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We are building a social media analytics tool to turn social media monitoring into social media action. We go beyond mentions to let you Explore, Discover and Engage with the tribes talking about your brand.

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Here comes everybody

Here comes everybody, the power of organizing without organizations is a book by Clay Shirky that discusses the power of the group when bought together by the Internet.  One quote in particular that caught my attention is this:

Every webpage is a latent community. Each page collects the attention of people interested in its contents, and those people might well be interested in conversing with one another too. In almost all cases the community will remain latent, either because the potential ties are too weak, or because the people looking at the page are separated by too wide a gulf of time, and so on. - Page 102.

Without splitting hairs too finely (a blog or wiki is a web page after all), I do think that this is an emerging problem in the space of Enterprise 2.0 content.  As we build up internal communities around tools like Lotus Connections, Microsoft Share Point and Jive SBS, we also build legacy content.  When I read a blog post that was posted 6 months ago, I am separated by a wide gulf of time from the community that interacted with it when it was created.

We need ways of linking the conversation from yesterday with the conversations of today, to bridge this gap in time and place.  Two ways that can help with this problem are:

  1. It's all about the people - make it easy to discover the current and active experts in a particular area.
  2. Keep tags current.
HiveMind can help with both of these problems, but it's the second one I'd like to talk about now.

Having created a blog post, most users would not return to update the tags, even if they created them in the first place.  Yet particularly for emerging knowledge, the way in which we understand and describe content changes over time as new words (Web 2.0 anyone) come into existence to describe what we are doing.  Six months from now is the way you described your post the way the organisation thinks of it?

By focussing on the content and it's demonstrated expertise, HiveMind is able to understand when content demonstrates an expertise and should be tagged with it, even if the expertise the post demonstrated doesn't exist until some time AFTER the post was created.  By helping to maintain the expertise tags on content across the organisation, HiveMind can help organisations bridge the content age gap, but ensuring that like posts are tagged alike as people go about their business of creating great content to share.


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Filed under  //  expertise   hivemind   tagging  
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Posted 8 months ago by Tim Bull