A couple of weeks ago, I had posted some teaser screenshots of the 2.0 release of our Harvest Reporting Server product, which was announced earlier today to be generally available. This product and Telligent's management team's strong commitment towards investing even more R&D in this area in the future were two of the key reasons why I decided to join the company a month ago. In today's tough (and growing tougher) economic climate, ROI matters most - and consequently, the ability to measure, report, and analyze the appropriate metrics has become a huge factor in how organizations choose social computing platforms and solutions. We've certainly heard the demand from many of our customers, and I believe that Harvest provides Telligent with a unique and very substantial competitive advantage. For more information about Harvest, go to http://telligent.com/products/harvest-reporting-server or play with the live demo at http://reports.communityserver.com/demo.
Perhaps much more significant than the release of Harvest 2.0 is the simultaneous announcement of Telligent's Chief Social Scientist position, which was created specifically to head up our R&D efforts in the area of social analytics, and importantly, whom we've hired to be in that role. I'm very proud to have referred my friend and colleague, Marc Smith (blog, Twitter), for the job, and I'm elated that he actually accepted our offer because he certainly had several other compelling opportunities (from very big names in the industry) to consider. I'm also very happy because I'll be getting a $1000 employee referral bonus. :-) You can read more about Marc's tireless work during the past 10+ years that's almost exclusively focused on what he calls "computer-mediated collective action" (to which I'd refer these days as simply "social computing") at http://research.microsoft.com/~masmith, and you can follow his ongoing efforts on relevant peer reviewed research papers at http://delicious.com/marc_smith/paper+Marc_smith.
On numerous occasions during my time at Microsoft as both the Community Lead and Social Computing Technical Product Manager for SharePoint, I relied on Marc's expertise in refining and validating my ideas and concepts around social media and online communities. Although many people have come to know me as a "community guru," I would gladly admit that it is Marc, who was the "man behind the curtain" and provided me with the sociological research and hard data that backed up much of my hypotheses for why humans have an innate sense of sharing and belonging and how technographic personas such as Asker, Answerer, and Connector can be derived and quantified from specific types of social interactions and metrics. I look forward to working closely with Marc in the coming months to better align and more tightly integrate social analytics into Telligent's overall platform strategy.
[Update 11/19: Oliver Young of Forrester has an insightful and relevant post about analytics being "the next competitive frontier."]
Posted
Nov 11 2008, 07:13 AM
by
Lawrence Liu