June 1, 2015: Consumer Goods Sales and Marketing Summit in New York City

04FebMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

There will be a NodeXL social media network analysis training session at the Consumer Goods Sales and Marketing Summit in New York City on June 1, 2015.

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.

July 12-13, 2010: Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, Redmond, WA

08JulMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

Faculty Summit

The 2010 Microsoft Research Faculty Summit was held July 12 and 13 in Redmond, Washington. Among the many panels and discussions related to the state of computer science the NodeXL team had several representatives talking about the ways network science education can be expanded using an easy to use application for network analysis built on Excel.

Jimmy Lin from the University of Maryland also attended to speak about programming in the cloud.

Here is the abstract for the NodeXL talk:

NodeXL – Social Network Analysis in Excel—Natasa Milic Frayling, Microsoft Research; Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland; Marc Smith, Connected Action

Businesses, entrepreneurs, individuals, and government agencies alike are looking to social network analysis (SNA) tools for insight into trends, connections, and fluctuations in social media. Microsoft’s NodeXL is a free, open-source SNA plug-in for use with Excel. It provides instant graphical representation of relationships of complex networked data. But it goes further than other SNA tools—NodeXL was developed by a multidisciplinary team of experts that bring together information studies, computer science, sociology, human-computer interaction, and over 20 years of visual analytic theory and information visualization into a simple tool anyone can use. This makes NodeXL of interest not only to end-users but also to researchers and students studying visual and network analytics and their application in the real world. NodeXL has the unique feature that it imports networks from Outlook email, Twitter, flickr, YouTube, WWW, and other sources, plus it offers a rich set of metrics, layouts, and clustering algorithms. This talk will describe NodeXL and our efforts to start the Social Media Research Foundation.

Some photos from the event: