Social Media Camp SF 2008
Data Portability (room 2, 1-1:20 PM)
Facilitator: Rich Reader; Notes: Raines
for an organization trying to figure out who its core is, what are principles...
you have to be able to monitor what's going on with your membership
reach out beyond the profiles
see what they're doing with the tools and sites
you have to be able to protect that data
watch it evolve dynamically
keep up with the changes
what is relevant will be different
strain data, analyze, aggregate
keys: portability, integration
goal: read the collective pulse of your people.
How are people doing it today?
Not highly automated
Kristie Wells, Jen McClure a couple of weeks ago conversation: complex. software not particularly friendly to integration, aggregation
example of complexity: community with 1000 members. There may be clusters that represent the biggest groups of people. for example: alpha wonks. electronic hobbyists. Understanding these larger, rather distinct core groups of people, all of whom are bringing constructive things in. People who are inner critics, constructors, innovators... who are the leaders, joiners, followers? Who are the people that the influencers are actually making connections with who are responding to them. Driving the community forward. Conversations.
Q: Self-nominating self-tagging plus analysis of behavior?
A: Self-nom = creators, rarely more than 19% of your membership. A social technographic profile of your community membership may tell you who's likely to come in. Creator more likely to be a critic than a follower is to be a creator? Look at the dynamics between creators, critics, recommenders, raters, followers.
Observe that social dynamic, understand what drives those people, beyond the walls of what they do inside your community. Being able to access (at least sample) the data means reaching out beyond. Trust data mining, surveys. Everybody does it from an informal sense. Beth Cantor: "cute dog" theory of social activism. Activists w/in the cmties she participates in... cute dogs they write about on flickr. illustrate a story by finding pictures of dogs that represent the type of energy/commitment she writes about. People say they follow because characterizations of cute dogs works for them. An instance of understanding the principle: people in your community who are energizing the larger core groups: they have other interests that make them more productive, inspired with more energy. What are those other things that people in your community do.
Q: w/in social nets/cmties, the ability to granularize...
A: if members in your community are using Twitter a lot, what are the keywords your membership is twittering about. If you're not monitoring that, scraping those twitter feeds. What are clouds and tags grown large, you're not reading the pulse of your community. You need some way of capturing that data. You can have either a formal integration program that's storing the data.
Q: hashtags.
A: secret decoder ring
Q: they've got to expose that data in an API or otherwise for you to use. Most community managers aren't going to write a MashUp or specialized application. They need a user-friendly tool that pulls data from different places and advises. The big providers don't want you to have it. Look at their terms of service re content ownership, required data expiration in 24 hours etc.
Q: If you have your own community...
An important subject, few doing something about
the PR industry is asking "What are we doing about portability, data security within our communities"?
Can we trust the platforms claiming ownership of our data to recover it in a way we can look at it later. Or do we have to be independent and do it ourselves? Historical context.
Q: Solutions to secure your own data?
A: "screen-scraping" and capture as text, put it into search engines, catalogs, other knowledge management systems.
Q: Bad for your to have to do as a hack yourself. Public API - cache issues. Realtime hassles. Build Apps that keep the data, let users have a set of data realtime. SQLlite a universal DB. Make a browser-based app, keep local data. Example: Google Gears
Q: I want my social graph to do interop between FaceBook, Twitter. I don't have the energy to add friends on all the networks.
A: Yoono solution.
Q: FriendFeed? An aggregator.
A: For an individual.
Q: Centralization? For Volume?
A: Use the Users Resources. Distributed Processing.
(this will be posted on the SocialMediaCamp wiki, linked from the Sessions page. Add your tools and suggestions and questions there! Keep the conversation flowing)
