On the Structure, Properties and Utility of Internal Corporate Blogs Pranam Kolari Tim Finin, Yelena

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On the Structure, Properties and Utility of
Internal Corporate BlogsPranam Kolari Tim
Finin, Yelena Yesha, Yaacov YeshaKelly Lyons,
Stephen Perelgut, Jen Hawkins
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GROWTH OF BLOGS
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(No Transcript)
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WELL, YES, I COULD READ YOUR INTERNAL BLOG OR
YOU COULD JUST TELL ME ABOUT YOUR WORK DAY.
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MOTIVATION

• What are the characteristics of Internal Blogs?
• How are they growing?
• Who uses them?
• How would you quantify the nature of
  conversations?
• How does this map to Corporate Hierarchy?
• How to best exploit Internal Blogs?
• What next with tools for Internal Blogs?

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gt Apache Roller Publishing Platform gt Similar
(less customized) platform used by Sun (Public
Facing) Blogs - http//blogs.sun.com/
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Landing page lists recent entries, popular
entries and hot blogs
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BACKGROUND
300K
23K
4K
Active Users
Adopters
Employees

• Means to initiate collaboration
• Protection of ownership to ideas
• Platform for leadership emergence
• Audience to discuss work practices
• Asset to overall Internal Business Intelligence

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BACKGROUND

• Blog host database from November 2003 to August
  2006
• 23K blogs
• 48K posts, 48K comments/trackbacks
• Employee Database of around 300K
• Support and Feedback from the highly enthusiastic
  internal blogging community

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GEOGRAPHICAL SPREAD

• US leads the pack
• UK, CA have good adoption
• Japan highest among Asian Zones
• Rest of Asia catching up

Distribution of Blog Users
Adoption closely mirrors those seen on the
external blogosphere
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GROWTH

• Hosted Blogs double once every 9-10 months
• Hosted Posts double once every 6 months

Top-down guidance and organizational policies key
to internal blogging adoption
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RETENTION/ATTRITION
Definition A user who posted during a specific
month is considered retained if he/she reposts at
least once in the following x(6) months

• More adopters retained than lost

Ability of the community to engage and retain new
users has improved significantly
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USE OF TAGS

• Tag use slowly growing
• 80 of all posts carry tags
• Tags per post spiked from an avg. of 1.5 to 2.5

Upgrades to publishing tools that connected tags
to internal book-marking tools and new
visualization tools
Adoption clearly tied to utility.
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TAG USE DISTRIBUTION

• Typical Power Law Distribution Some tags are
  popular with a long tail of less popular tags
• What can we draw from these two data points?
• Is this related to quality of a folksonomy?

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LINKING BEHAVIOR
Posts over 2 months
Feature Hyperlinks
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40
Feature Internal Links
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Feature External Links
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Feature Internal Blog Links

• Internal themes are widely discussed
• More conversations are through comments, few
  through trackbacks

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SNA BACKGROUND

• G(V,E)
• Every user u is in V
• User u commenting/trackbacking on one or more
  posts by user v creates an edge (u,v)
• 75-80 of the nodes were disconnected
• Created a blog with no post
• Not commented on other posts, not a recipient of
  comments
• 4.5K Nodes
• 17.5K Edges

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DEGREE DISTRIBUTION

• In-degree slope -1.6
• Out-degree slope -1.9

• Web (-2.1, -2.67)
• E-mail (-1.49, -2.03)

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RECIPROCITY

• Do bloggers hosting conversations, engage in
  conversations elsewhere?
• Plot shows average out-degree of nodes with the
  same in-degree
• Slope of close to 1, but lower (collective
  evangelism)

Conversations are highly reciprocal a case in
point also attested by me as a user
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GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS
POST
COMMENT
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GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS
What is the Impact of Global Conversations?

• All pairs shortest path on the graph
• Ranked Edges by Centrality
• Plot ratio of inter-geography conversations in
  top x edges

Global Conversations are key to information
diffusion
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REACH/SPREAD
Reach measures distance between all
conversations on a post independently, while
Spread measures them together based on the
corporate hierarchy.
REACH 356 14
C(3)
C(5)
SPREAD 8
C(6)
P
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REACH/SPREAD

• Posts with spread 1 (Employee/Manager) quite
  low
• Spread peaks around 4 showing intra-department
  conversations
• Spread continues to be significant showing
  global conversations

The notion of spread in addition to showing
nature of conversations can also contribute to
new metrics
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DERIVED METRICS
Additional Ranking Measures
Meme Tracking Overall Spread of Conversations on
a Post
Trend Identification Tags attached to high
meme posts can correlate with emerging interests
Thought Leaders Authorities on topics by
identifying meme and their topics
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CONCLUSION

• Internal Blogs gaining traction within
  corporations
• Important additional channel to collaborate
  across geographies
• Workforce Journalism just round the corner
• Emerging area for bottom-up competitive
  intelligence

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THANKS!