Strategic Network Intelligence

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.

On my last trip to Paris I had lunch with Gilles Prigent, founder of Take Part Media and creator and administrator of Scitizen. Scitizen is a peer reviewed science news source: news edited and created directly by the scientists who make it, directed to well, everyone.

The technology that allows Scitizen to work is brand new, but the idea of peer review, which is a core element of Web 2.0, is as old as science itself…

Whether we are looking at Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Scitizen or the process of open source programming, a self regulating community review is what makes these sources of information so reliable.

Scitizen is an excellent example of how Web 2.0 is democratizing the means of information production, blurring the line between scientist and journalist and cutting out the traditional TV or newspaper middlemen.

One of my preoccupations since joining Exvisu has been how to use visual representations of data to provide valid and easy-to-explain recommendations to help our clients make strategic decisions. The most important element must always be the validity of the presentation of the data itself - eye candy that isn’t accurate is misleading - but that doesn’t mean it can’t look good as well. visualcomplexity.com is a great resource that clearly demonstrates the advances that have been made in this area.

My friend Tomek, a visual interface designer par excellence (http://www.pixelbox.com/), introduced me to this site a few weeks ago… it floored me with its insight and its visual display. It is similar in principal to our lexical text mapping tool here at Exvisu. What WeFeelFine lacks in flexibility and depth (we check word correlations for all words in blog postings) it makes up for in real time response and sheer beauty of the interface:

Check it out first http://www.wefeelfine.org/.

And then read how it works (from the we feel fine site):

The We Feel Fine data collection engine automatically scours the Internet every ten minutes, harvesting human feelings from a large number of blogs.
We Feel Fine scans blog posts for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”.
Once a sentence containing “I feel” or “I am feeling” is found, the system looks backward to the beginning of the sentence, and forward to the end of the sentence, and then saves the full sentence in a database.
Once saved, the sentence is scanned to see if it includes one of about 5,000 pre-identified “feelings”.

The core of the work we do at Exvisu is using network analysis tools to draw out interesting and (often) hidden relationships between concepts. There are a lot of companies doing similar work in different ways, including TextMap, which bills itself as “The Entity Search Engine”. Lots of great information there!

Exvisu unveiled its latest brand study at Webcom Montréal (http://www.webcom-montreal.com/) last week. Webcom was exciting to say the least, one could feel rise of the participative web in the conference halls. For a good summary of the Webcom conference check out Benoit Marcoux’s blog: http://www.benoit.marcoux.ca/blog/.

We (Exvisu and K3) looked at a day in the life of the Red Bull brand on the blogosphere… and found some pretty interesting correlations.

The study was realised with Exvisu’s Micheal Boyle (http://www.mikel.org/) and the head of K3 media’s web consulting group, Alain Lépine (http://www.k3media.com/1/Conseils).

The study summarized over 550 blogs that mention Red Bull with key words: health, party, sex, performance, sport, work. We actually found a strong correlation between Red Bull’s main active ingredient and depression… of course Red Bull’s sponsorship of sporting events greatly improved its brand presence on the blogosphere… to see more about our findings check out the one page pdf summary:

Red Bull one pager