Weekly blog round up

• Leigh Householder, The Worst Focus Group is You, Advergirl
  "You may simply be too close to the brand. After years of being a marketer / customer / advertiser, you hold certain core beliefs about the brand(s) you represent. If there is a change in the marketplace – or, even in your core customer – you may be too close to see it without an outside perspective."
• Tiffany Monhollon, Multitasking vs. Time Management, Employee Evolution
  "It turns out, multitasking may help us do more things at once, but it doesn’t help us do them well – or even quickly for that matter. In fact, it slows us down."
• Sean Silverthorne, HBS Cases: How Wikipedia Works (or Doesn’t), Harvard Business School Working Knowledge
  "From the outside, Wikipedia may look like chaos barely contained. 'When people look at these sorts of phenomenon at Wikipedia, they misread the anarchy,' Lakhani says. 'All these people, thousands of people, there must be no rules! But there is a very ornate and well-defined structure of participation.'"
• Todd Rogers and Katy Milkman, Understanding the ‘Want’ vs. ‘Should’ Decision, Harvard Business School Working Knowledge
  "We predicted that online grocery shoppers would order healthier groceries when ordering for delivery in the distant future (i.e., 5 days from now) than when ordering for delivery in the more immediate future (i.e., tomorrow). This is exactly what we found. ... people are more likely to rent DVDs in one order and return them in the reverse order when should DVDs (e.g., documentaries) are rented before want DVDs (e.g., action films)."
• Nora Barnes and Eric Mattson, The Game Has Changed: College Admissions Outpace Corporations in Embracing Social Media, Robin Good's Latest News
  "This research reached out to the 'marketing teams' (i.e., the admission departments) of over 2,000 accredited four-year colleges and universities nationwide [USA] to learn how they were using these exciting new technologies. ... Interestingly, admissions departments feel that social media is 'very important' to their future strategy in almost a 2:1 ratio to Inc. 500 businesses that feel the same way (51% compared to 26%)."