All three relied on the capabilities of NodeXL, the open tool built by the Social Media Research Foundation to map and understand networks, and which Smith described as “aspiring to be the Firefox for networks”.

Network Graph of #LSS11 on Twitter - made with NodeXL

Before Smith’s session, his SMRF colleague, Dr Bernie Hogan, a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, also talked about the science of social networks. He started from the position that at the moment, networks seem to be more useful and interesting to scientists than the general public. We understand that there’s value in understanding networks, but we don’t know how to get at it. In this session and his lunchtime workshop, Hogan set out the basics of social network analysis. He identified three levels of information you can get from a map of a social network: individual position, clustering and the shape of the network itself. And he introduced the three canonical metrics of network analysis: degree, which is the number of connections someone has; closeness, which shows how connected someone is to people to whom lots of people are connected; and between-ness, which measures the shortest paths between individuals.

Of these metrics, he said, degree is the most obvious and the most used by companies in their search for social media influencers. But it can be misleading, because the person with the highest number of connections isn’t necessarily the one who exerts the most influence. Between-ness, he argued, is actually a better measure, because it allows you to identify where clusters overlap and connect.

Smith put it another way. “Between-ness is your bridge score,” he explained. “It’s why two connections can be more powerful than 200.” According to Smith, companies looking for influencers should be looking for bridges, because they are people who control the flow of information into new communities.

Having developed the NodeXL tool, the SMRF is encouraging people to use it to graph social networks, and to share their graphs with other users. According to Smith, the work is already paying dividends in allowing them to see the different characteristic shapes of social networks, what Smith calls the flavours. And he’s also tracked the progress of those shapes over time. The example he gave was of communities around message boards, which have a characteristic shape defined by “answer people”, people who have a lot of outgoing connections but few incoming ones, reflecting the fact that a lot of people listen to what they say for advice, but don’t then respond. Smith showed how to recognise these people in a community, and how you can see when they leave. The number one reason they leave is because of hurt feelings, the sense that they’re not appreciated, But as Smith noted, these people can save fortunes in customer service, by acting as an unofficial helpdesk or call centre. And getting them back can involve as little as sending them a branded coffee mug and an understanding message. Without that map of the network, however, all you’d know is that the volume of calls to your helpdesk had shot up, with no explanation why.

Both presentations are available on slideshare:

• LSS'11: Charting Collections Of Connections In Social Media – Dr Marc Smith
• LSS'11: Science of Social Media: Social Network Analysis On Facebook – Dr Bernie Hogan

As part of our continuing series of talks, seminars and events on The Science of Social Media we will again have a number of sessions at Local Social Summit ’11 cover this topic. First up we will have Dr. Bernie Hogan back at LSS giving a flash talk introduction to social network analysis. Bernie will also run a breakout session – a seminar on social network analysis. The most exciting “science” session we have confirmed so far is a keynote at the end of Day 2 from Dr. Marc Smith. Marc is the Chief Social Scientist at the Connected Action Consulting Group and co-founder of the Social Media Research Foundation. We will be back with his full bio later in the week.

Here is an outline of his planned Keynote. This will be on Day 2, Thursday 10 November. This is also one of the sessions not to be missed, so sign-up today for LSS here.

Keynote Title: Charting Collections of Connections in Social Media: Creating Maps and Measures with NodeXL

Abstract:  Networks are a data structure common found across all social media services that allow populations to author collections of connections.  The Social Media Research Foundation‘s NodeXL project makes analysis of social media networks accessible to most users of the Excel spreadsheet application.  With NodeXL, Networks become as easy to create as pie charts.  Applying the tool to a range of social media networks has already revealed the variations present in online social spaces.  A review of the tool and images of Twitter, flickr, YouTube, and email networks will be presented.

Description: We now live in a sea of tweets, posts, blogs, and updates coming from a significant fraction of the people in the connected world.  Our personal and professional relationships are now made up as much of texts, emails, phone calls, photos, videos, documents, slides, and game play as by face-to-face interactions.  Social media can be a bewildering stream of comments, a daunting fire hose of content.  With better tools and a few key concepts from the social sciences, the social media swarm of favorites, comments, tags, likes, ratings, and links can be brought into clearer focus to reveal key people, topics and sub-communities.  As more social interactions move through machine-readable data sets new insights and illustrations of human relationships and organizations become possible.  But new forms of data require new tools to collect, analyze, and communicate insights.

One of the panel sessions we are going to hold at Local Social Summit 2011 (LSS’11) in November that I am most looking forward to is titled “Can Social Media Be Outsourced?” The starting point of the debate will be from the perspective of the small and medium sized local business. The questions we will explore include:

• Is it effective for a local business to outsource some or all of its social media activity?
• Does it scale?
• Is it even ethical?
• What process should a local business use to decide the strategy on in-house vs. outsource?
• What criteria should they use to choose the right supplier/partner?

However, we are also sure to cover this question from the perspective of the big brand or even better the national/global businesses that have a local store or presence (think of any restaurant chain, for example).

An easy answer to this questions is “YES” social media can be outsourced. There are many companies offering social media services and tools. For a larger or more geographically widespread business it is probably a necessity to outsource some part or even all of their social media activity, yet alone build up social media skills in house. The sheer volume of potential work and a growing number of social channels drives the need for engagement by all sizes of business.

A quick survey of the web for recent posts on this subject found two posts YES and two post NO:

• Why You Should Never Outsource Your Social Media
• Automate the right way
• 5 Reasons Small Business Should Outsource Their Social Media Marketing
• 6 reasons why you should never outsource social media

For this session we have several interesting panellists already lined up. These include Justin Sanger, CEO & Founder of JoinHere and Seb Provencher, Co-Founder of Needium. However, I am pretty sure they will both be in the “YES” camp. If you are in the “NO” camp and want to be the detractor who says “no you cannot outsource your social media” – then please get in touch.

Note: Here is the Agenda for the 3^rd Annual Local Social Summit. If you are working at the intersection of Local and Social Media then you will not want to miss LSS’11.

Another year and another Social Media Week. This year we did a cutting edge pop-up restaurant plus a seminar around a local social case study – Two Sides to Every Story. This was a collaboration with Young & Foodish and CowPR. Not to blow our own horn but this was a great event! Perhaps our best event to date.

We learned about one man brands intersecting with global brands to create “magic moments” that last beyond the initial connection. This intersection of the global with the local creates both long lasting value and powerful meaning for the people involved. A theme we will be sure to explore later this year at our 2-day 2011 Local Social Summit in November. Note: we are looking for a few good sponsors iIf interested please get touch).

STEPHANIE WOLLENBERG from RPM said it better than we could (read her complete post here with great photos):

As Daniel and Jack discussed the event in unison last night, what was interesting was the collaboration between them on such a small happening and it was nice to see corporates like Burger King taking an active interest in Social Media, and therefore Daniel’s invasion. Jack jokingly touched on his reservation to come down to Burger King that day without pre-warning Daniel. Neither of them knew much about the other, and it was like two strangers meeting with secret agendas, which thankfully for Daniel, worked out perfectly.

Stephanie’s post is also here on SMW site.

For some pre-weekend fun here is a short low quality 1 minute iPhone video from the event:




We are super excited that Stephen Leighton, owner of leading UK coffee roaster Has Bean, is going to join us at LSS 2010. Many of you will remember he was part of our LSS@Social Media Week event back on February 4th.

Stephen will be part of our panel:

The Rise of the Super SMBs.  Conversations with some SMBs who are crushing it with Social Media.

In reality, we’re fans of Steve and without saying the amazing coffee Hasbean sells from the UK. We would be happy if he just comes along and shares his wonderful passion for coffee. However, we are sure that we will not only learn a bit more about great coffee but also how he is leveraging social media to “bat above his weight” to grow a business that now sells coffee world-wide.

Stephen is into coffee, coffee and coffee and occasionally has time to support the Sunderland football club. His background prior to setting up his ‘local’ coffee ‘empire’ had nothing to do with coffee – but he has always had a serious taste for beans and started roasting in his garage sometime the 1990′s. To found out more about Stephen and hear him speak please join us at LSS 2010 on November 18th – tickets are available here.

To get a view of why we think he’s “crushing it” (or should we say “roasting it”) here’s a video from In My Mug, Steve’s weekly video show:

To fully get an understanding of how Steve is using Social Media in furthering the success of Has Bean we suggest you:

• Read his blog
• Follow him on Twitter
• Check out the photo stream on Flickr
• Watch episodes of In My Mug or check out the Hasbean Vimeo channel

LSS 2010 is also going to feature Has Bean Coffee as the “official coffee of the day” for the conference — so those who join us will get a chance to drink some amazung brew on Nov 18th!

Mike Rowley is Chief Commercial Officer for Northcliffe Digital which is the regional digital arm of DMGT which publishes a range of local websites around the “Local People” and “This is” brands.

Mike has worked in DMGT as Classified Director for the Evening Standard as well as Digital Director for Northcliffe Media.  He has worked extensively around the migration of print advertising to digital platforms particularly around classified verticals and other SME categories (as advertisers demand better ROI and accountability from new platforms).  He has also worked for IPC Media running a large classified and DR sales department and well as working in B2B publishing.

• LinkedIn

Local Social Summit Speaker Biography Footnote: As disclosed here, our policy is to publish Speaker Biographies as is.

After Bernie completed his talk, Rebuilding the Collapsed Contexts in Social Media, Bernie performed an analysis of the Twitter API using NodeXL to build a network diagram of all the people who had tweeted with the hashtag #smwLDN.

Click on image for full size

To help us understand it, Bernie included the following notes when he sent over the image for us to publish on the Local Social Summit blog.

This is a twitter network of all people who tweeted #smwLDN

People who ended up retweeted or mentioned by at least 4 others have a thumbnail and label. Color means number of followers – red means lots of followers, blue means few followers.

In the center is one big group, linked through several tenuous connections such as Jeremy Jacobs and mediaczar.

In the upper right is another group with stevebridger and 1000heads.

In the bottom are all the small groups of singletons or dyads who tweeted the tag.

The arrows point outwards showing where tweets went as people mentioned or retweeted #smwLDN. Clearly, its paid off for the organizers to be be active in using their own hash tag as smwLDN has the high number of mentions outwards.

All of the nodes that seem to fan out from a single person highlight someone who has a relatively active audience. Some of these people share an audience, too.  SteveBridger and lesanto have a lot of fans incommon (since these fans retweeted or mentioned both of these people).  The same can be said for EEPaul and BernieJMitchell.

But of course, this graph also shows that Twitter is a rather thin medium. Social Media Week London had 16,000 followers, and yet the application only picked up 30 retweets or mentions from them (mazi has most herein with 34,800).

Bernie is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford and we feel lucky to have had him speak so far at two Local Social Summit events.   Amongst other more academic venues, Bernie’s work on Facebook will be featured in the forthcoming “Analyzing Social Media with NodeXL” edited by Derek Hansen, Marc Smith and Ben Shneiderman due in mid-July.

You can find more about Bernie on his Oxford Internet Institute microsite or follow him on Twitter.

The coffee was the El Salvador Finca Los Amates Bourbon Cup of Excellence 2009 and below is the episode of Steve’s weekly video show, In My Mug, where he cups this special coffee.

Local Social Summit is very excited that Stephen Leighton owner of leading UK coffee roaster, Has Bean, has agreed to come speak at LSS@Social Media Week on 4th February 2010.

We are planning to have a conversation with Steve about how as an artisan coffee roaster he is utilising a proliferation of Social Media channels to build engagement with his customers and the coffee community in general.

In reality, we’re fanboys of Steve (and without saying the amazing coffee Hasbean brings back to the UK) and would be happy if he just comes along and shares his wonderful passion for coffee and with that his direct trade approach with growers (actually, here’s hoping we get some of that because when you think about it, that’s still Local Social).  Regardless of what Steve talks about, our hope is that those who come along to LSS@Social Media Week will agree with us by the end of the evening when we say, we believe Stephen Leighton is coffee’s rising answer to Gary Vee.

To get a taste of why we think that, here’s a video from In My Mug, Steve’s weekly video show:

To fully get an understanding of how Steve is using Social Media in furthering the success of Hasbean, we suggest you:

• Read his blog
• Follow him on Twitter
• Check out the photo stream on Flickr
• Watch episodes of In My Mug or check out the Hasbean Vimeo channel
• Not forgetting the Hasforum

You can read more about the LSS@Social Media Week event by clicking here.  Go to the eventbrite microsite or start the booking process below:

LSS@Social Media Week:  The Science of Social Media

It could be said that most people have faith that Social Media is more than a new hype bubble. While faith alone isn’t a bad thing, we plan to add some reason as we explore the Science of Social Media

LSS@Social Media Week is brought to you by:

Confirmed Speakers:

• Dr. Bernie Hogan from the Oxford Internet Institute – Bernie will taking time out from his busy teaching and media schedule to present his latest research into the emerging issue of social information overload and effective methodologies for leveraging online interactions and new media in everyday life.
• Stephen Leighton owner of Has Bean Coffee: http://www.hasbean.co.uk/ – A conversation with the up and coming UK and coffee’s answer to Gary Vaynerchuk (Wine Library and Crushit)
• Paul McCrudden - from Imagination & #6weeks fame, will share insights and knowledge from how consumers are interacting with brands
• Carolyn Watt, Founder and Managing Director of Yabber, Profero’s digital PR and social media division will be presenting an exciting case study

When: Thursday, 4th February 2010, 6:30pm-8:30pm
Where: The Hospital Club (http://www.thehospitalclub.com/)

Social Media Week: The second annual conference will take place between February 1st – 5th, 2010 simultaneously in New York City, Berlin, London, San Francisco, Toronto and São Paulo. The five day conference will explore the profound impact that social media has on culture, business communications and society at large.

More Details & Register:

For more details click here to go to the event page and you can get your tickets through the eventbrite ticket microsite.