The Future of Social Analytics - Defrag 2010

The Future of Social Analytics
by Dion Hinchcliffe (@dhinchcliffe)
Wednesday, November 17, 2010

® 2010 Dachis Group. Conﬁdential and Proprietary
What is social analytics?
2

The Future of Social Analytics | Defrag 2010
Social Analytics
3
getting value from whatʼs observable
“The creation of typed signals by
listening to social ecosystems,
resulting in the ability to tap into
collective intelligence as well as
aggregate, mine, and predict
outcomes.”

Social is now how we communicate today
4

Hundreds of public social networks...
5
...channel fragmentation

Dozens of internal social channels
• E-mail
• Text messaging
• Instant messaging
• Meetings and conference calls
• Enterprise 2.0
• Social CMS
• Knowledge management
• Intranets
• Online communities
6

Knowledge is increasingly visible in social channels
7
It no longer “evaporates” or is hidden

And we now realize itʼs part of a single continuum...
8
Social Businessenterprise ecosystem
customers +
world
business partners
workers
Web 2.0
Crowdsourcing
Social CRM
Enterprise 2.0
Social Media
Online Communities
integrated vision
intranet
extranet
Internet

But is all this observable information valuable?
9
story

Observable work: The issues
• Knowledge workers currently spend 20% of their
time looking for the information they need to do
their jobs (1 day a week) Source: Forrester
• Approximately 42% of the economies of developed
nations is “tacit interactions”, meaning complex
collaborative problem solving carried out by
knowledge workers. Source: McKinsey
• Organizations that adopt social tools widely, after
several years, see the amount of observable work
skyrocket, becoming a management and search
concern. Source: Jive
• Between 80%-90% of the information that
organizations have spend hundreds of billions
collecting over the last 30 years in IT systems is
inaccessible by most workers. Source: Various including
Gartner, IDC, others
10

“Information overload is not the problem. Itʼs
ﬁlter failure.” - Clay Shirky
11

Our information landscape is now measured in
millions of exabytes
• Social ecosystems are largely responsible.
• The good news: Information is no longer
submerged.
• However, it is increasingly becoming an onslaught.
12
1 EB = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 B = 1018 bytes = 1 billion gigabytes = 1 million terabytes
Visible
Knowledge Us

Comparing analytics and search
13
Seeing the
shape of the
haystack
Finding the
needle
versusanalytics search

14
value

Entering a new era of information
15
Take Away: We donʼt need to directly see all the information, we
need to see the “shadows” it makes.

How do we get to the third wave?
• Cloud computing? SOA?
• Open APIs and supply chains?
• Decentralized IT?
• Better data warehouses?
• Improved search engines?
• Recommendation systems?
• Business re-engineering?
• How about analytics?
16
The Goal: Breaking down
information silos and
obscured information inside
and outside of our
organizations to get to value

First, itʼs about listening
17

Listening versus crawling
• Filter 1: The lens of your social capital
18

• Filter 2: What you care about
19
Filters

• Filter 3: What you donʼt know to ask for
20
Search that ﬁnds you in your
social channel.

Putting listening in context
21
Itʼs the new ﬂow of business

21
Social Media
Universe
1 Billion People
+
You & Your Organization
+
3rd Parties (Partners, etc)

21
Social Media
Universe
1 Billion People
+
+
Global
Reach
Economy
of Scale
Unified
Approach

21
Social Media
Universe
1 Billion People
+
+
Global
Reach
Economy
of Scale
Unified
Approach
Listening
Landscape
Analytics &
Intelligence
Engagement
Processes
Capability
Acquisition
•Create scaled & integrated picture
•Identify participants & communities
•Capture unmet needs
•Identify opportunities & crises
•Aggregate social media data
•Mine sentiment & trends
•Derive strategic insight
•Develop effective responses
•Provide dashboards and BI
•Access all social touch points
•Engage with ecosystem
•Drive objectives and create value
•Ensure consistency of response
•Build new social capital
•Create conduit to social world
•Build skills and ability to execute
•Develop ability to govern
•Assemble a Social Business
Capability

22
Listen Analyze
Engage
Social Business
Capability
informs
informs
• Tap widely and deeply into the
top social channels
• Pick up important social
signals in near real-time
• Centralized capacity to update
listening capabilities as the
social marketplace continues
to rapidly evolve
• Enable all stakeholders to
access vital social activity
• Maintain an understanding of
everything the marketplace knows
• Be able to connect the dots of social
activity across all channels
• Wield strategic insight that can be
leveraged across the organization
• Initiate responses systematically
from policy with less duplication and
with high degrees of automation
• Share and provide access to data
and insight to all stakeholders
Connect with customers in their
channel of preference to drive high
value activities such as better
customer care, product input,
innovation, and sales
New products,
services, and
products
Social
Business
Processes
The new ﬂow of business

How will we listen?
• Personally
- In our social environments
- On our devices
- With our social capital
- For us
• Using strategic tools
- To automate
- To scale
- With aggregate social capital
- For our businesses
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http://apps.facebook.com/friendwheel

Strategic listening tools exist
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• But are in their infancy
• Focus primarily on the outside
world
• Strongly favor new social
environments over older style and
vertical communities
• Have limited analytics abilities
• Donʼt connect well to existing
reporting tools and data
warehouses
• Are relatively expensive (compared
to free)
They also exist where you donʼt
expect them

25
• Plug-ins or E2.0 application features that
allow user feedback of contributions
• Including posts, comments, and even tags
• Example: LiquidPub
• Allow quality and portable reputations to be
established over time in E2.0 ecosystems
• Most useful for newish or large social
business environments
Nascent social analytics: Reputation systems

26
• Standard sidebar with
navigation and tag
cloud
• A floating graphic in
upper right which
shows an analysis of
what links users have
made to this page
Plug-ins for open source social systems like
Drupal and Wordpress

How do we reconcile with Enterprise 2.0?
27
social analytics
goes here

Second, itʼs about analytics
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Listening and graphing are easy, analyzing is
harder
• Requires deeper understanding what youʼre listening
to
• Needs tools that understand network graphs, power
laws, information architecture
• Worse, real results always seems to entail taxonomy/
classiﬁcation
- Which has been one of the very few classically stubborn
problems on the Web
• Almost as tough, itʼs social analytics, and so requires
insight into people
- Incorporation of motivations, personalities, desires, and
the vast variety of human expression, cultural mores,
and other social aspects virtually doesnʼt exist
• Itʼs not just about network theory, but about sociology
- Not just the what, but the why

Like the Semantic Web: Its a typing problem
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Unlike listening, real analytic tools are hard to
ﬁnd
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One Example: NodeXL

Itʼs about so much more than just social
network visualization
32

How Social Analytics Is Happening
The Story of KatrinaList
• Hurricane Katrina
– Survivors emerged and announced
where they were on their blogs
– People watching the Web’s syndication
“ecosystem” noticed the reports
– A small group collected the reports out
of the blogosphere and centralized the
listing
– Over 50,000 survivor reports in the first
3 days after the disaster
– Emergent phenomenon that’s a
microcosm of how we’ll do real-time
analytics and problem slving.
– A critical example for how to rethink
solutions to traditional business
problems in a 2.0 world in which we
can actually tap collective intelligence
through analytics
– Approach has since been codified into
event analytics platforms like Ushahidi

Stuff That Matters: Social Analytics for Major Global Events

Social analytics solves real and important
problems

What will social analytics be used for?
• Sentiment analysis
• Expertise location
• Critical situation tracking
• Root cause analysis
• Trend extraction
• Sociology
• Knowledge mining & discovery
• Social capital management
• Social supply chain
• And much more

The Future of Social Analytics
• Weʼll move beyond conﬂating social
listening and visualization with analytics
• The Google of social analytics will arrive
• It will be free, it will be multi-channel, and it will allow
us to see more of the shadows than ever before
• There will continue to be many niche tools but it will
ultimately look like the search industry does today
• Enterprises will be largely left out of the online world
of social analytics for internal uses
• But E2.0 social platforms will get them, eventually
• Business intelligence tools will become better at
social analytics.
• We will know weʼve gotten there when social analytics
tells us why, not just what
- Taking on previously unconquerable business challenges

The Future of Social Analytics - Defrag 2010

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