Social Analytics for Online Communities

This is the first post of 2014. Happy new year to one and all...........

A recent discussion on knome (TCS' internal social platform) related to managing online communities, controlling spam, making the best out of an enterprise social platform of the scale of ~200K members made me study the application of Social Analytics to achieve these objectives.

As I research on the internet, came across this paper - http://vmwebsrv01.deri.ie/sites/default/files/publ... titled "Scalable Social Analytics for Online Communities" by Marcel Karnstedt, Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), National University of Ireland, Galway Email: marcel.karnstedt@deri.org

This post is to summarize the contents of the paper and some of my thoughts around it.

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Success of a social platform depends on strength of analytics understanding and driving the dynamics of the network built by the platform.

To achieve these goals we need to have a set of tools that can perform multidimensional analysis of the structure, behavioural, content/semantic and cross community analysis.

Structural Analysis: Analyse all the communities, memberships, sub-communities based on strong relations between the members, influencers/leaders and followers.

Behavioural Analysis: Analyse the interactions to identify the helpful experts (or sub-groups) who provide information and newbies who are seeking information that are benefited by the interactions. Both a micro-level or individual level and a macro-level analysis is needed.

Content / Semantic analysis: Use text mining to detect, track and quantitatively measure current interest and shift in interest in topic and sentiment within the community.

Cross community dynamics: Understand how the community structure and sub structures are influencing each other to detect redundancies and complementary to merge and link them together.

There is a need to sufficiently combine all the analysis from all four dimensions in a scalable real-time model to achieve best understanding, control and utility of socially generated data. (rather knowledge!)

New solutions for new problems! Have a nice weekend...........