The Enterprise 2.0 conference is about to get underway in Boston. The event focuses on all the ways social media tools that are familiar on the consumer Internet are making their way behind the firewall in many enterprises and institutions. Why can’t you “friend” a colleague or “like” a spreadsheet or slide deck? Employees often come to their jobs expecting tools that resemble the social media tools with which they already spend much of their time.

Like many conferences, this one has a hashtag, actually two that I know of: #e2 and #e2conf. There is already a good deal of activity leading up to the event. Here is a map of connections among a group of people who mentioned either #e2 or #e2conf in the last few days.

In this map there are 532 Vertices and 9,395 Unique Edges, creating 13 Connected Components, 11 of which had only a Single-Vertex, the largest component had 519 vertices which were interconnected 9,393 times.  The small number of isolated components indicates that this is a cohesive community of highly connected participants.  These people know and follow, reply and mention one another.  The Graph had a Density of 0.03 and the Maximum Geodesic Distance (Diameter) was 5 steps with an Average Geodesic Distance of 2.

Within this mass of connected users is a core group of highly “between” people, those who most broadly span connections within the population. These are one possible set of “influentials” within the Enterprise 2.0 community.

Here is a two screen view of the list of the top most between #e2 OR #e2conf mentioning twitter users along with the overview graph of their internal linkages.

A closer look at the graph alone can reveal enough detail to read the names of these central participants.

This is a view of the list of authors sorted in Excel by their “Betweenness centrality” score, the measure of how much these people “bridge” across the network.

An alternative view plots these contributors in an X/Y space based on their count of followers (along the x axis) and count of tweets (along the y axis).

The top 15 are:

dhinchcliffe
jowyang
rlavigne42
enterprise20
jumpersearch
marciamarcia
itsinsider
cmswatch
philcampos
rwang0
dankeldsen
lliu
juliancaparaz
lehawes
sameerpatel

Twitter users who mentioned #e2 or #e2conf on June 13, 2010 scaled by number of followers, x = log(followers), y = log(tweets).

There is a correlation between tweets and followers, but not everyone converts tweets to followers at the same rate. Below the diagonal are those who over convert tweets to followers, those above the diagonal under convert tweets to followers.

The book, Analyzing social media networks with NodeXL: Insights from a connected world, is forthcoming summer 2010 from Morgan Kaufmann and from Amazon.