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Rob Howard's Blog

A daily dose of enterprise 2.0 and social computing topics

Harvest 2.0 now available!November 12

Harvest 2.0 is now available. This release includes a significant number of improvements (scorecards, sentiment/tonality, forecasting, and more).

Want to learn more? You can watch a great video overview that Jana, the Harvest Program Manager, put together or download the Harvest Product Overview PDF.

The planning for the next version of Harvest is well underway and Marc Smith will be helping shape a lot of the functionality as Telligent continues to invest in Social Analytics.

If you would like to speak with someone about Harvest, please contact us!

Posted to Harvest

Marc Smith, formerly Senior Sociologist Researcher on Microsoft's R&D team, has joined Telligent as our Chief Social Scientist.

Marc will lead Telligent's R&D efforts around analytics and business intelligence (tools to help you understand what people are doing in your communities), specifically Telligent Harvest.

For the last 10+ years Marc has been instrumental in defining, understanding, and describing the relationships that people form in online communities. You can read about some of his previous work in this 2003 C-NET article or this Online Community Report article:

The industry, more than ever, needs help defining what's important and how you measure the value of communities. Groundswell set the stage for describing this problem, we aim to address it eve

McCain or ObamaOctober 29

So this is off topic from what I usually like to write about. But it's my blog so tough luck.

With the current economic crisis caused in large part by banks making loans to people who really couldn't afford them - and because of people being overly optimistic about the value of their property increasing YoY - a lot of people are quickly finding themselves in a personal financial crisis. Large companies in turn have been shedding jobs which puts even more pressure on the economy. As a business owner I see this first hand in trickle-down results as buyers delay purchasing, customer stretch payment terms out further, etc.

What worries me the most is that the bottom is still a long ways down. Why? Because as people start getting cash strapped they start floating more debt on credit cards. Eventually those short-term loans will get defaulted on and either written down by the credit card companies or force pennies-on-the-dollar payments for the debt. This in turn causes even more problems.

In my opinion one way to address this would be to ensure the government is doing everything possible to incentivize the creation of more jobs so people have the means to cover the debt they've created. With slowdowns in hiring and layoffs we will only exacerbate the current problems as more debt will get written down.

So who is best equipped to fix this? McCain or Obama? My political views are fairly independent, but frankly I don't like a lot about either candidate

Information vs Knowledge WorkerOctober 29

I've spent the past couple of days in Redmond, WA at Microsoft's Enterprise Partner Summit. A term Microsoft uses just about everywhere is "Information Worker". They have entire business units formed around "IW".

This nomenclature is inaccurate, in my opinion, in describing the customer or people that it is being applied to.

Information these days is everywhere, is useless by itself, and has only minimal value. It's only when you can apply organization and intelligence to the information thereby converting it to knowledge that makes information useful and valuable.

The term coined by Peter Drucker in the 70's is more appropriate for describing the people that do this: knowledge worker. A knowledge worker applies expertise to information to create products, make decisions, etc based on the expertise of the subject material they are responsible for. The people within your organization that poses the talent of converting information to knowledge should be some of the most valued assets you have.

An information worker is akin to workers hired to manually go through and pick tomatoes. The crop by itself has value, but the value can be increased substantially when a knowledge worker combines a variety of resources along with their skills to produce something more valuable.

Social FingerprintsOctober 23

One of the really innovative things that the team has been working on, and that we showed at the in.Telligent conference, is something we're calling Social Fingerprints. This is included in Harvest 2.0 which we'll release in the next few weeks.

The concept is that each person in a community has their own unique contribution style or fingerprint that they they leave on a community. While finger prints from a variety of individuals may be similar they will almost always be unique. For example, here is mine:

I tend to skew heavily towards "Asker" meaning that I ask lots of questions or start lots of discussions.

Now compare this to Joe who is the program manager for Evolution who tends to skew more towards the contributor/answers side:

The fingerprint is built around how the user contributes in the community and their profile changes over time.