Social Networking Conference: Jeff Bruce on Enterprise Digital Networks

Social Networking Conference: Jeff Bruce on Enterprise Digital Networks summarizes how Dow Jones helps firms develop business and relationship intelligence. Social networking & business information technologies offering.

Jeff presented a fascinating concept, “social networking meets business intelligence (BI).”

• Jeff was a co-founder of Generate, which was acquired by Dow Jones; he now leads the media practice.
• The idea behind “Business and Relationship Intelligence” is that it combines business “social” networking with Dow Jones arsenal of news feeds and some other tools. For example: 17 million firm profiles (like Hoovers) + 28,000 executive bios + hundreds of custom news feeds via Dow Jones + news feeds from 1000s of other sources.
• Jeff shared a case study of Deloitte’s TMT (Technology, Media. Telecoms) practice. The DJ app filters all the information and news and extracts the people involved, formatting the information in a BI-like dashboard. Imagine a synthetic LinkedIn (synthetic because it’s packaged by algorithms, not the person) “profile,” plus extracts of algorithm-driven relevant news feeds relating to people on a search term. Not only that, as with BI, you can drill down by clicking.
• Its algorithms also help define who is the best match to try to get in touch with someone.
• John pointed out that this solution involves no opt-in: it builds the connections maps by analyzing the connections of everyone in the firm, and massaging and presenting public information from the news feeds.
• Notably, unlike LinkedIn, you can’t see anyone’s connections, but they appear in search results. I believe you have to ask permission to use them.
• Unofficially, I heard (not from Jeff) that their solution is priced like an enterprise software solution; I’ll be interested to learn more.

The Social Networking Conference took place June 24-26 in Beverly Hills. Between leading the pre-conference workshop on Enterprise Social Networking and leading the final panel, I scribbled these notes.

Enjoy and watch for the final report within a few days!