illegal - you can't call yourself an Institute if you're not.

I also have found erik qualman of socialnomics to be very concrete and helpful in his writing http://www.socialnomics.net/about-erik-qualman/

With all respect to the person who asked this question, I searched for the reference of Dan Zarella in Harzing's Publish or Perish, and he does not have any peer-reviewed publication. He might claim to be a scientist to sell legitimacy, but if you do not appear in an academic journal, that is just a void claim.

Now, to answer your question, if you want to search for articles related to social media, I recommend browsing ISI through http://www.webofknowledge.com/ (you need institutional access, maybe through your university). Another option is to go though google scholar. Of course, in order to access the journals, you need institutional access, or pay each article.

His emphasis isn't really on social media, though he does a descent amount in the space. Definitely worth taking a look at Brian Massey:

Brian Massey, The Conversion Scientist
brian@conversionscientist.com
www.conversionscientist.com
512.961.6604
@bmassey

John Lovett wrote an excellent book on social metrics:

http://www.amazon.com/Social-Media-Metrics-Secrets-Lovett/dp/0470936274

Peter and Scott, what do you think about these additions to the list?

B. J. Fogg
Jonah Lehrer
Alexandra Samuel
Eve Mailer (ex-Forrester analyst)
Steven Johnson
Beth Kanter

This is slightly off topic, so I've create a new post and would welcome your input on this:

http://www.focus.com/questions/what-is-the-science-of-an-irrational-and-emoti...