New Metrics for New Media August 4, 2009

Presenter: Marc A. Smith, Chief Social Scientist, Telligent Systems

Abstract: Social media is growing in importance but the tools and concepts needed to measure and track it are lagging. As businesses adopt message boards, blogs, and wikis internally or deploy them outside their companies to host the conversations and contributions of their customers, tools that provide accounting and measurement of this activity grow in importance. This talk will introduce useful traditions from the social sciences that provide a language and methods for studying the collective creation of value in social media. Social network analysis of social media can provide a way to map and measure conversations and connections to reveal central people, isolates, and different kinds of participation patterns that are invisible to simple activity measurements.

Bio

Marc Smith is a sociologist and Chief Social Scientist at Telligent Systems, a provider of fine quality social media platforms and systems. Smith specializes in the social organization of online communities and computer mediated interaction. He founded and managed the Community Technologies Group at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington and is now leading the development of social media reporting and analysis tools for Telligent. Smith lives and works in Silicon Valley, California.

Smith is the co-editor with Peter Kollock of Communities in Cyberspace (Routledge), a collection of essays exploring the ways identity; interaction and social order develop in online groups.

Smith's research focuses on computer-mediated collective action: the ways group dynamics change when they take place in and through social cyberspaces.

As usual gourmet dinner and wine are included.

$20 online $30 at the door.

Official Website: http://www.meetup.com/CIO-IT-Executives/calendar/10848745/