NeuroFocus, a firm that brings brain research to marketing, today unveiled what it deems “the first dry, wireless headset designed to capture brainwave activity across the full brain.” The device, three years in the making, debuted at the 75th Annual Advertising Research Foundation conference in New York.

One thing you aren't likely to hear Sunday night from the Oscar-winning producer after accepting the trophy for Best Picture: "I'd like to thank my neuroscience partners who helped us enhance the film's script, characters, and scenes."

It's not that far-fetched, though.

A sizable number of neuromarketing companies already brain test movie trailers for the major studios through fMRI, EEG, galvanic skin response, eye-tracking and other biometric approaches. For now, the test data helps the studios and distributors better market the movie.

This ‘strata’ visualization shows a stratification of the top topics of discussion by volume and how they evolve over time. Using Pulsar‘s semantic analysis tools we have clustered the messages around a few topic areas.

The content of the conversations between researchers on Twitter is highly self-referential, i.e. researchers talk a lot about social media itself. Large strata include “social media”, “Twitter”, “social media marketing”, “Facebook”. This demonstrates that many people in the industry are still going through a learning phase when it comes to using social media

What’s the right way to behave when listening in on online conversations? Jeffrey Henning proposes consumer-driven rules for social media monitoring.

As the web has evolved from a library to a mall to a public square, more and more conversations are taking place online. Many are about personal, parochial matters of little import to anyone other than the people involved, but quite a few are about causes, challenges and dilemmas, or products, services and brands: issues that your organisation cares deeply about.

The Council of American Survey Research Organisations (Casro) has formed a social media research task force to get to grips with the ethical and methodological issues surrounding the use of social networks and blogs for gaining consumer insight

While social media use has grown dramatically across all age groups, older users have been especially enthusiastic over the past year about embracing new networking tools. Social networking use among internet users ages 50 and older nearly doubled—from 22% in April 2009 to 42% in May 2010.

• Between April 2009 and May 2010, social networking use among internet users ages 50-64 grew by 88%--from 25% to 47%.
• During the same period, use among those ages 65 and older grew 100%--from 13% to 26%.
• By comparison, social networking use among users ages 18-29 grew by 13%—from 76% to 86%.