The IAB email this morning caught my eye because it referenced a BusinessWeek article that mentions a study done by Rapleaf (a company that aggregates social network information and has come under fire for some of its marketing tactics), saying (my emphasis added) “Rapleaf CEO Auren Hoffman, citing a recent study by her firm, writes about the gender gap in social media…” - I thought this was funnily ironic because Auren is of course, a man and not a woman.

Anyway, we are always interested in new studies especially around Social Media - so I followed the links given in the BW article to the study, which sounded massive: “At Rapleaf we conducted a study of 13.2 million people and how they’re using social media”.

The “study” page on their site that is referenced in the article, amounts to an aggregation of data from other sources, none of which is quoted here by name. I suspect they utilized comScore data for most of the gender stuff. We may be wrong, but it looks like the only bit of Rapleaf-specific information here is the number of profiles they’ve aggregated from each of these sources e.g. 11.3 million (of the 13.2 million quoted in the article presumably) are MySpace users.

This doesn’t mean the article in BW is bad - but I do think with all the data bandied about these days, it makes sense to be more clear about one’s sources whereever possible. Though of course, certain companies make up entire businesses around data obfuscation and aggregation so it’s easy to fall into that habit I guess.