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.

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

June 27-29 2014: Networks in the Global World 2014, St Petersburg, Russia

08JunMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

NetGloW ’14: Bridging Theory and Method: American, European, and Russian Studies

June 27-29, St Petersburg, Russia

I will remotely participate in the conference “Networks in the Global World 2014. Bridging Theory and Methods: American, European and Russian Studies” taking place in St Petersburg, Russia, June 27-29 2014. The 2 day, single-track conference will also have pre-conference workshops including a day devoted to using the NodeXL social media network analysis application. The primary organizing institution and host is the Centre for German and European Studies, Bielefeld University and the St Petersburg State University.

This will be the 2nd Networks in the Global World conference (for information on the 1st one held in 2012 see http://www.ngw.spbu.ru). This conference series brings together researchers exploring cutting edge networks research from around the globe. In 2014 the focus is on linking theory and methods that integrate information, communication, semantic and cultural networks.

The primary goal of the NetGloW conference series is to bring together networks researchers from around the globe, to unite the efforts of various scientific disciplines in response to the key challenges faced by network studies today, and to exchange local research results – thus allowing an analysis of global processes. It is also crucial for us to support junior researchers’ orientation in the complex landscape of network science, and to encourage applications of network analysis by practitioners.

The idea of the 2014 event is to discuss the key current issues and problems of linking theoretical and methodological developments in network analysis.

The structure of the conference: June 27^th – workshops and seminar for practitioners; June 28^th & 29^th – presentations.

Confirmed invited speakers:

Jana Diesner, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
Loet Leydesdorff, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
Tom Valente, University of Southern California, USA
Dimitris Christopoulos, MODUL University Vienna, Austria
Mario Diani, University of Trento, Italy
Peter Groenewegen, VU University Amsterdam, Netherlands
Wouter de Nooy, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
Johanne Saint-Charles, University of Quebec at Montreal, Canada
Marc Smith, Connected Action Consulting Group, USA

The sessions of the conference will include the following:

Networks in Science, Technology, and Innovation: Traditional Approaches and Operationalization of New Theories
Words and Networks
Network Perspectives on Knowledge, Communication and Culture
Making Sense of Big Network Data: Testing Hypotheses on New Data
Social Movements and Collective Action as the Network Phenomena
Network Analysis of Political and Policy-making Domains

The conference will host workshops on the following network analysis software: ConText, Pajek, NodeXL, UCINet, RSiena.

The conference will include seminar Network analysis: How can it be used by globally operating practitioners?

Host: Center for German and European Studies (St. Petersburg State University – Bielefeld University).

Working language: English.

Abstracts (200 words) will be published as a part of conference programme. Full papers (2500 words) should be submitted prior to the event. Selected full papers will be published in peer-reviewed journal(s).

Free accommodation will be provided for MA and PhD students who submitted the best abstracts.

Fee: Participation in the conference is free of charge.

Further information about the conference and registration form can be found at www.ngw.spbu.ru or requested via e-mail: netglow@spbu.ru.

Book: Ways of Knowing in HCI (Kellogg and Olson, editors) Chapter on SNA and HCI

08JunMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

A new book edited by Wendy Kellogg and Judy Olson is now available. Ways of Knowing in HCI is a collection of chapters on the subject of methods and theories that frame Human Computer Interaction studies.

I co-authored a chapter in the book with Professor Derek Hansen from Brigham Young University on the role social network analysis can play in Human Computer Interaction.

: A social network consisting of Twitter users (nodes) who have Tweeted the word “global warming” connected to one another based on Follow, Reply, or Mention relationships (edges). Nodes are assigned different colors based on clusters. Hubs with many followers are indicated by size.

The chapter outline:

Introduction

A Brief History of Social Network Analysis

Social Network Analysis and Human-Computer Interaction

Goals of Social Network Analysis for HCI Researchers and Practitioners

1) Inform the design and implementation of new CSCW systems
2) Understand and improve current CSCW systems
3) Evaluate impact of CSCW system on social relationships
4) Design novel CSCW systems and features using SNA methods
5) Answer fundamental social science questions

Social Network Analysis Questions

Questions about Individual Social Actors
Questions about Overall Network Structure
Questions about Network Dynamics and Flows

Performing Social Network Analysis

Identify Goals & Research Questions
Collect Data
Sources of Network Data
Types of Social Networks
Representing Network Data

Three ways of representing network data

How to Analyze and Visualize Data
Network Analysis Tools
Commonly Used Network Analysis and Visualization Tools

Node-Specific Metrics: Focusing on the Trees

Common Centrality Metrics

Aggregate Network Metrics: Focusing on the Forest

Common Aggregate Network Metrics

Network Clusters & Motifs: Focusing on the Thickets

Network Dynamics and Information Flow

What Constitutes Good Work

References

NEW: NodeXL updates Twitter user and list importer

06JunMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

NodeXL has new updates to its importers for Twitter users and lists.

We have released an updated version of NodeXL that simplifies and merges the previously separate User and List importers.

The new, streamlined importer treats an individual user as a list of one.

Lists can be defined by pointing to an existing Twitter List or simply entering a list of delimited user names into the text box.

The updated importer now collects many more tweets per person and parses these messages to generate reply and mention edges.

You can now define a group of Twitter users and find out how much they reply and mention one another.

You can even pull in the followers of each person, to see if they reply or mention people they also follow.

But ever since June 11, 2013, Twitter has made access to the “follows” edge data very difficult (its just very slow). Designed and implemented prior to the update that restricted access to the follower network, the original NodeXL Twitter list importers relied mostly on queries that are now impractically slow for all but the smallest lists of users who have small collections of followers.

The update to these User and List importer is partially an adaptation to these changes. The importer shifts away from the follower network to focus on the communication interaction data in the content of Tweets. Since Twitter offers more generous access to Tweets than to information about who follows who, we are obliged to make better use of what they do offer.

The results are insightful! Here is a map of the connections among the members of the United States Congress.

VIDEO: SNA for fundraising and development webinar hosted by the Prospect Research Institute

05JunMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

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.