presented at the Techville 2012 conference held by the Nashville Technology Council in May 2012 by Kate O'Neill, James Soto, Joshua Camp, and Joey Strawn

1. From Connection to Innovation:
Measuring Social Media Technology’s Impact
on Community and Business Well-Being
in Techville and Beyond
Part 1: Kate O’Neill

2. #wearenashville. #wearechatty.
Healthy blogging
community in mid-
2000s
Strong
representation on
Twitter and in other
social channels
Fans, friends, followers
of beloved local brands
(Yazoo, Opry, etc.)
#34 city on
Tweet Grader

3. Is our participation productive?

4. Harnessing Participation for Progress
Boosterism
Innovative
Applications
Advancement

5. A Case for Alternative Measures
• Global Peace Index
• Happiness economics
• Legatum Prosperity Index
• Philosophy of happiness
• Post-materialism
• Psychometrics
• Satisfaction with Life Index
• Utilitarianism
• World Values Survey
• Gross National Cool

6. Gross National Happiness
• Psychological Well-being
• Standard of Living and Happiness
• Good Governance
• Health
• Education
• Community Vitality
• Cultural Diversity and Resilience
• Time Use and Happiness
• Ecological Diversity and Resilience

7. Genuine Progress Indicator
• + Personal consumption weighted by income distribution index
• + Value of household work and parenting
• + Value of higher education
• + Value of volunteer work
• + Services of consumer durables
• + Services of highways and streets
• - Cost of crime
• - Loss of leisure time
• - Cost of unemployment
• - Cost of consumer durables
• - Cost of commuting
• - Cost of household pollution abatement
• - Cost of automobile accidents
• - Cost of water pollution
• - Cost of air pollution
• - Cost of noise pollution
• - Loss of wetlands
• - Loss of farmland
• -/+ Loss of forest area and damage from logging roads
• - Depletion of nonrenewable energy resources
• - Carbon dioxide emissions damage
• - Cost of ozone depletion
• +/- Net capital investment
• +/- Net foreign borrowing
• = GPI
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genuine_Progress_Indicator

8. Improving Metrics that Matter
• Recruitment of Tech Talent to Nashville
• Retention of Tech Talent in Nashville
• Tech Sector Development
• Tech Entrepreneurship
• Overall Livability and Quality of Life

9. The Health of Techville’s
Tech Community
• Talent Availability
– Influenced by boosterism?
• Tech grads attrition
• Tech talent likelihood to stay
• Investment

10. But we don’t
want to be
Silicon Valley.
But we
don’t want
to be
Atlanta.
But we
don’t want
to be
Austin.

11. Of course not. We want to be
• Music City.
• Techville.
• Nashvegas.
• Smashville.
• #wearenashville

12. Not Just About the Joneses
• People prefer to live in a world in which they receive an
annual salary of $50,000, when others are pulling in
$25,000, than an annual salary of $100,000 when others
are making $200,000.
• Social comparison, status and rank more important than
the absolute value of our bank accounts or reputations
• How we spend money influences our individual happiness:
“Spending money on anything that promotes personal growth --
French lessons, say, or a cooking class -- tends to make us
happier, as does spending money on social outings, compared to
spending money on solitary endeavors”
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2675

13. The Happiness of Techville’s
Tech Community
• Connectedness
• Identity
• Integrity
• Relative Success

14. Measuring Community Happiness
• Social Sentiment
– Text analysis of the sentiment of social shares and
statuses
• Social Connectedness
– Analyze networks and connectedness for
indicators
• Self-Reporting
• Readily quantifiable economic indicators

15. Social Networks and Health
• Social connectedness relevant to health
• “social network transmission may be one
mechanism through which both beneficial and
adverse effects are mediated.”
• http://www.bmj.com/content/337/bmj.a2781
.short

16. The Means to Acquire the Metrics
• Integrating service APIs
• Alternative views of mundane data
• Analyzing and data storytelling

17. Alternative Views of Mundane Data

18. The Means to Impact the Metrics
• Guitars and Gamification
• Happiness Contagion
• Weak Ties + Offline Connectedness = Strong
Ties

19. We Don’t Do “Weak Ties” in Music City
• Connecting Nashville’s connectors
• Online contacts become offline connections

20. From Connection to Innovation
Part 2: James Soto, Joshua Camp, Joey Strawn

21. Setting the Stage
1. Share insights as to how Nashville stacks up
as a tech community
2. Assess if the current metrics we use to assess
tech community health and happiness work
3. Explore how community, corporate and
public sector social media connectivity and
adoption plays a role
4. Use a few tools of the trade

22. DIGITAL STALKING
Thanks for the Invitation?

30. FEATURING

32. THE NASHVILLE TECH GENOME
Can We Mind Map Nashville’s Technology Ecosystem

34. NTC as an Indicator
Nashville Technology Council Membership
Tech Members
Social Media & Marcom
Technology

35. Growing Tech Community
350
400
450
2011
2012
NTC Membership
NTC Membership

36. Tech Entrepreneurship

38. Exploring ways to
Measure Techville’s Progress
• Gross Domestic Product
(GDP)
• Genuine Progress
Indicator (GPI)
• Social Media Chatter
• Social Media Adoption
• Mind Map
• API’s
• Listening

39. ENTER SOCIAL METRICS
From Traditional to Technology Measurement

40. The Chicken and the Egg
Does economic growth lead to happiness or
does happiness lead to economic growth?
Where do we really start?

41. #WeAreDriven
“New firms add an average of 3 million jobs in
their first year, while older companies lose 1
million jobs annually”
-2010 Kauffman Foundation Study

42. Sources, Tools, and Technology
• Startup Genome Project
• Angel list
• University of Chicago, SM Impact Study
• Nashville Technology Council
• Aberdeen
• US Bureau of Labor Statistics
• Radian6 and Our Social Arsenal

43. Nashville’s Digital Growth
2011
NTC member companies - 390
Social & Digital Media Members - 63
2012
NTC member companies - 431
Social & Digital Media - 65

44. Average Lifespan of a Funded Startup
- Shikhar Gihash; Harvard Business School
• 70-80% Never see an ROI
• 30-40% liquidate entirely in the first 3-5 years

45. Old Data = Tired Results
…yet we continue to measure Key Performance
Indicators as though they should still be based
on a limited system of compiling the same old
tired data that yields erroneous results

46. The Typical ‘Old School’ Example
GDP includes ‘negative’ expenditures such as
burglar alarms, daycare, self-defense and fails to
capture social investments into the community.
In other words, welfare takes a back-seat to cash
flow, which is where GPI comes back in

47. Objective Vs. Subjective Social Indicators
• Unemployment
• Poverty Rate
• Working Hours per Week
• Perinatal Mortality Rate
• Life Satisfaction
• Job Satisfaction
• Perception of Liberty
• Personal Areas of Importance
• Environmental Concerns

48. The real problem
• Investing in socioeconomic initiatives based
on a perceived benefit, with the only real goal
being to improve that very perception or
single metric.
• No standard for how to correlate
• No standard for what to measure, monitor, or
how to correctly interpret the data

49. It’s Easy!
• It’s EASY to pull outdated statistics and ignore
the CURRENT situation
• It’s EASY to see that unemployment is high
and think “we need jobs”
• It’s EASY to see that crime is on the rise and
proclaim “We need more police!”
• It’s EASY for the public to see education costs
rising and it’s EASY for them to to cry “Debt
Forgiveness!”

50. Social Media to the Rescue?
• Ok, so maybe it’s really just time to re-
evaluate our methodology
• What are we measuring in the first place, and
how? With what tools?

51. The REAL question?
• How can we identify, and then act on the
present state of our community and
implement changes that will give us a true
‘edge’ as a technology hub?

52. Measuring Startup Attraction Potential
• Entrepreneurship Spirit
• Legal Environment
• Availability of Talent
• Infrastructure
• Capital Availability
• Community Sentiment and Support

53. Overhauling the Social Indicators
City Services Quality of Life

54. Nashville’s Connectedness
Benchmarking Nashville’s 49 Inc. 5000’s
LinkedIn – 88%
Facebook - 76%
Twitter - 65%
Google+ - 20%
Youtube - 29%

55. Stop, Look, and Listen

56. Benchmarking Greatness
*Austin
*Palo Alto
*Boston
*Raleigh
*Tampa
Global Marketing Technology Startup ‘Chatter’

57. Benchmarking Greatness
Nashville
*Austin
*Palo Alto
*Boston
*Raleigh
*Tampa
Vs.
Global Marketing Technology Startup ‘Chatter’

58. Actionable Intelligence
Nashville Ranked 43/75 in 2011
Benchmarking our Future with new metrics

59. In a Nutshell

60. @JoshuaCamp
@Joey_Strawn
@JamesSotoISM
@ISMSocial
#marketstrong

61. @JoshuaCamp
@Joey_strawn
@JamesSotoISM
@ISMSocial
#marketstrong