Social Web Analytics with Telligent's Harvest Reporting Server

Let's talk about social computing. Or we can talk about communities. Or we can talk about enterprise 2.0 and social networking, blogging, forums, wikis, what have you. Regardless of what you choose to call it, there's a need to analyze what is happening when you deploy or harness social tools. And, no, we are not talking about basic traffic stats. 

Telligent (news, site) has a keen awareness of this need. Hence we have Harvest Reporting Server — social analytics for their social computing solutions, Community Server and Community Server Evolution. Interested in getting a better feel for what social analytics really are and how you can leverage them, we spent some time with Telligent. This is what we learned.

We could jump right in and start talking about Harvest, but that might be a little premature. Especially if you don't understand much about Telligent's community solutions. Harvest currently only works with Community Server and Community Server Evolution.

Telligent's Community Solutions

Telligent is best known for their community solutions: Community Server (for Internet websites) and Community Server Evolution (for intranets). They are lessor known for their Graffiti web content management system, but that's another story.

Community Server

Community Server comes in three flavors: Enterprise, Professional and Express. Express is, much like Telligent's Graffiti CMS Express Edition, free for non-commercial use and is limited in functionality. Enterprise and Professional are the commercial on-premise solutions.

Telligent's Community Server

Josh Ledgard, Telligent’s Director of Program Management gave CMSWire a tour of Community Server. He told us that Telligent was the first company to offer a full suite of Web 2.0 products, combining them into a white label community solution. The decision to build an on premise solution was based on providing organizations more control over their community.

Community Server has all the things you expect in a community solution and a few extras:

• Blogs: Customizable themes, widgets, podcasting (RSS), out of the box support for iTunes, media casting, moderation and more
• Media Galleries: Photo and File combined, extendable
• Forums: Q&A functionality, workflow enables, options like Mark as Answer, Verify Answer and Suggest this as Answer, ranks and roles
• Wikis: Formatting image, video, files, tables, system will create the wiki structure (not the user) - table of contents is automatically generated, more structure than traditional wikis, WYSIWYG editing, rating and comments, history and revisions
• Groups: Sub-communities, public or private, listed or unlisted, have their own email distribution list, can have their own community services, there are members, owners and managers (admin), custom themes and layouts
• User Profiles: Activity lists, a "wall" to post notes, ability to set site options, announcement blog
• Messaging and Social Streams: twitter-like micro-blogging, instant messaging to individuals in community or group

And of course detailed reporting and analytics via the Harvest Reporting Server. 

Community Server Evolution

Community Server Evolution is the intranet version of Community Server designed for an internal audience. It includes integration with Microsoft SharePoint, Exchange and Active Directory.

Community Server Evolution

Out of the box, Evolution includes a two-way sync with SharePoint, having more than 20 web parts that pull Community Server content into the SharePoint platform and let SharePoint users seamlessly interact in Community Server itself.

There is much more we could cover, but enough about Community Server. We are here to talk about social analytics.

Why Social Analytics?

Now maybe you are asking why you need social analytics? The answer is pretty straightforward. You don't implement a technology solution just because. There is always a business need driving your technical solutions. Community solutions don't escape this obvious reality.

To know whether you have achieved your business goals, you have to measure something. With communities, measuring page views is not enough, maybe not even applicable at all.

You need to measure what's happening in your community. If you are interested in knowing what your community members are up to, what information they are sharing and looking at, what they are saying about you, your product or your service (positive and negative), then you need social analytics.

If you need to know how many users are signing up, how many are contributing to blogs, wikis, forums, how many are asking and answering questions, then you need social analytics.

With social computing becoming much more mainstream and in many cases, a requirement for both external and internal relationship building, it has become critical to measure the impact these solutions really have. You also need to know how and where to improve these solutions.

And you aren't going to get this information from traditional web traffic analytics.

In a review of Harvest with Telligent's new Chief Social Scientist, Dr. Marc Smith and Harvest Program Manager Jana Carter, we were told that Harvest will help organizations analyze and understand the value of the customer conversation.

A Social Scientist for Telligent

Yes, Telligent has themselves a Social Scientist. What is a social scientist you ask? It's someone who studies human society and its personal relationships. Marc Smith comes from Microsoft where he was part of the Internet Services Research Center at Microsoft Research in Silicon Valley and studied among other things the social interaction of online communities.

A lot of the work Marc focuses on is the relationships and roles in social media and online communities. His role at Telligent is to help define the best evolution path for Harvest, so that Telligent continues to provide ROI measurement capabilities for communities. 

Marc has been working in this area for over 15 years and has co-written many research papers, including several for Telligent. In fact, Telligent has a paper in the International Conference on Web Logs and Social Media conference that discusses how social network analysis can predict the topics of threads, differentiating between Q&A and discussion.

And apparently there is a big difference between Q&A and discussion, one that can lead your organization down the wrong road if you aren't doing things right.

Measuring Social ROI

Social ROI seems like an odd term, but it's a valid one. You need to know how your investment in your community is improving your organization, whether it's in increased productivity, reduced expenses, better knowledge sharing, happier employees, things like that.

Learn about the Customer Conversation

If you want to learn more about measuring the customer conversation, watch this video from the Web 2.0 Expo that took place last week.

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Tags: analytics, communities, enterprise 2.0, social analytics, social computing, telligent, telligent harvest, web analytics

Let's talk about social computing. Or we can talk about communities. Or we can talk about enterprise 2.0 and social networking, blogging, forums, wikis, what have you. Regardless of what you choose to call it, there's a need to analyze what is happening when you deploy or harness social tools. And, no, we are not talking about basic traffic stats. 

Telligent (news, site) has a keen awareness of this need. Hence we have Harvest Reporting Server -- social analytics for their social computing solutions, Community Server and Community Server Evolution. Interested in getting a better feel for what social analytics really are and how you can leverage them, we spent some time with Telligent. This is what we learned.