March 17-19, 2015 MURTEC (Multi-Unit Restaurant Technology Conference) at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas: NodeXL Hands-on Training

04FebMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

There will be a NodeXL Hands-on Training session at the MURTEC (Multi-Unit Restaurant Technology Conference) at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas. March 17-19, 2015

The IT Leader’s Guide: How to Map Your Brand’s Social Media Network

Speaker: Marc A. Smith, Director, Social Media Research Foundation

Social media matters – it matters to consumers – and that social chatter can matter to you if you understood how to interpret it. Learn to identify your key social media influencers and use that information to amplify your brand’s message. Uncover connections between sales and social media data, empower marketing to uncover new dining trends and brand champions, and even impact loss prevention efforts. This session will teach you how to apply social media network maps to your brand (and competitor’s). Restaurant executives, in particular those with a technology mind-set, will find great value in learning how to build, interpret and use social network maps. Participants will have an opportunity to map their own brand on social media using the free and open NodeXL (http://nodexl.codeplex.com) tool.

Bring a Windows laptop running a recent copy of Office to participate in the exercises!

This is an example NodeXL social media network map and report for the hashtags #MURTEC, #HotelTechForum, #RestES or htmagazine:

Maps and reports like these reveal the structure of an online conversation, revealing the key people, groups, and topics.

The “mayors” of this discussion are:

@htmagazine, @vivianfatule, @htmagazinetv, @colorvisionc9,
@auramusicrd, @team_techy, @paolamunnigh, @chasanmiguel,
@lissyvalerio, and @josiasortizg.

The most commonly used hashtags related to this topic are:

#htmagazine, #restes, #fromage, #fort, #hospitality,
#yoveocolorvision, #htrest, #viande, #antigaspi, #mobile

Maps and reports for a range of dining and hospitality topics will be presented at the MURTEC training session.

How to import matrix data into NodeXL

09JanMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

Some network data sets are created or received in the form of a matrix.

A matrix can be directed or undirected. In this example, we will import a directed network.

First open a blank NodeXL template.

Next open the matrix workbook in the same instance of Excel (just drag it into the title bar of the current NodeXL Excel instance).

Here is a simple asymmetric matrix with weights for tie strengths.

To import this matrix, switch back to NodeXL and select the Data>Import>From Open Matrix Workbook:
2015-NodeXL-Matrix Import

A matrix may or may not have labels (row and column headers) and the user should define what their data set looks like.

The matrix may represent a directed or undirected network (if it is undirected the matrix must be symmetrical!).

This results in data appearing in the Edges worksheet of NodeXL:
2015-NodeXL-Matrix Edges

This can then be visualized as a network where the edge weights are used to set the thickness of the lines connecting two nodes:

November 17-18, 2014: Cape Town South Africa: MammothBI Conference – talk about social media networks

25OctMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

I am delighted to return to South Africa where I will participate in the Mammoth BI conference in Cape Town, on November 17-18, 2014 at the Cape Town International Conference Centre, Convention Square, 1 Lower Long Street, Cape Town, 8001, Western Cape, South Africa.

November 3 – 5, 2014 – Restaurant Executive Summit – Mapping restaurant networks in social media

25OctMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

The 2014 Restaurant Executive Summit will be held on November 3 – 5, 2014 at the Ritz-Carlton in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

The theme of the event is “How to Feed Consumers with a #Digital @ppetite”

I will speak about the ways that restaurants and dining experiences are discussed in social media. I will show network maps that visualize the relationships among people who talk about restaurants created with the free and open NodeXL social media network analysis and visualization application.

Here are some recent NodeXL social media network maps for mentions of major chain restaurants featured in the NodeXL Graph Gallery:

DunkinDonuts

McDonalds

Chipotle

@olivegarden

These maps illustrate the shape of the crowd that gathers around the names of major chain restaurants. A few Twitter user accounts occupy key positions in these network crowds, these are the influential voices that are repeated widely by others.

Closer inspection (click through for details) reveals smaller groups or clusters which form as a smaller set of people interact with one another more than with the larger population. These groups have distinct topics of interest which are summarized in the content report associated with each visualization.

The network and content report can reveal the topics of interest to various groups in the discussion as well as the key people within each group.

October 2-3, 2014: Digital Strategies for Development Summit, Asian Institute of Management, Makati City, Philippines – Mapping social media networks

22SepMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

I attended and participated in the October 2-3, 2014 Digital Strategies for Development Summit hosted by the Asian Institute of Management and held in Makati City, Philippines.

The event gathered 50 speakers from around the world and more than 300 participants to focus on the role of digital and social technologies for civic needs. The summit focused on bringing people from many communities into a discussion of how technology can be used for:

“…enabling a better society and an empowered community? How can various stakeholders, including Government, Private Sector and Civil Society gain more momentum for their core mandates by leveraging the use of digital technology enabled solutions? Can Digital Technology create a platform for better collaboration and cooperation amongst various stakeholders?”

I spoke about the role social network analysis can play in understanding the emerging world of social media and computer mediated collective action.

29-30 September at the University of Melbourne – Talk about social media networks

07SepMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

Best Practice in Data Journalism Workshop

PROGRAM
29-30 September 2014

Terrace Lounge, Level 1, Walter Boas Building, Parkville Campus

(Campus map at http://maps.unimelb.edu.au/parkville)

MONDAY 29 SEPTEMBER

9-9.30AM	REGISTRATION AND WELCOME
9.30-9.45am	WELCOME AND INTRODUCTIONS- DR MARGARET SIMONS AND CARLTON CONNECT
9.45am-11	Presentations and Q and A from journalists: Marc Moncrieff and Craig Butt – Fairfax Media; Lisa Cornish – Red Cross (formerly News Corp); Harrison Polites – Business Spectator.
11-11.30	MORNING TEA
11.30-12.30	Presentations by Journalists (continued): Ed Tadros – Australian Financial Review; Matt Liddy, ABC; Nick Evershed – The Guardian in Australia.
12.30-1PM	ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION AND IDENTIFICATION OF COMMON THEMES AND CHALLENGES
1PM-2PM	LUNCH
2PM-2.30pm	AURIN – Exploring the potential – Presentation by Professor Richard Sinnott, University of Melbourne.
2.30-3pm	NodeXL – Exploring the potential – Presentation by Marc Smith, Director, Social Media Research Foundation
3-3.30pm	AFTERNOON TEA
3.30PM-5PM	Panel Session – Big Data. What Next? With Craig Thomler (Delib), Professor Paul Jensen (Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Melbourne); Jodie McVernon, (School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne), Scott Ewing, (World Internet Project, Swinburne Institute for Social Research.)

There will be a 3 hour session introducing NodeXL on Tuesday from 2-5pm 30th September at the main Parkville campus of UniMelb. The event is open to the public and is free.

It will be in the Old Arts Building Lecture Theatre B.

The main session will run from 2-4pm and there will be an additional hour for those that want to stop on for further training, finishing at 5pm

If you want to use NodeXL in the session, you will need a Windows laptop, and the Windows version of Excel (2007/2010/2013).

You can download NodeXL in advance from: http://nodexl.codeplex.com/.

Map and Building:

http://maps.unimelb.edu.au/parkville/building/149#.VCTinmS1Zlo

Download instructions:

http://nodexl.codeplex.com/releases/view/117659

September 26, 2014: Sydney #Disrupt – Talking about social media networks

07SepMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

I will be speaking at the University of Sydney on September 26th, 2014 as part of the 2014 Sydney Disrupt conference.

This year’s theme is “Living Disruption”.

Speakers include:

A keynote by Maria Ogneva, on community building for employee and customer engagement
A keynote by Tom Hajdu, CEO of Disrupter, on disruptive innovations in the entertainment industry
Mya Dellow presenting her perspective on the educational value of the online gaming platform Minecraft.
Academy Award winner Mark Sagar demonstrating BabyX, a photo-realistic, intelligent infant avatar.
A panel of experts discussing the potentials and risk of gamification.
Marc Smith from the Social Media Research Foundation will provide practical knowledge about analyzing social media data in straight forward ways with freely available tools.
Ripple Effect Group team leading a wearable technologies design workshop.

Here is a recent map of the connections among people who tweeted “#disrupt“:

Here is a video review of the 2013 #Disrupt event.

I will also lead a workshop on using NodeXL, in a hands-on training on 25th September 2014 from 9am to 12pm in the Link Building (J13), Room 417.

The workshop is sponsored by the Digital Disruption Research Group (DDRG), in collaboration with the Complex Systems Research Group at the Faculty of Engineering & IT.

Talk September 12th: Retail & Consumer Goods Analytics Summit, San Diego – The Impact of Social Media on Data & Analytics

30JulMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

RIS News, the leading media organization for retail executives, and Consumer Goods Technology, the leading source for the consumer goods sector, have partnered to launch the 2014 Retail and Consumer Goods Analytics Summit. The conference hashtag is #RCAS2014.

I will speak on September 12th at the event. I present the Closing Keynote from 2:30 – 3:10pm on Friday. My talk is titled:

The Impact of Social Media on Data & Analytics

Speaker: Marc Smith, Director, Social Media Research Foundation

People talk about the products and services the use, love or hate all the time in social media. These conversations can be better understood through perspective of social network analysis. Network theory views the world as a web of connected people. Network analysis builds measures and visualizations of collections of connections to reveal the key people, groups and issues in these conversations. Using social media network maps and reports the confusing landscape of tweets and posts comes into focus. Information visualizations of the virtual crowds of people gathered around every brand, product, event, or service highlights the range of variation in the shape of these crowds. Six different patterns have been identified so far, allowing social media managers to recognize the nature of the brand network they have and the nature of the network they want to have. Network measures are useful as KPIs for tracking not just the size and volume of a social media stream, but also the shape and structure of the pattern of connections. The six patterns: divided, unified, fragmented, clustered, and in and out hub and spoke, are a useful guide to strategic engagement in social media.

These are social media network maps and reports for the terms risnewsinsights and “consumergoods OR cgsm2014 OR cgtmagazine“:

risnewsinsights Twitter…

consumergoods OR cgsm20

NodeXL is hiring: C#, .NET, ASP.NET, VSTO, Admin for servers and MySQL

23JulMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

The NodeXL team seeks qualified full and part time software developers to contribute to the development of the NodeXL application and the NodeXL Graph Gallery web site.

NodeXL is sponsored by the Social Media Research Foundation and is a free and open way to get insights into connected structures like networks. NodeXL makes it easy to extract networks from many social media platforms, and automatically process the data into a network visualization and report. Using NodeXL researchers, scholars, analysts, marketing, PR and event professionals can all easily collect, store, analyze, visualize, and publish reports on social media networks.

We seek a skilled developer who can work in a distributed virtual team to maintain end extend the application.

Candidates should have the following skills:

Required: .NET development skills in C#.

Because most of the NodeXL software is written in C#.

Required: Basic system administrator skills. Amazon EC2 experience is a plus, but certainly not required.

We have three NodeXL EC2 servers that need to be kept up and running. This involves regular server monitoring, backups, Windows updates, increasing disk sizes when necessary, and so on.

Desired: Excel programming skills, preferably with Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO).

The NodeXL Excel Template uses VSTO. These skills might be hard to come by, though, and any C# programmer should be able to learn the Excel programming model without much difficulty.

Desired: MySQL programming and administrator skills.

The NodeXL Graph Server runs on MySQL. Bonus: Experience dealing with larger databases. The Graph Server database is approaching half a terabyte, and having someone who knows how to manage that would be a big plus.

Desired: ASP.NET / HTML / CSS / JavaScript skills.

The NodeXL Graph Gallery is implemented in ASP.Net.

Desired: SQL Server programming skills.

The NodeXL Graph Gallery back end runs on SQL Server.

Would be nice: Forum moderation experience.

Because people ask lots of questions on the NodeXL CodePlex Discussion board.

Interested? Email marc@connectedaction.net to submit an application.

June 18th, 2014: IIeX-NA: Atlanta, Georgia

08JunMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

I will speak on June 18th at the IIeX-NA 2014 event in Atlanta, Georgia. The Insight Innovation Exchange conference focuses on advances in market research.

My talk is about the ways social network analysis can reveal important patterns in social media.

CHARTING COLLECTIONS OF CONNECTIONS IN SOCIAL MEDIA:

CREATING MAPS AND MEASURES WITH NODEXL

Susan Griffin (Chair), Marc Smith

lennyism OR insightnovation OR #IIeX Twitter NodeXL SNA Map and Report for Monday, 09 June 2014

The graph represents a network of 611 Twitter users whose tweets in the requested date range contained “lennyism OR insightnovation OR #IIeX”, or who were replied to or mentioned in those tweets. The network was obtained from the NodeXL Graph Server on Monday, 09 June 2014 at 00:24 UTC.

The requested date range was from Tuesday, 01 April 2014 at 00:00 UTC through Sunday, 08 June 2014 at 23:59 UTC.

The tweets in the network were tweeted over the 67-day, 4-hour, 35-minute period from Tuesday, 01 April 2014 at 00:26 UTC to Saturday, 07 June 2014 at 05:01 UTC.

There is an edge for each “replies-to” relationship in a tweet, an edge for each “mentions” relationship in a tweet, and a self-loop edge for each tweet that is not a “replies-to” or “mentions”.

The graph is directed.

The graph’s vertices were grouped by cluster using the Clauset-Newman-Moore cluster algorithm.

The graph was laid out using the Harel-Koren Fast Multiscale layout algorithm.

The edge colors are based on edge weight values. The edge widths are based on edge weight values. The edge opacities are based on edge weight values. The vertex sizes are based on followers values. The vertex opacities are based on followers values.

Top 10 Vertices, Ranked by Betweenness Centrality:
@lennyism
@insightnovation
@beyondverbal
@socialdecode
@rebmannresearch
@danielfalcon
@lrwonline
@rafacespedes
@fearlesscomp
@eyeonmedialatam

Top URLs in Tweet in Entire Graph:
http://www.iiex-na.org
http://www.iiex-na.org/
http://www.iiex-na.org/sponsors/
https://events.bizzabo.com/iiexlatam2014/welcome
http://chile.feebbo.com/feebboch/surveys/anon/participate/3143
http://www.iicompetition.org/idea/view/312
http://www.iiex-latam.org/
http://www.iicompetition.org/idea/view/321
http://www.bloomberg.com/video/the-naked-brand-the-future-of-marketing-wTo1reeNTNugBjR1Qj~gnA.html
http://commun.it