June 23rd, 2009 by Marc Smith · No Comments
Telligent has been hard at work upgrading our platforms in the past months and the results have been announced at this year’s Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. There have been significant changes across the product line along with new names. Our platform for Internet facing communities, formerly called Community Server, is now “Telligent Community“; the intranet enterprise collaboration platform formerly known as Evolution is now “Telligent Enterprise“; and the analysis and reporting platform I work on, formerly known as Harvest, is now “Telligent Analytics 3.0“. The name changes reflect a significant number of enhancements in each product.
The development team has focused on integration with existing business applications, manageability, ease-of-use, measurability and reporting the demonstrates ROI. My focus has largely been on Telligent Analytics 3.0, a platform that helps companies quantify engagement both inside and outside their online communities. The big step forward in this release is the focus on the patterns of connections created by the conversations and other user activities that take place in either a Telligent Community or a Telligent Enterprise site. Where activity was previously measured in amounts of activity (counts of number of authors or messages) now activity is also measured in terms of the quality and quality of connections between people and the objects they create. Telligent Analytics now builds several “social graphs” from the aggregate of these links and then applies the techniques of social network analysis to calculate measures that describe the graph as a whole as well as each individual or object in the graph. By calculating metrics like “eigenvector” centrality among other network metrics, Telligent Analytics can generate a score that describes how much any participant resembles I a number of roles in their social media communities. It is useful to know which of your community participants are the “answer people” and who is gets the discussions that thrive started. These metrics make it easier to find and follow influencers within your organization or community.
Rob Howard, the current CTO and founder of Telligent, describes the products as a way to bring “social computing, enterprise technology and traditional communication [...] together to break down information silos and enhance measurability both inside and outside the organization.”
Telligent Community 5.0 and Telligent Enterprise 2.0 are now available, previews of Telligent Analytics 3.0, which will be released soon, are by invitation, let me know if you would like to have a look!
Tags: Companies · Measuring social media · Metrics · Social Media · Social network · Technology · Telligent
June 23rd, 2009 by Marc Smith · No Comments
My colleagues Derek Hansen and Ben Shneiderman (University of Maryland) and I have just finished the second version of our tutorial/manual for the NodeXL social network analysis toolkit for Excel.
The latest version of the tutorial Analyzing Social Media Networks: Learning by Doing with NodeXL is now available from the University of Maryland Center for the Advanced Study of Communities and Information (CASCI) web site. We will use this version of the document in our upcoming tutorial at the Communities and Technologies conference at Penn State University on June 24th.
We plan to continue to expand the tutorial to include a step-by-step guide to the analysis of several major social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube, delicious, and flickr as well as personal stores of social media like your own email (if it is stored in a Windows Search Index found on most Windows desktops). Our goal is to create an easy-to-follow guide to network theory for people who new to the field or who do not want to develop programming skills to perform network analysis. We are focused on social media as a data source for social media although other examples are included, like the United States Senate voting network that reveals interesting patterns in the connections created when votes are cast. Using 2007 data it reveals which Senators are most likely to change party affiliation.
Your comments, corrections, and suggestions for improving the document are welcome.
Instructors interested in teaching classes about social networks are welcome to make use of both the NodeXL toolkit and the document to guide students through the core concepts of social network theory.
Here is the table of contents:
[Read more →]
Tags: Collective Action · Data Mining · Measuring social media · Metrics · NodeXL · Social Interaction · Social Media · Social Roles · Social network · Sociology · Visualization
June 17th, 2009 by Marc Smith · No Comments
Penn State hosts C&T 2009
Derek Hansen (University of Maryland) and I will be running a workshop as part of the Communities and Technologies conference next week in University Park, PA. We have room for additional participants. If anyone is interested, please email me (marc.smith@telligent.com) or Derek (shakmatt@gmail.com). If there is sufficient interest by those in the DC or Bay Area we could potentially arrange for a similar workshop closer to home. We are particularly interested in reaching instructors who may be teaching social network analysis or courses on social media in the Fall of 2009 and have a tutorial we have developed to aid in that process. The tutorial is being updated, but here is the old version (which still is useful!). We will distribute the updated version at the conference and thereafter here on the blog and the NodeXL codeplex site.
Title: NodeXL: Social Network Analysis and Visualization tools for Social Media
Date/Time: Wednesday, June 24, 8:30am through early afternoon
Place: Penn State University, University Park, PA
(http://cct2009.ist.psu.edu/index.cfm)
This session will provide a walk through the basic operation of NodeXL. Attendees are encouraged to bring an edge list of interest. Sample data sets will be provided. To download the NodeXL add-in and slides, go to:
http://www.codeplex.com/NodeXL
Tags: Uncategorized
June 17th, 2009 by Marc Smith · No Comments
I just read a new paper from Jennifer Preece and Ben Shneiderman that provides a nice framework for the ways people contribute at different rates to collective projects in general and social media on the Internet in particular.
Preece, Jennifer and Shneiderman, Ben (2009). The Reader-to-Leader Framework: Motivating Technology-Mediated Social Participation, AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction (1) 1, pp. 13-32.
Available at: http://aisel.aisnet.org/thci/vol1/iss1/5, the paper is published in a new journal, Association for Information Systems Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction, and is likely to be of interest to those in the social media and network analysis community. The main argument is that there are distinctive activities that people move through: initially as readers, then contributors (in small then larger ways), then collaborating with others to make larger contributions, and then to leadership (policy making, enforcement, coping with disruptions, mentoring novices, etc.). The figure (above) from the paper is modeled on Wikipedia where these activities have been studied extensively, but they argue that these activities can be found in many technology-mediated social media. The conversion rate from one activity to another is often as low as 1 percent (for example, there are half-a -billion readers of wikipedia, but just 1600 admins who are effectively the leaders), so the paper offers suggestions for improving the usability and sociability design to raise the conversion rate.
Tags: Collective Action · Common Goods · Community · Papers · Research · Social Interaction · Social Media · Social network · Sociology
June 8th, 2009 by Marc Smith · No Comments
The Communities and Technologies conference is holding its 4th meeting in Penn State June 24-27. This conference gathers a range of scholars interested in online community, social media, social networks, and mobile social software. A paper “Analyzing (Social Media) Networks with NodeXL” has been accepted for publication in the conference! Congrats to my co-authors!
Paper Title: Analyzing (Social Media) Networks with NodeXL
Authors: Marc Smith (Telligent Systems), Ben Shneiderman (University of Maryland), Natasa Milic-Frayling (Microsoft Research), Eduarda Mendes Rodrigues (Microsoft Research), Vladimir Barash (Cornell University), Cody Dunne (University of Maryland), Tony Capone (Microsoft Research), Adam Perer (University of Maryland, now at IBM Research), Eric Gleave (University of Washington)
Abstract: In this paper we present NodeXL, an extendible toolkit for network data analysis and visualization, implemented as an add-in to the Microsoft Excel 2007 spreadsheet software. We demonstrate NodeXL features through analysis of a data sample drawn from an enterprise intranet social network, discussion, and wiki. Through a sequence of steps we show how NodeXL leverages and extends the broadly used spreadsheet paradigm to support common operations in network analysis. This ranges from data import to computation of network statistics and refinement of network visualization through a selection of ready-to-use sorting, filtering, and clustering functions.
Tags: Conference · NodeXL · Papers · Research · Social network · Sociology · Telligent · Visualization
June 2nd, 2009 by Marc Smith · No Comments
The upcoming Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston June 22-25 features several presentations of possible interest. George Dearing and I will both be on panels and, centrally, there is a presentation from Telligent co-founder Rob Howard about what is new at Telligent Systems:
Enterprise 2.0: Work, Productivity and ROI Today’s ever-changing workforce requires that enterprises tackle an array of shifting demands. Adapting to the various ways people collaborate and work together without actually being in the same place is now an organizational necessity, not just an option. Join us for this informative session as Rob Howard, Founder of Telligent and an innovator of online collaboration strategies, presents Enterprise 2.0 and social computing in the context of work, productivity and ROI. Enterprises that have embraced collaborative computing and analytics are realizing results in increased workforce productivity, expanded input and insight from customers and partners, and now have the ability to manage and report on the value of these efforts. Join us for this session and walk away understanding how you can prepare today for the future of work.
Speaker – Rob Howard, Co-Founder, Telligent
George Dearing from Telligent and I will both be on additional panels at the conference. I am looking forward to the chance to present along with Kate Niederhoffer from Dachis again; we presented at Web 2.0 on the topic of “Beyond Buzz: On Measuring a Conversation” which I think was well received. Details below:
[Read more →]
Tags: Community · Conference · Industry · Measuring social media · Metrics · Social Media · Technology
June 2nd, 2009 by Marc Smith · No Comments
For those in the Bay Area there is an event next week of particular interest to community managers, platform developers, researchers, marketers, and software developers: at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View on June 10th is the 2009 Online Community Unconference. This year 300-400 online community and social media professionals will attend with 50-60 collaborative sessions devoted to social media and online community topics.
“The Online Community Unconference is a gathering of online community practitioners – managers, developers, business people, tool providers, investors – to discuss experience and strategies in the development and growth of online communities.”
I attended last year and found it to be a valuable use of time: many practioners in the social media space will attend and some will self-nominate and present on a wide range of topics of relevance. I plan to be there again this year, hope to see you there!
Tags: Community · Conference · Industry · Measuring social media · Metrics · Research · Social Media · Sociology · Talks · Technology
May 31st, 2009 by Marc Smith · No Comments
There is some very positive coverage of Telligent recently in the press. First there is the very detailed review of the community platform and its reporting features from Barb Mosher at CMS Wire: “Social Web Analytics with Telligent’s Harvest Reporting Server“. The article does a great job of detailing the features of the Harvest social media analysis product. The article’s explanation of what social media analytics are is itself useful:
“You need to measure what’s happening in your community. If you are interested in knowing what your community members are up to, what information they are sharing and looking at, what they are saying about you, your product or your service (positive and negative), then you need social analytics.
If you need to know how many users are signing up, how many are contributing to blogs, wikis, forums, how many are asking and answering questions, then you need social analytics.
With social computing becoming much more mainstream and in many cases, a requirement for both external and internal relationship building, it has become critical to measure the impact these solutions really have. You also need to know how and where to improve these solutions.
And you aren’t going to get this information from traditional web traffic analytics.”
A mention of Telligent in the New York Times is also cause for note: the recent article on help communities listed Telligent as a provider of platforms, along with Jive, Lithium, and HelpShare, that enable companies to host communities of passionate users who help one another solve problems with their products. There is a great quote from Natalie Petouhoff, Forrester Research analyst:
Natalie L. Petouhoff, an analyst at Forrester Research, said that online user groups conform to what she calls the 1-9-90 rule. About 1 percent of those in the community, she explained, are super-users who supply most of the best answers and commentary. An additional 9 percent are “responders” who mainly reply and rate Web posts, she said, and the other 90 percent are “readers” who primarily peruse and search the Web site for useful information.
“The 90 percent will come,” Ms. Petouhoff said, “if you have the 1 percent.”
I would extend this point and add: within the 1% of active users are all the different types of active contribution, both good and bad. Top answer people, discussion starters, discussion people, question people, and flame warriors all crowd into this sliver of the online demographic. It is important to have the tools to separate the different kinds of active contributions to be sure that an active community is also a properly productive one!
Tags: Companies · Industry · Measuring social media · Metrics · Social Media · Social network · Sociology · Telligent
May 30th, 2009 by Marc Smith · No Comments
Tags: Community · Conference · Cultural Representations · Sociology · Technology
May 28th, 2009 by Marc Smith · No Comments
A few weeks ago I attended a meeting at the University of Maryland in College Park of a working group proposing a new “National Initiative for Social Participation”. The meeting brought together people from the major universities, research labs, and government funding agencies to think about an “Apollo Program for Social Media”. The idea is that data networks, social media applications and mobile devices could change disaster recovery or help governments deliver regular services and address common problems.
Peter Pirolli, research at PARC, presented the keynote about the challenges and opportunities for the use of social media to address social problems.
There is growing interest in this space, for example NSF funding was significantly increased this year. For example, there is the new NSF Social-Computational Systems (SoCS) program: http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=503406&org=NSF&sel_org=NSF&from=fund
President Obama’s recent speech to the National Academy of Science (http://www.nasonline.org/site/PageServer) sets some of the context for this group’s vision, he speaks about crowd sourcing and its impact on science. (See minute 28:30) video is on the web site of the National Academy of Science http://edg1.vcall.com/video/nas/launch.asp
“I have charged the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy with leading a new effort to ensure that federal policies are based on the best and most unbiased scientific information. I want to be sure that facts are driving scientific decisions – and not the other way around.
As part of this effort, we’ve already launched a website that allows individuals to not only make recommendations to achieve this goal, but to collaborate on those recommendations; it is a small step, but one that is creating a more transparent, participatory and democratic government.”
Elsewhere in the speech there is a refernce to the role of (appropriately) digitizing medical records which I think includes the idea that people will increasingly gather online to work towards better personal health:
“The Recovery Act will support the long overdue step of computerizing America’s medical records, to reduce the duplication, waste, and errors that cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives.
But it’s important to note: these records also hold the potential of offering patients the chance to be more active participants in prevention and treatment. We must maintain patient control over these records and respect their privacy. At the same time, however, we have the opportunity to offer billions and billions of anonymous data points to medical researchers who may find in this information evidence that can help us better understand disease.”
There seems to be a role for the kinds of online communities and social media that people turn to when facing physical or medical challenges.
National Initiative for Social Participation at University of Maryland
http://iparticipate.wikispaces.com/Motivating+Scenario
http://chronicle.com/daily/2009/05/17280n.htm
http://www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/sets/72157617551332795/
Tags: Community · Conference · Interdisciplinary · Location · Measuring social media · Metrics · Mobile Devices · Mobile Social Software · Research · Sensors · Social Interaction · Social Media · Social Roles · Social network · Sociology · Uncategorized
