Rob Howard

Community Platform of the Year

rhoward — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 17:05:31 GMT

Yesterday our Community Server 2008 product was named Community Platform of the Year by InfoWorld for Applications, Middleware, and Data Management.

Obviously we're thrilled with the recognition, but we're more thrilled to be associated with a number of other technologies that were selected for this category including: Mozilla Firefox, and Oracle 11g.

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Graffiti 1.2 released

rhoward — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 04:18:00 GMT

Graffiti 1.2 is now available for download.

This release includes a number of updates and bug fixes (yes it was a long time coming). We've also published the product roadmap and all current customers will get a free upgrade to the 2.0 version.

I also want to apologize for us taking so long on getting some of this information published. When we initially launched Graffiti we didn't anticipate its popularity and staffing plans for the product weren't properly made. We're fixing these problems and making some bigger investments in both the platform and our thinking for how people will use Graffiti in the future (more on that with the 2.0 release in 2009).

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Measuring Social Media

rhoward — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 19:19:39 GMT

It's not that often that I'm right (and probably much more often that I'm wrong!), but there are several things that Telligent called before the market that I don't hesitate to see us take credit for:

Before there was "Social [Networking | Media]" we had a vision for building a community platform that integrated in a suite of tools. This is what became Community Server, our main product.
Nearly 2 years ago we started investing in tools to help measure activity. This became Harvest.

This morning someone forwarded me a paper that Peter Kim published, Social Media Predictions for 2009. One of the macro points at the end was, "Measurement needs to be addressed, soon".

I couldn't agree more!

We've been working on this problem for nearly 2 years now and it is why we hired Marc Smith, whose doctorate is in sociology, to help us think through this problem even more. Version 3.0 of Harvest is due out in early 2009 and will help answer questions about usage that usually required traditional web analytics tools tying them back into the social analytics. In fact, you can see some of the roadmap details here:

http://telligent.com/products/road-map/road-map-overview/

So yes, Measuring Social Media is going to be a critical success factor for 2009 (and beyond). ...and Telligent has been there from the beginning.

BTW, you can watch a quick video overview of Harvest on YouTube here:

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Enterprise 2.0 Keynote at VSLive!

rhoward — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 17:03:05 GMT

Slides from my keynote for the VSLive! conference in Dallas, "Building the Infrastructure of Enterprise 2.0", is published on SlideShare:

http://www.slideshare.net/robhoward/vslive-dallas-keynote-presentation/

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Harvest 2.0 now available!

rhoward — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 16:41:09 GMT

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!

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Telligent hires Sociologist Marc Smith

rhoward — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 12:58:27 GMT

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 even further. We’ll have more news to share about Telligent’s commitment to business intelligence around social analytics and what we expect Marc's impact will be in the coming months.

The short-story: we’re making a big bet on BI and analytics.

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McCain or Obama

rhoward — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 18:50:37 GMT

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.

What I've looked for, but have yet find, is a clearly articulated strategy for how both these candidates intend to fulfill the promise of 'creating more jobs' which they so readily promise. Responsible and accessible credit availability for small businesses, tax relief for the entrepreneurs willing to take the risk, making the R&D tax credit permanent, etc. would all be good starts - but what I see instead is defensive posturing related to off-shoring and union support. Not to mention the onerous plans to have employers pay for healthcare [1]. Frankly I think these types of defensive plans make America less competitive and not more competitive in the global market. More importantly they make it much harder to do business.

Our economy in America is driven in large part by small businesses. Government, in my opinion, should keep their hands out of small businesses and not dictate expenses and instead do everything possible to enable those small businesses to hire people and grow. Neither candidate seems to appreciate this point of view though.

[1] Note, Telligent pays 100% of health benefits for employees and families - well over $1m/year. But this is a benefit not a 'right'.

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Information vs Knowledge Worker

rhoward — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 17:57:07 GMT

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.

Knowledge workers add value to the information and make information more than just noise. Information work can be automated, knowledge work is not so easily replaced.

As organizations navigate their way through this recession it is the knowledge worker and the unique skills and talent that organizations need to guard and protect. Because it is the unique knowledge of the organization that is ultimately its most valuable resource and will be in the most high demand both during and after the recession.

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Social Fingerprints

rhoward — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 13:06:16 GMT

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.

We think this is a pretty interesting way to think about how to categorize and classify groups of people too. Depending upon the type of community you are creating you would expect to have a fingerprint for the overall community type too. That is, a support community should look different than an enthusiast community. We'll eventually tie this data into predictive profiling of users - so you know what types of users turn into high contributors, etc.

While this is only version 1.0 of our work in this area we're going to be investing a lot of time and energy into helping customers use this kind of information to improve and measure.

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2008 In.Telligent Conference Sold Out

rhoward — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 17:37:47 GMT

It came down to the wire, but as of about 10AM today - the Friday before the conference - we sold out! Last year we had approximately 80 attendees + staff. This year we have 200 attendees + staff!

It's going to be a great show. Also, all the content will be filmed and published later.

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