Knowledge graphs built from Enterprise Social Networks

Photo by Eric Ziegler

More and more companies are building social networks in the enterprise. For those keeping track, the common term used today is Enterprise Social Networks (ESN).In almost all cases, the reasoning for implementing an ESN is to improve collaboration, break down silos, ease the flow information, etc. One that is often missing is how it could influence search results in the enterprise.

In the internet, social networks play a huge role in helping with search results. This help does not come in the straight up indexing of the content and adding to the overwhelming amount of content already being indexed, but rather from the building a a social or knowledge graph from the social networks.

Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. have built algorithms to mine the content in social networks and to try to understand the relationships between the interactions happening in the social networks. While this information is used for many purposes, the mining of the data is used build out what is called a social graph and to extend knowledge graphs (think really big taxonomies or ontologies).

There is a big opportunity for companies to leverage their ESN implementations to improve their search results. This concept goes beyond the idea of ESN and could even be applied to any location people interact with each other (online meetings, Chat sessions, even corporate email).

By mining the information from these interactions, a social graph of related to topics and concepts can be built, that will improve how people search and eventually find the information they are most interested in.

This note was inspired  +David Amerland book,  Google Semantic Search - Amazon location 2111.

Marketing Enterprise Procedures/Processes/reference material

As I read David's book, I quickly realize that the internet content creation preparation checklist tips he provides at location 2075 (Kindle edition of the Google Semantic Search book) are similar items for how to create content in an enterprise. Basically, if you want your content (a policy, procedure, reference material) to be found, you need to use some simple marketing techniques (yes, marketing techniques, build and they will come does not work) and a great place to start is to adapt the checklist that David has in his book.

• Identify the types of content you are producing (policy/procedure/etc.)
• Decide what message you want to send to the different target audiences
• Explain how your policy/procedure/content reflects what you want to get across to the target audience
• Explain how the policy/procedure is consistent with the values of your department/division believes in
• Explain your content creation strategy, including frequency of updates, interactions with employees about the content, etc.
• Identify your main content /communication channel
• What other channels do you plan on using to get your message out about the policy/procedure?
• How do you plan on measuring success? (e.g. how do you know the policy/procedure/etc. reached the correct people?)
• Explain how you will identify the main traffic drivers in terms of the content produced for your policies/procedures

The ideas that David refers to in his book are often easy enough to translate from being specific to internet marketing and search strategies to enterprise marketing and search strategies. And in this scenario, this still holds true. Do you have a policy or procedure you need to communicate (market) to your employees? You are going to need to follow some of these basic tenants to be fully successful.

This note was inspired by +David Amerland  book, Google Semantic Search - Amazon location 2075

Keywords are not the only thing that makes a page findable

Photo by Sarah Ziegler

Many people believe that keywords are the best way of making content easier to find. While there is some truth to this, it is pretty evident that as semantic search grows, the power of keywords in relation to other influencers diminishes. In short, in the current day, the power of keywords does not always provide the best way of making a piece of content findable. As I continue my path down of translating ideas from David's book to apply to internal enterprise search, I realize more and more that this basic concept is especially true for enterprise search.

Let's dig a little bit. It is a guarantee that when semantic search is involved, the search query always contains words which are not declared keywords on some of the pages returned in the search results. Instead these words come from other locations, from the content itself, from the comments on the content page, from social media that references the page. In addition, if the content or the page supports the ability to rate or like the content, these items can definitely influence the search results.

For employees to truly benefit from semantic in the enterprise, helping them to find the information they are looking for, social capabilities start to really have a huge influence that can't be ignored. While keywords might help, the content of the page, being written well, using the correct nomenclature on the page and allowing people to interact with the content in as many ways as possible becomes a very important factor.

This note was inspired by +David Amerland 's book, Google Semantic Search - Amazon location 2056

Fulfillment through learning

Photo by Ben Ziegler

I learned from someone (wish I remembered who) that as you learn there is a point where you start to plateau. And as you plateau, you become complacent because you believe you have more knowledge than others.  And because you believe you know more, you stop pushing to learn more.

To keep from being complacent you need to jump to the next thing, to learn something new, taking the risk of jumping from what you are an expert on to something that you are not the expert on, for learning is what truly fulfill us.

Don't stop learning.

Corporate Publisher - you are more than just someone on a project

Photo by Eric Ziegler

So, its been several weeks since I last posted. No good reason except for life was moving faster than I could write. Picking up where I left off, David writes about the need for entrepreneur to realize that while they might have set their company up to sell something, they still need to be a publisher. Why? My perspective is that it is simple, as an entrepreneur, you need to do marketing.

I have been in many position in the enterprise where this same concept applies. If you worked on an project implementation that crosses a large part of the organization, you are very much like the entrepreneur. You need to become a publisher, a marketer, a cheerleader. Unfortunately, teams that provide services to other parts of the corporation often forget that they need to do marketing.

This note was inspired by +David Amerland 's book, Google Semantic Search - Amazon location 1955.

Corporate communications ?= internal marketing

Photo by Eric Ziegler

Isn't a corporate communications teams really just internal marketing team? Why don't they act like external marketing teams, using the same techniques?  The ones that I know, have not changed their ways to match the methods external marketing. In some instances, they don't embrace some of the newer ideas and technologies.

Are there reasons why? My guess? The biggest reason is probably that the focus and value provided by these corporate communications teams is perceived to not be as high as the ones that are "driving" people to purchase the products and services of the company. Because of that, they do not get the funding or the encouragement to step outside of the basic tools they are provided.

Unfortunately, enterprise communications teams are probalby more valuable than most people think.  They have the ability to really drive change in the organization, change to processes and new technologies. And unfortunately, they are often left with either the lack of tools to do the job of external marketing teams or the lack the ability to realize that they could be more like the external marketing teams.

This note was inspired by +David Amerland 's book, Google Semantic Search.

I wonder ... Enterprise profile photos in search results

Photo by Eric Ziegler

I know that google has gone away from authorship and providing image previews, but I still wonder if there is some value in providing an image of the authori/authors next to search results. I believe that there is some serious value in the enterprise of showing all authors of a document or a piece of content, so people know who all contributed to the content.

I wonder if there could be some sort of UI design that would provide images of the authors in certain instances (they are authorities on a subject in the enterprise?) and not show the author images in the search results for when they are not the recognized authority on a topic.  Similar to my last post, this technique would most likely drive people to the "higher authority" content.

The only thing that puts some level of doubt into my mind is the changes that Google recently did to their search results. I wonder if they found that the pictures did not add that much to how people found the content they were looking for. I wonder if they determined that having those images did not improve the "trust" that people had for the content.  If that is the case, I wonder if providing profile photos next to the search results would increase or decrease the trust people had related to the content.  

I wonder...

This note was inspired by +David Amerland 's book, Google Semantic Search.

Images, previews and search results - how to attract bees to honey

Photo by Eric Ziegler

Much of the content in an enterprise intranet is documents. Documents of procedures, project plans, division and department policies, design document to, legal documents, etc. In fact this type of content completely overwhelms the content found related to corporate news, corporate communications and corporate policies. So how do you attract people to the content that is more important?

When people search for content, all content in the search results are not made equal and different techniques should be used to attract people to the content. One method is to provide an image or snippet of the actual content in the search results. Through semantic search, search should be able to determine which results should have an image, based on the quality of the snippet and the relative importance of the content. This technique means that not all search results would have an image snippet but rather a subset of the search results.

The two reasons why I came up with restricting images in the search results include:

1. By only providing images for some content, the search engine can help drive people to specific content. For example, content that is growing in authority but does not have the highest authority score might have an image snippet provided.
2. If all results had images, the search results would get over cluttered and the power of providing an image is actually a net negative, not a net positive.

To try to help the end user, I suggest that some images are provided and in other instances, the search results provides a way for people to click to get to a "preview" of the content. The image snippet would be a lower quality, less informative version of the preview. The images would attract employees to click the preview or go directly to the content, while the preview would allow people unsure if the content was what they were looking for a way to determine if the content is really what they were looking for.

And if you had not thought of it, the behavior of the image snippet and the viewing of the preview  can all feed into determining the best search results through authority and semantic methods.

This note was inspired by +David Amerland 's book, Google Semantic Search.

Click through rates (#CTR) and search basics 101

Photo by Eric Ziegler

I recently completed reading and taking rough notes from David Amerland's Google Semantic Search. The books is well worth the exercise of reading. I recommend that you read through the book while expanding your thinking by trying to determine how it might apply beyond what David discusses. While I indicated that I am done reading the book, I still have 30+ rough notes to convert to intelligent blog posts. So sit back and relax over the next several weeks as I review and share my thoughts generated by David's book.

Today's thoughts are pretty simple and to the point. As I read David's book, I realize that I am relearning many concepts that I once knew while learning many new concepts. This post is about click through rates (#CTR) and the impacts that they have on search results. I am relearning CTR and also learned some new thoughts and concepts. What I knew was that CTRs include the number of people that clicks a link to go to a site. What I learned beyond what I knew was that CTR also how long the person stays on the page or site.

And the great thing about this is that semantic search finds value in analyzing the length of time someone visits a site or a piece of content. Semantic search infers that the quality of content is higher when a person reads the sites pages and content for longer periods of time. Basically, the longer people stay, the higher the likelihood the content is quality and the more trustworthy the content should be treated.

And the beauty of this is, that this basic principal applies to semantic search in the enterprise. And such a simple concept can have a very large impact on search results in the enterprise allowing people to find the content that is most valuable and most trust worthy.

Love it - search basics 101.

This note was inspired by +David Amerland 's book, Google Semantic Search.

Helping corporate communication find value with an #ESN

Photo by Eric Ziegler

In my previous post, I talked about helping team find the value in using a new technology.  In this post, I am going to focus on one very specific example. Helping a corporate communications team that is stuck in their old methods of communication style.

In the traditional corporate communications world, most teams are just familiar with the intranet and email as primary vehicles to communications. In many cases this specific team will resist the desire to change communication methods. My guess on why they resist? They don't see the value. They are uncertain and doubt that a new method might be better. As I stated in my last post, to help a team like this find value, their biggest concerns, their biggest issues with communication need to be understood.  For example, are they seeing a drop in people reading their communications?  Are they hearing that people only hear about events after they occur?  Are they hearing that people can't find appropriate content?  

So when a new technology like an Enterprise Social Network (#ESN) is implemented, identifying solutions that will reduce the issues they see today is a great way of getting a team like this to adopt the new technology. So the question is how can an ESN help corporate communications with these hypothetical issues?

By using an ESN to advertise and promote the latest news article or event, people visiting the ESN will start to read more of the content. It is a secondary channel to share and obtain a greater readership. And if done well, the reach of the message could be even larger, as people share and re-share the information.

In addition, by sharing out the enterprise social network, the sharing and resharing will have an impact on the ability for people to find the best and most appropriate information and content. Similar to the internet, social plays a huge role in how search works. And by having employees engage with the content will allow search engines to automatically assess the most important information and will allow people to find the content faster (through multiple channels including the ESN and search).

This statement might seem out of place, but ...  the concepts of traditional inside the enterprise marketing has to adapt. Especially as semantic and social in the enterprise collide. The quality of the content that is created is all that much more important.  The higher and more relevant the content, the more likely it will be found.

This note was inspired by +David Amerland 's book, Google Semantic Search.