I participated in a webinar hosted by the Prospect Research Institute. We discussed the ways that NodeXL can simplify the task of collecting social media and social network data. The tool generates easy to understand reports that highlight insights into connected structures.
The slides associated with the talk can be found here:
Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a Connected World
Episode 4 of the Social Media Clarity podcast has just been released.
In this episode host Randy Farmer (@frandallfarmer) and I talk about how to think about social media influence in terms of a social network. Networks can be measured and a variety of patterns can be found in them that indicate the role or pattern of connections a person has.
We talk about why influence is not a single attribute, it is a more complex function of a person’s position within a web of relationships.
People play different roles in social media networks, we talk about three: hubs, bridges and islands. Each plays a different role in a social media network. Each has a different kind of influence.
Once these different roles are measured, people can be ranked in terms of their similarity to one or the other pattern. Highly ranked people can be influential” in terms of their different locations in a network.
In a related blog post, I suggest possible strategies for using network insights to drive a social media campaign: identify key people and their content to guide targeted relationship building. See:
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This April 8 and 9, 2013 an NSF funded workshop called Kredible.Net to be held at Purdue University will bring together researchers studying reputation and social roles in social media.
The grant will help researchers investigate how social media, especially Wikipedia articles and editors, shape public knowledge. The project aims to build a research community and to propose a research agenda for the study of reputation and authority in informal knowledge markets, such as Wikipedia.
The team is lead by Sorin Adam Matei (PI) of Brian Lamb School of Communication, Elisa Bertino (Cyber Center), Michael Zhu and Chuanhai Liu (Department of Statistics) , and Luo Si (Department of Computer Science).
The KredibleNet project is supported by an international team of researchers including Marc Smith, director of the Social Media Research Foundation and the NodeXL project and by Dr. Luca De Alfaro, from University of California, Santa Cruz, the head of the WikiTrust project. The team also includes researchers Jure Leskovec (Stanford), Bernie Hogan (Oxford Internet Institute), and Ben Shneiderman (University of Maryland).
The KredibleNet grant will fund research and workshops that will reveal how social media leaders gain authority to shape public knowledge.
See: http://kredible.net/in/kredible-net-awarded-nsf-grant-to-study-reputation-and-social-roles-on-social-media/
The video from my talk is on YouTube: