See how Social Analytics can help employees discover the content, colleagues and communities that can help them Get Work Done.
Note: originally posted here: http://www.slideshare.net/alanlepofsky/social-analytics-in-the-enterprise
Note: some of the fonts/text seem to have been messed up during the conversation to SlideShare. ex: Slide 30 should say "Content".
Vendors, press, analysts… everyone is talking about Social Analytics.But what is it, and how can it help in the context of getting work done?In today’s talk I want to move beyond the hype and provide some real examples of how social analytics can help employees
I’ll start by providing my definition of social analytics.Then to set the stage, we’ll look at examples from tools we use in our personal lives,Which will then position us to look at similar examples from enterprise software
Collecting – important to gather all the dataMeasure – important to make the calculations against KPIsBut it’s NOT just about the content… SA involves people and the interactions between people, and between people and content.This is a theme you’re going to hear me say over and over again in this presentationPhoto credit: https://secure.flickr.com/photos/61056899@N06/5751301741/
The first part of social analytics is getting the data.You can’t make measurements or observe patterns without it.
Where is all this data coming from. I love this chart from Image via: http://www.go-gulf.com/blog/60-secondsTake a look at home many blog posts, videos, photos, tweets, status updates are being created every minute.It’s staggering.
BUT what I want you to get your mind away from is just thinking about “big data” as being more and more content being created.Content is only 1/3 of the equation.Image via: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ginnerobot/2549674296
People are equally as important when discussing social analytics.It’s not just more and more stuff being created, it’s who’s creating it, who’s consuming it, who’s sharing it…Image via:http://www.flickr.com/photos/pgoyette/2819175465/
And the part I think people understand or at least think about the least, is not just the content or the people,It’s how people interact with each otherAnd how people interact with the content.It’s those interaction gestures that are creating the largest amount of metadata, And it’s that metadata is what allows us to discover really important things.Image via: Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bala_/2488407797/
So what do I mean by “metadata is what allows us to discover really important things”?To example, let’s start with a simple example we all know: the phone and email.These tools essentially have senders, recipients and content.At the end of the day, what information do you really have about the relationships?Well, the output is an addressbook. It’s not shared and it’s out of date.It’s pretty limited.
But then along came social networks. (both internal and external)
With social networks, we’ve all been introduced to the concept of connecting to people.You did not connect with people in email, you just send them stuff.There was no explicit action of connecting, friending or following.You can’t see statistics of how many people have your email in their addressbook, but you can see how many people follow you on a social site.So how can that information be useful?
Here we have what I call the “lowest hanging fruit” of social analytics, the recommendation.FB, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc… all provide some type of “people you should follow”, but for the most part these are horrible recommendations.They are based on very simple things like people you have in common.It’s a great start, but there are much more powerful things recommendation engines can do which we’ll look at later on.
Here’s an example of how you can drill into more detail about your social network.It’s a tool from Microstrategy called Wisdom.Wisdom is a free iPad app that allows you to see the demographic breakdown of your friends.
So, discovering information about people is nice, but now start to layer in what those people are doing.What they are reading or writing.Questions they are asking.Ideas they are sharing.Photos and videos.
With all these people creating all this content, we need ways to interact with it all, which leads to what I call “the new verbs”The new verbs are actions like bookmark, like, +1, share, retweet.These actions make it simple to put your stamp of approval on objects, inform the owners or creators that you approve.These simple gestures make it easy for people to get a sense of what is popular and what is now.For example, a blogger can now easily tell which posts people liked and shared with others.You don’t get that type of social analytics with email!
So going back to MicrostrategyWisdon, we can move up the social analytics value chain a bitAnd look not only at the demographicsBut at what type of interactions we have with our facebook friends.Who’s posts do I comment on the most?Who likes my posts the most?
So we’ve talked about people.We’ve talked about the content they are creating.And we’re talked about some of the interaction gestures.Now let’s talk about some of the ways this information is displayed.One of the simplest ways is via leaderboards.Leaderboards provide motivation for people to “move up”What I find fascinating is not just basics like where you are, how many times you’ve visitet, but notice I earned extra points for a check in because I knew the person who was the mayor.Now image at work if you could tell that the people you were interacting with were subject matter experts? So instead of each thread or conversation having equal weight, what if you knew more context about the people you were interacting with?This is where social analytics can play a big role in the enterprise.
And what about knowing who your content is reaching?Google+ has an amazing features called Ripples, which provides visualization about who’s reshared your posts.
Search plus Your World , Google's new search experience that blends personal results with universal resultsRegular search provides pretty generic results
but looking at my personal results I see information created by people I know, life, and trust.We always hear that one of the biggest problems are work is finding information.Imagine of your intranet’s search engine worked like this? You’ll see some cool advancements in search in a slide later on.
The real power of sentiment analysis is integrating with real customer data (SFDC, SAP, etc) so you can determine what type of customer the posts are coming from.Ex: Lihtium/Scout Labs, Salesforce Radian 6, Jive Fathom, Cisco SocialMiner, IBM Cognos Consumer Insight,Genesys, Oracle RightNow CX for Twitter , SyncapseImagine sentiment analysis not of your brand, but of your employees? Well see that very thing in a few minutes.
So hopefully I’ve made it clear that social analytics requires content + people + interactions.The new tools and services we’re using are providing an increabile array of metadata we can use
That metadata allows us to now just break down information by demographics, but also by psychographics, meaning what people like, their mood, their passions.What am I doing?Where I was. Where I am. Where I'm going. Who I’m with.What am I eating?What am I drinking?What I bought. Where I shop.How I pay. What I watch. What I listen to. What am I reading.Who I like. What teams I route for/against.What sports I play.How far did I walk? How many calories have I burned?What’s my heart rate? What’s my weight?
I believe the most important that Social Analytics can do at work, is help employees discover the right colleagues, content and communities to help get their job done.
IBM Connections provides recommendations, but using much more information than just people you have in common.(similar to my consumer slide about recommendations)
NewsGator analyzes various aspects of people’s profiles and the content they create to graph their strength of connection with particular termsPeople closer to the center have higher expertiseAdmins can determine the weights applied to various actions.This helps reduce the problem of “just because so and so talks about something a lot, it doesn’t mean they are an expert”
Socialtext, via partnership withIntroNetworks provides a very interesting way of pattern matching people based on a series of attributes.
We talked about leaderboards earlier, here’s an example from Yammer where we’re not looking at something as simple as “who’s the most active person”, instead we’re seeing who the people are that the community responds to the most.
At CA employees share information with each other openly on their Global User Community.Via integration with Badgeviille, as members contribute to the community by creating content, commenting, voting, etc. they are rewarded points.A leader-board widget placed at the top of the community and profile pages enables people to easily see who the most active members are.This transparent view of participation provides incentive for people to contribute to the community.The use of Badgeville at CA has driven increased engagement with the community, enhanced user generated content, as well as surfaced levels of expertise within a broad array of topics.
Again, its important to now just see who’s posting the most or creating the most pages, but to get a greater degree of insight such as “which conversations have the most replies” or “which pages are people watching the most”
Remember that Goolge+ Ripples feature, where you can see where you content is going.Here IBM Connections is showing you who has downloaded a file.This allows content creators to get a really good sense of who their audience is.
Remember the slides about google’s social search… well vendors like Jive and IBM are providing similar features.Here you can see two different people, performing the same search (“analyst”) get very different results based on their role and their social network.
We’ve talked about colleagues and content, let’s talk about community.Here IBM Connections is providing some basic analytics about activity
Similarly Yammer allows people to get a very detailed snapshot of what’s happening which networks, groups, files, pages, etc.This enables people to filter through large amounts of information
Igloo Software, via partnership with Microstrategy (mentioned earlier wrt Wisdom Facebook app) allows you to measure a community against KPIs
Lithium, well their Principal Scientist Michael Wu, literally wrote the book on social analytics.http://pages.lithium.com/science-of-social.htmlLithium enables community managers to take six different factors into account when computing the health of their community.key attributes of a healthy community: growth, useful content, popularity, responsiveness, interactivity, and liveliness These map to what we’ve been discussing today, content, people and the interactions
Remember when I talked about sentiment analysis of a brand, now imagine sentiment analysis of your employeesSocialCastVmware, NikoNiko (means smiles in Japanese)Easily get a sense of how people, department or locations are feeling.Enables managers to take action.
IBM, via integration of their Cognos analytic tools with their collaboration tools, is look at ways of getting detailed sentiment analysis based on what people are writing, posting, etc.A great example IBM provide me is: picture discovering an unhappy employee (perhaps they don’t like the old laptop they have) and being able to take corrective action to make that employee happy, or better yet prevent them from leaving.This is much more affective than they old “end of year employee review”.
An extremely hot area is the combination of social and HR.Oracle Fusion - how social attributes (in this case, kudos, or what is more popularly known as social feedback) is surfaced in the talent review process for better analysis of the workforce and talent review outcomes. Others: SFDC Ryyple, Visier, Mercer, Saba, PeopleFluent and many more.Use social analytics now just to improve a single employee’s job, but picture creating winning teams via matching the right people.Think “Moneyball for the enterprise” (movie reference)