World Class Communities

The past few months I’ve spent a lot of my time working on our research for what it takes to build a world class community.  This morning I posted an article about setting a clear business objective.

Below I’ve included a few links and images to material we’ve created — and this is just the start!

The first is a white paper, World Class Communities: The Characteristics of Community Excellence white paper, an on-demand webinar, and a series of blog posts detailing the findings of our research.

We’ve also created some great info-graphics:

Social Networks vs Online Communities

The Social Ecosystem

This is just the start of some great research about what it takes to become a world class community.  Stay tuned, there is a lot more to come!

Track mentions on Twitter

In August we released our 3rd version of Telligent’s tool for helping people measure and understand their community: Telligent Analytics 3.0.

Telligent Analytics is unique in that, unlike the myriad of other listening tools available, we started with ensuring that Telligent Analytics provided unique information first and foremost from Telligent powered communities.  In the most recent version we introduced some capabilities to correlate community activities with external activities (twitter, blogs, etc.).

Combined, you can now view the sentiment of keywords or phrases (no limits on how many) that you wish to track and graph it over time:

image

But in addition to tracking sentiment from within your own community, you can also track mentions from external communities – such as twitter:

image

For example, using a generic topic like “Report” Telligent Analytics 3.0 shows mentions of that keyword on Twitter.  On August 13th there was a spike in mentions, which can be explored simply by selecting a range in the graphic.

image

Next, you can view the topic for sentiment, so of the mentions made how many were positive and how many were negative?  Telligent’s sentiment engine is a proprietary natural language engine that currently works only with English.  It analyzes the sentence structure and determines if the keyword is being mentioned in a positive or negative manner – it is 80% accurate, unfortunately it can’t detect sarcasm and usually scores it negative.

image

Finally you can drill down into the topic, read the content that was analyzed and even go directly to the mention on twitter:

image

In addition to twitter you can easily add any source that supports RSS. In the example of twitter the Telligent Analytics application is using APIs to pull information directly from Twitter.

You can learn more about Telligent Analytics 3.0 at Telligent.com. At our site we have a video walk-through as well as some product PDFs with more details.

Graffiti 1.2 released

Graffiti 1.2 is now available for download.

This release includes a number of updates and bug fixes (yes it was a long time coming). We’ve also published the product roadmap and all current customers will get a free upgrade to the 2.0 version.

I also want to apologize for us taking so long on getting some of this information published. When we initially launched Graffiti we didn’t anticipate its popularity and staffing plans for the product weren’t properly made. We’re fixing these problems and making some bigger investments in both the platform and our thinking for how people will use Graffiti in the future (more on that with the 2.0 release in 2009).

Intel Capital invests $20M in Telligent

intel

I’m thrilled to announce that Intel Capital, Intel’s global investment organization, has made a $20M investment in Telligent. You can read the full press release here: Intel Capital to Acquire $20M Stake in Telligent.

I started Telligent back in 2004 with about $5,000. Since then we’ve grown into a 140+ person profitable business. Today millions of people use Telligent’s software everyday with customers such as Microsoft, NASDAQ, NFL, Intel, MySpace.com, and Dell (to name a few).