Strategic Network Intelligence

One of the key questions we get when we present our services to potential clients is, “how many people really blog, though?” and, “Do people - ‘real’ people - really pay attention to blogs?”

At Exvisu we don’t make quantitative claims about the extent to which the blogosphere is representative - in our work, this varies on a case-by-case basis, and a big part of our job is to ensure that the analysis we do relies on a substantial dataset that we construct.

The other argument on this point relates to the sheer size of the blogosphere. For years, people have tried to assert that there are X number of blogs. Another approach - one that we prefer - is to talk about what proportion of people blog themselves and read blogs. The numbers are pretty impressive.

In Quebec, the most reliable information comes from NETendance CEFRIO and Léger Marketing, whose survey data suggests that 8.3% of Quebeckers publish a blog (March 2007) and that over 25% of Quebeckers read blogs (July 2007).

Earlier today Sebastien Provencher from Praized Media published a post summarizing new results from e-Marketer.com about the US blogosphere on The Praized Blog. In terms of bloggers, the numbers tell an even more impressive tale. In 2008 they estimate that 13% of Americans are bloggers and over half the population (54%) reads blogs. By any standard, figures like these are impressive.

Here are some impressions I had related to the talks I saw at Webcom Montreal 2008:

• Early in the day I listened to Andrew McAfee’s talk about Web 2.0 in the enterprise. He laid out the case for the Enterprise 2.0 very clearly, emphasizing the importance of weak ties in the pursuit of individual knowledge workers’ goals. This is an important point, and though it’s something that most of us that have studied sociology at any level know, it’s far too often ignored in the context of the study of online social networks. McAfee also did a good job of giving an overview of the challenges to embarking on Enterprise 2.0 projects in companies, which are well known and range from cultural issues to the need for control within organizations and the general difficulty of unseating incumbent technologies. There was one challenge that he missed (probably to his credit - it’s a pretty cynical point): the difficulty corporate IT seems to have admitting that relatively inexpensive tools can be the secret to leveraging (unused) six-figure KM platforms and the like. Pride, not sound business decisionmaking, seems to rule in many IT organizations.
• Fred Cavazza gave a great talk in French that underlined that in the social media/network environment, a company’s brand doesn’t really “belong” to it anymore. This is a point that is fundamental to what we do at Exvisu, and experience has taught us that this is absolutely true today, though obviously many are still fighting against this fact. At the end, Fred did a good job of identifying several new roles that are rising to prominence: Community planner, social media manager, community architect, virtual community moderator, social analytics experts, and social coach. Key take-away: No engagement, no response… and those folks are what will give you the engagement you require.
• Later on I sat in on Jon Husband’s talk about the new work environment ushered in with Web 2.0. Jon is a very experienced management consultant who several years ago decided that the existing models or approaches were broken and set out in search of alternatives. Jon told a funny story about early in his career when a (more senior) colleague complained about his reading the newspaper “on company time”. At a certain point in our history, general knowledge of the environment was not seen as a competitive advantage, let alone a food-water-shelter kind of necessity. Now, however, both general and specific knowledge of the environment in which a company works has become absolutely essential. Companies seem to be struggling to confront this reality.
• In parallel with the main webcom event, the organizers were gracious enough to host an unconference called WebCamp, which I had a real pleasure sitting in on for a while. WebCamp was a semi-structured roundtable that featured some of the key members of the Montreal and Quebec web world, people like my friends Patrick Tanguay, Sebastien Paquet and new friends like Martin Lessard, Mario Asselin and others. A conference like Webcom has a serious program, but nevertheless is primarily designed (as far as I can tell) to bring advanced subjects to a generalist audience. It is great to have a (free) event alongside where specialists with years of experience can share - something that is altogether too rare now that people are getting busier and busier.

Claude and I spent a great day yesterday at webcom Montréal 2008. The program chair for Webcom Montreal is Claude Malaison, and as usual he put together a very good event with a schedule packed full of interesting keynotes and well-chosen conference sessions.

There are too many people we met to single them all out in a post like this, but we’d like to acknowledge the support of our friends from K3 Media who (again) helped us to get the most out of an important Montreal event. In a day or so I’ll post about some of the key take-away thoughts from the sessions.

Last week, Chris Scott, a friend and an excellent Drupal and Ruby on Rails developer, (http://www.extonrails.com/) sent me this link. I have been constantly using it ever since.

Summize Labs has come up with a real-time twitter sentiment mapper and overall evaluator. http://labs.summize.com/sentiment. It is pretty simple: you type in a word or a person, and it searches all the tweets and evaluates the positive or negative strength of words associated to the search terms you entered - and then produces a color coded graph and overall sentiment measure!

Hours of fun, but this also opens a new door: Twitter text mining…

This morning, Claude and I went to a breakfast mini-conference hosted by the AMM-PCM (the Association marketing de Montréal) at the HEC: Les blogues d’entreprise en 3 temps. The conference was very well put together and considered three themes: business transparency, blogs and authenticity, and the risks associated with employee blogging.

Sometimes events like these in Montreal are entirely populated by established experts, but it was very nice to see that this one included a mix of experts and people who wanted to learn more about blogging and the enterprise. Even better was the fact that the meeting was very much focused around discussions that were animated by the presenters (i.e., not a lecture).

Congrats to Muriel Ide for putting on a great event and to Martin Ouellette, Mario Asselin and Isabelle Poirier (among others) for some particularly good interventions in the discussion this morning.

We’re happy to announce that Exvisu’s Montreal office has moved to the Main - 5369 St-Laurent, Suite 450. Our new space will give us a better environment than ever to collaborate on our research and strategy work - and we have more options to invite clients and friends to visit us. Special thanks to our friends and colleagues at Station C, which has served as a great home base for the past few months.

The March issue of National Geographic Magazine’s feature on Megaprojects in Iceland has some stunning photos of the immense dam built to supply Alcoa’s new aluminun smelter near the NorthEastern town of Reydarfjordur. The story focuses on the debate raging around aluminum, industrial development, hydro power dams and jobs in this small island nation. Not suprisingly, the story also reinforces much of the findings presented in the Exvisu Report Alcan & Alcoa in Iceland - Iceland has not been culturally acustomed to debating its future and making choices- for centuries the land and sea offered a natural bounty and beauty that produced an economy based largely on fishing. But now all of that has changed. Iceland is a modern society now, and technology-oriented businesses have largely replaced traditional ways. But the future is uncertain and the population holds a deep love for its natural environment. Big multinationals see easy opportunities and “win-win” scenarios, but as both Exvisu and National Geographic point out, companies that ignore the popular pyche and deep land-oriented history of this beautiful island may find it difficult to proceed with their projects

Dans La Presse de ce matin, on peut lire un article sur l’importance que les patrons devraient accorder à l’information qui circule sur leur entreprise via des sites de réseautage social, comme Facebook. L’article met l’emphase sur l’intérêt de connaître les propos que peuvent tenir certains employés au sujet de leur entreprise sur le Web.

Nous ajouterions qu’être au courant de ce que nos employés disent à notre sujet n’est que la pointe de l’iceberg. Les réseaux sociaux sont riches en informations qui ne touchent pas seulement la réputation de l’entreprise: en effet, ce sont non seulement les employés, satisfaits ou non, qui discutent de l’entreprise, mais également différentes parties prenantes, comme les consommateurs en général et certains groupes possédant des intérêts dans certains produits ou projets relatifs à l’entreprise. C’est tout un portrait de certains enjeux qui peut être révélé grâce à l’étude des propos tenus au sein des réseaux sociaux.

C’est d’ailleurs sur cet intérêt d’obtenir un portrait des opinions de toutes les parties prenantes que semble insister Sylvain Sénécal, professeur agrégé et titulaire de la chaire de commerce électronique RBC Groupe Financier à HEC Montréal, dans l’article cité plus haut:

“L’entreprise devrait effectuer une veille systématique, c’est-à-dire au moins une fois par semaine, sur ce que l’on dit sur elle et ses concurrents dans l’internet. Le web est devenu un puits au sein duquel une société peut découvrir une foule d’informations sur la façon dont elle est perçue par ses employés, ses clients, ses fournisseurs, etc. Elle peut ensuite en profiter pour se conforter dans ce qu’elle fait de bien et investir ses énergies dans ce qui devrait être amélioré.”

Alcan and Alcoa in Iceland is our blog based network intelligence mini-study of the sustainability debate surrounding the aluminum industry’s role in that small country. This study has been featured in the latest online issue of Corporate Knights magazine. I especially like Prof. David Wheeler’s ANT-like approach to corporate structure:

Think of the modern corporation less as a monolithic, fixed structure and more as an entity presiding over a kind of business ecosystem or a set of interlocking ‘value based networks’, where value is defined by the firm and its different stakeholders according to the nature of the relationship”

If one were to map such a stakeholder network in the blogosphere, the network graph would probably look like this (click on the image to access a full-sized version):

The world-famous DEMO conference has been held for the last couple of days in California, and as always, there have been dozens of interesting product launches. Most interesting to us is the launch of Silobreaker’s corporate ASP model (and, really, a relaunch of the site itself, which hasn’t attracted nearly the attention it deserves). Silobreaker is a search tool like no other - it not only provides a number of interesting search tools, but using their tools gives users the ability to contextualize news in very interesting and visually appealing ways.