Speaker(s):  Marc Smith 

Duration: 60 minutes

Track: Data Analytics and Visualization

We live in a sea of tweets, posts, blogs, and updates. Social media can be a bewildering stream of comments, a daunting fire hose of content. But with better tools and a few key concepts from the social sciences, the swarm of favorites, comments, tags, likes, ratings, and links can be brought into clearer focus to reveal key people, topics, and sub-communities. The Social Media Research Foundation's free, open NodeXL project makes analyzing social media networks accessible to most Excel users. With the NodeXL add-in for Excel in Office 2007 and 2010, creating a social network map becomes as easy as making a pie chart.
NodeXL supports the exploration of social media with import features that pull data from Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, web hyperlinks, and personal email indexes. Come see how this tool lets non-programmers quickly generate useful network statistics and metrics and create visualizations of network graphs.