Exploring the Practical Side of Social: Notes from the Virtual Enterprise 2.0 Social Analytics Conference

The average social practitioner is not maneuvering with a lot of down time. But an event like the recent virtual Enterprise 2.0 meeting is one that hundred of us carved time out to attend. The infrastructure of this e-conference was quite impressive. The “Who’s Here” area was particularly gratifying, and showed which areas of the conference are drawing the most of the attendees.

Here’s a shot of that section in the half hour before the first session started – and I watched as more and more attendees joined the event, heading to the lounge to say hi in the chat room or filed into the auditorium to wait for the first keynote to begin.

I want to talk a little bit about the first two presentations so you can decide if it's worth it to register to view the recordings.

How Analytics and Big Data Are Driving Better Social Business

The opening keynote was presented by Dion Hinchcliffe, Executive Vice President of Strategy at Dachis Group. He talked about the current moment in enterprise social business, and how analytics can lead social business pioneers to success.

He pointed out that enterprise social space is 2 to 4 years behind the personal social space.

He took on the question: What is social data?

He talked about aggregation, analysis & mining of observable work – describing the different roles of analytics and search, and why each is essential to a social business.

His presentation provided a lot of valuable insights for social managers who are already implementing innovative projects, and perhaps even more so for marketing professionals who want to create a social focus and need to create the business case for their leadership – how do you use enterprise 2.0? Why is it worth it?

IBM Platinum Sponsor Feature Presentation: Maximizing Competitive Advantage with Social Analytics

In this presentation, Mark Heid, Program Director of Social Analytics at IBM, went into some fascinating details of IBM’s use of Social Analytics internally, and how they pull an impressive amount of information from their internal social posts through IBM connections, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc.

However, he also pointed out you have to address the privacy question – if we are looking at much of our employees communications – how do we keep from creating an Orwellian environment?

Heid shared some best practices on reasonable privacy within social analytics. IBM scrubs individual employee information, they only look at the aggregate, never reach out to the individual – so they are looking at trends, not at individual communiqués.

Heid went on to talk about social analytics as it applies to recruitment, within and without the enterprise.

What a fantastic, free event from Enterprise 2.0!

Click here to register to access the recording!