Science for SEO: web

November 16, 2008

The power of twitter - a personal experience

I began using SlideShare a few weeks ago, it's a place to share presentations with others in the community, they can download them, favourite them, view them, embed them in their own sites and blogs. It's a great source of information on a wide variety of topics, and it supports open office, which Google presentation doesn't. It worked great and I began using it to share info with the Uni students and colleagues and so on.

For about a week, it stopped working and I could no longer add my presentations. I'd begun to rely on it, and suddenly it was letting me down (it is in beta, so lets not be too harsh, and it is a free service!).

I vented my frustration on Twitter saying something like "I will never use SlideShare again, it won't let me upload anything and I can't see where to contact anyone". Within a few hours, SlideShare were following me and also asked what was wrong, how they could help and pointed me to their "contact us" link that I couldn't find. I explained my issue via Twitter and they explained what the problem was.

What they achieved?

Me actually bothering to go back to try the service again, and when it still didn't work, I decided to leave it for a week and see how it goes then. Without their Twitter intervention, I was a lost cause to them and their product.

Obviously if it does never work again, I'll use a different service altogether, but the important thing is that they made me feel valued and understood. I think a lot of companies should learn from just this one instance, and I know many like Dell already look after their customers and users this way, not to mention potential customers.

Time to get on board those of you who haven't yet!

November 12, 2008

Social network analysis tool

Agna (Applied Graph & Network Analysis) is a tool built for social network analysis, sociometry and sequential analysis. With Agna you can study relationships between groups, relationships between people, and the structure of social networks. The results are graphed nicely so that you can simply see the results of your analysis.

It uses network analysis which assumes that the way that people communicate affects important properties of that group. Here nodes are people and edges are communication acts. It also uses sequential analysis which identifies the constants and rules that govern the inner structure.

It was developed by Marius I. Benta, a PhD student at University College Cork (Ireland).

It's a free download (windows, Mac, Linux), and you can see more screenshots here.