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!

The Benefits of Activity Streams and their Implications for UI and Customer Care

I wanted to share a very interesting article that I read this week on the Software Advice blog about Activity Streams. Activity streams are a list of recent activities on a website, that provides direct links to the most up-to-date content and contributors in a social site. An activity stream is a feature made most famous by public social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and they are are quickly becoming prominent in enterprise software.

Blog author, Derek Singleton, points out some benefits of activity streams in a manufacturing organization. He lists ways that activity streams can improve manufacturing software UIs including their potential to:

1. Automate reminders to keep projects flowing;

2. Stream educational information along with project tasks; and,

3. Indicate which projects are most important and require immediate action

Read Derek’s fantastic post and join the conversation about use cases for activity streams for your business!

Derek has pointed out some key benefits to the activity stream. I would like to point out another way the activity stream can enable a extended enterprise community.

This topic is close to my heart, because microblogging and activity feed features are so prominent in the Saba Online Community. Powered by the Saba People Cloud, our homepage features the activity feed function and I can see where activity feeds often foster conversations between our members that would otherwise not occur.

For example, today the activity feed helped to shape and promote an upcoming user conference.

See the way it appeared on the homepage - with links for many options. You can:

*Enter the discussion forum

*See only the first response (while remaining on the homepage)

*Scroll through all responses

*Find out more about the community member who posted the question

A conference track owner posted a question asked for feedback from our LMS customers. This was posted in the LMS group, and notifications only went out to the group members.

Of course he wouldn’t have wanted to notify all community members, so that he wouldn’t be spamming customers who are not interested in the LMS, and who haven’t opted-in to be notified about LMS conversations.

After his post, I saw responses from many LMS customers and partners, but also members who were not members of the LMS Group. They offered their advice for session topics. I also saw an influx of new subscribers for our conference page. Because of the easy to expand listing on the public activity feed, his content reached a larger audience on their own terms, allowing all community members to provide feedback on the presentations in our upcoming user event without annoying them with unsolicited emails, and promoting the event at the same time.

What are some benefits of the activity stream?

What are some drawbacks?

How does your organization foster conversation using social media functionality?