When I was managing intranet sites, I began to get into web analytics. My employer had purchased SiteCatalyst from Omniture for use internally. Now intranet sites are different to internet sites in lots of ways I won't go into here but tracking this data was an interesting if frustrating experience. If you're interested in web analytics from a practical angle then Avinash Kaushik's blog is prett damn good.
However, it's social media metrics that we're interested in here. Judah Phillips has two posts on applying SNA to web analytics. Now Judah is treating content as nodes and clickstreams as ties - in effect looking at the linking behaviour of users between pages. That's an interesting approach to site modelling (and in some ways similar to the wiki-SNA example below). In effect, this is the linking of content by people. I think that I am interested in the reverse of this - the linking of people by content.
Marianina Chaplin also posts about social & value network analysis and web analytics - and has an interesting graphic from MIT on myspace networks. Like Marianina I think there will be a linking of social network analysis & web metrics, but I don't know in quite what form yet. VNA currently seems to be focusing on the ERP/CRM world however its application to websites interactions is probably not that far away.
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4 comments:
Hi Matt,
Thanks for mentioning the blog. I agree that the linking of people by content is another interesting way the SNA can be applied to generate insight about your user community and their behavior.
Warm regards,
Judah
Judah - Thanks for visiting. The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of both kinds of mapping: people -> content & content -> people...
Hi Matt
Me too belatedly - thanks for the mention. VNAs in theory is a more inclusive way of looking at performance as it includes both comment flow and the value of conversions. In the end though how will the traditional WA solutions find ways of measuring the importance of content in relation to people?
Cheers
Marianina
Marianina
In the end though how will the traditional WA solutions find ways of measuring the importance of content in relation to people?
I'm not sure they will. That's why I think we need to start looking at alternatives. The critical thing is that the metrics you gather are actionable in some way. The issue with SNA & VNA metrics is we can gather them and calculate them but what do we then do about them?
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