Join Us for a free webinar on Charting Collections of Connections in Social Media: Creating Maps and Measures with NodeXL
The Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) Business Intelligence Virtual Chapter will be hosting Marc Smith next week, on 2nd July at 7pm PDT. I am honoured to be hosting. To register, click here:
The topic: Networks are a data structure common found across all social media services that allow populations to author collections of connections. The Social Media Research Foundation’s NodeXL project makes analysis of social media networks accessible to most users of the Excel spreadsheet application. With NodeXL, Networks become as easy to create as pie charts. Applying the tool to a range of social media networks has already revealed the variations present in online social spaces. A review of the tool and images of Twitter, flickr, YouTube, and email networks will be presented.
Does it work? It’s certainly very interesting stuff. Here is my NodeXL graph for the past week:
I must admit that I’m not terribly good at planning out tweets. I don’t tend to worry about things like ‘reach’ and ‘engagement’. I just put out things that interest me, and things I am excited about. People respond, or don’t respond. I am more concerned about what I don’t tweet: I try to take care not to offend anyone because I think it can be done inadvertently when you have only 140 characters. Things spill out, that interest me! I am an ‘interested’ person, who loves lots of subjects and probably many of you are the same.
Personally I’m very grateful for twitter since it allows me to connect with my sqlfamily from around the globe. I love tweeting people in the US, for example, because it’s great to feel connected with people even though they are far away.
Tweeting suits my lifestyle. I am a single mother and I don’t have a sparkling social life with friends and parties. For example, it is 4am here in the UK and I am still working. However, I am happy and this is no sob story! What I do have, is friends that I see at technology events such as SQL events, and these people are my friends, my ‘sqlfamily’ and I am at home at these events. I never thought I’d feel so at home with a bunch of people from all over the place, and I know I am extremely privileged to know many of the sqlfamily from everywhere.
I suggest you go to the NodeXL website, take a look at the free download, and introduce yourself to your own networks hidden in your data. This could be Twitter data – or perhaps even data and patterns hidden in your corporate Data. You don’t have anything to lose by simply trying it, and who knows what you will find!
I am not holding this webinar, but I am hosting. So please allow me to introduce my guest speaker. For those of you who don’t know, Marc does some interesting research on social media and I recommend that you join us. Marc Smith is a sociologist specializing in the social organization of online communities and computer mediated interaction. Smith leads the Connected Action consulting group and lives and works in Silicon Valley, California. Smith co-founded the Social Media Research Foundation (http://www.smrfoundation.org/), a non-profit devoted to open tools, data, and scholarship related to social media research.
Smith is the co-editor with Peter Kollock of Communities in Cyberspace (Routledge), a collection of essays exploring the ways identity; interaction and social order develop in online groups. Along with Derek Hansen and Ben Shneiderman, he is the co-author and editor of Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a connected world, from Morgan-Kaufmann which is a guide to mapping connections created through computer-mediated interactions.