SMITH BRAIN TRUST — Social media users post millions of “likes” and comments every year on brand pages for everything from AAA to Zyrtec. That’s a potentially rich source of information for marketers trying to gauge customer sentiment, but built-in biases create challenges. New research from professor Wendy W. Moe and a colleague at the University of Maryland’s Robert H.

Companies worried about disruption need science and technology to stay relevant in the 21st century, but speakers at the fifth annual Smith School Business Summit pointed to soft skills as the real competitive advantage. “If you get leadership, management and culture right, everything else takes care of itself,” keynote speaker David Williams told an audience of more than 300 faculty, staff, students and working professionals gathered Oct.

SMITH BRAIN TRUST — Retweets aren't necessarily endorsements, and they definitely aren’t votes. So what can Twitter tell us about the 2016 presidential election? Maybe more than you think, new research from the University of Maryland suggests. For starters, Republican nominee Donald Trump is winning — at Twitter anyway — over Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.

SMITH BRAIN TRUST — Facebook might know more about you than Big Brother, which makes it easy for the social media giant to steer advertisers toward likely customers.

Binge watching television — taking in a season of “Mad Men” or “Silicon Valley” in a day or two — has become a new pastime, made tempting by streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu and Amazon.

Predicting presidential election outcomes has gotten tricky in the digital age because the rising generation of voters doesn’t answer their phones or buy newspapers. Instead, they communicate online.

"All across the television landscape, viewers are changing how they watch TV," a host of NPR's Morning Edition recently noted. "Instead of taking in episodes of hit shows like 'The Big Bang Theory' once a week, people are stockpiling episodes to watch them later."

SMITH BRAIN TRUST — The video game industry is a massive one, with some $93 billion in annual sales. Budgets for major titles rival those for major motion pictures.

SMITH BRAIN TRUST -- Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton gained 15,000 Twitter followers during Tuesday’s Democratic debate. Her rival Bernie Sanders gained nearly 50,000 followers. But the Twitterverse winner was not on stage.

SMITH BRAIN TRUST -- Binge-watching television — taking in a season or more of "Mad Men," "Silicon Valley" or "Scandal" in a couple of days — has become a much-discussed new pastime, made tempting by streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu and Amazon, with their vast stores of shows. Content providers often seem to cater to bingers, as when Netflix uploads a season of "House of Cards" all at once.