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Conference: Enterprise 2.0 in Boston, June 22-25

Marc Smith — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 17:06:49 +0000

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:

In one panel, George will be talking about the role of social media in customer relationship management:

Web 2.0 and Selling #e2conf22
The idea that markets are conversations is common wisdom today. But when a handful of visionaries drafted the Cluetrain Manifesto about 10 years they could not have foreseen the explosion of Web 2.0 tools over the past decade that would bring customers so quickly and directly into all aspects of sales and marketing. Today’s buyers are not content to be passive recipients of controlled and targeted information; they are demanding an equal voice in the sales process, sharing information, engaging with other buyers in digital communities, and doing competitive research online. That means sales people have to be smarter and learn how to translate the old fundamentals of good selling into “social selling” -a process to build trust, generate interest and eventually close the deal.

Moderator – Robin Carey, CoFounder and CEO, Social Media Today LLC

Speaker – George Dearing, Senior Corporate Evangelist, Telligent
Speaker – Mark Woolen, Vice President, CRM Product Strategy, Oracle
Speaker – Romi Mahajan, Chief Marketing Officer, Ascentium
Speaker – Timothy Jones, CEO, Buzzient

I have the great opportunity to rejoin Kate Niederhoffer for a panel along with Bruce MacVarish (Avaya) and Daniel Debow (Rypple.com) to discuss the new measurements available when an enterprise adopts a social media platform.

Metrics in the Hands of Users: Empowering the Enterprise 2.0 Workforce #e2conf45
As the enterprise transforms, how do the metrics evolve and who owns them? We readily acknowledge the shifted priority on interactions, but how do we measure them and who does this information benefit most? Today’s enterprise is built on metrics that are relevant to business goals; management closely monitors progress. From hierarchy to flat: supplying the E2.0 workforce with metrics that facilitate relevant behavioral communicating with the right people in the right ways– will play a clear role in managing the change an enterprise will endure as it shifts its tools, processes and culture.

Moderator – Kate Niederhoffer, Senior Partner, Dachis Corporation
Dr. Niederhoffer is part of the founding team at Dachis Corporation. She joined from Nielsen Online where she was the VP of Measurement Science, liaising between Research, Product, and R&D.

Speaker – Bruce MacVarish, Director, Business User Group, Avaya
Speaker – Daniel Debow, CEO, Rypple.com
Speaker – Marc Smith, Chief Social Scientist, Telligent

My colleagues from Microsoft Research will also be presenting:

Technology Innovation – Exploring Beyond Social Computing Tools in the Market Today
We know what social computing tools are available in the market today, but how are researchers thinking about technology innovation? How are organizations using social networking and driving adoption? Microsoft Research has been working on projects that dig into the analytics of how the intelligence gathered can provide more information about the user or to enhance productivity and successful results for information workers. Come see some demos and hear about Microsoft Research team’s vision.

Speaker – Andrzej Turski, Principal Software Development Engineer, Microsoft Research
Speaker – Jonathan Grudin, Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research

CMS Wire reviews Telligent Social Media reporting and platforms

Marc Smith — Sun, 31 May 2009 16:20:23 +0000

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!

2009 ICWSM Poster – Distinguishing Knowledge vs Social Capital in Social Media with Roles and Context

Vlad43210 — Sun, 17 May 2009 18:22:01 +0000

On Tuesday night Marc Smith and I will be presenting the poster for our paper, “Distinguishing Knowledge vs Social Capital in Social Media with Roles and Context” at the International Conference for Weblogs and Social Media. You can find the poster, co-authored with Marc Smith (Telligent Systems), Lise Getoor (University of Maryland) and Howard T. Welser (Ohio University), here. The full text of the paper has more information, but the poster is a good summary of the key concepts in the paper:

What roles do people play in social media?
What contexts shape user behavior in social media?
How can we leverage roles and context together to predict future user behavior (in terms of contribution type) from past user behavior?

The specific research question being addressed is: can we predict whether a particular contribution to Live Q&A (a Microsoft-sponsored community question answering site) will be contain factual information, or discussion / chat. It is possible to do the prediction based on the text of the contribution, but such an approach focuses entirely on the content, and not on the actor – the user who is making the contribution. If we leverage actor-centric information (what role does he/she play in the community: an “answer person” or a “discussion person”? is he making the contribution in a discussion-oriented context, such as implied by tagging the contribution as “fun,” or a fact-oriented context, such as implied by tagging the contribution as “math”?), we find we can build a decent predictor at very low cost with very few variables. If we use just role information or just context information, we do reasonably well… but if we use both, we do *much* better. While the question we’re answering here is quite specific, the advantage of our approach is that it can be applied to almost any social media context – any place online where users can both contribute content and interact with others. We could just as easily create a predictor for contributions to Yahoo! Answers, or even to Wikipedia (if we had the relevant data). This is definitely food for thought / opportunity for future work

Conference: Web 2.0 in San Francisco – “Beyond Buzz: On Measuring a Conversation” with Kate Niederhoffer

Marc Smith — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 14:42:51 +0000

I will be speaking with Kate Niederhoffer from Dachis at Web 2.0 Expo Wednesday, April 1st at 10.50 in San Francisco. We will be speaking about:

Beyond Buzz: On Measuring a Conversation
http://www.web2expo.com/webexsf2009/public/schedule/detail/6273

What is the most meaningful way to understand and measure a dialogue? As marketing transforms from a broadcast model to a conversational one, which constructs should be captured and how do you measure them? Is it necessary to make a distinction between the metrics used to tap into the value of a conversation per se and the ROI of a social media marketing campaign?

The proposed presentation offers new strategies to think about and tap into the depth of interactions and emotional connections people have online. Beyond buzz levels, sentiment, and other core metrics typically provided by brand monitoring solutions, the presentation will offer methods to understand a conversation: how emotional is it, how in synch are the constituents, how intimately do they relate to the brand or product? How much trust do the constituents reveal?

Marketing efforts that take advantage of technology to enable community and collaboration render traditional metrics limiting, at best. Traditional metrics have been optimized for more passive exposure to a specific message, frequency of exposure is considered a proxy for relevance; and, the premium is on reach over quality.

Primarily due to its more participative dynamic, a conversation engages constituents unlike static messaging. As many in the industry have noted, a natural development is to measure engagement. However, there is little consensus on what engagement means and how it can be measured. Often it is calculated by merely adding traditional metrics, assuming more is better.

The presentation will introduce new constructs and present case studies with empirical research demonstrating more valuable, still measurable constructs than the core metrics currently in use.

Forrester report on social media platforms – get a free copy

Marc Smith — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 15:46:49 +0000

Forester recently released its review of leading social media platforms.

They conclude that communities are a powerful way for businesses to grow. Community and social media have ROI!

The segment is getting crowded, over 100 vendors and growing, but only few cleared Forrester’s threshold for robustness and feature richness.

Forrester evaluated nine social media platforms in depth and called out Jive Software and Telligent Systems on the strengths of the administrative and platform features and the company’s support and customization track record.

The other leaders included in the report: KickApps and Pluck, Awareness, Lithium Technologies, Mzinga, LiveWorld and Leverage Software.

This is great news for Telligent, of course, and we are happy to provide a copy of the Forrester report just for asking (and trading some contact information): http://telligent.com/forrester-report/.

Others are noting that social analytics are key differentiators in social media platforms:

http://tomhumbarger.wordpress.com/2009/01/15/ive-seen-the-social-analytics-future/

Telligent’s Harvest Social Media reporting platform provides a rich set of features for tracking activity in your community.