Telligent, a provider of solutions for online communities and social networks, announced the release of the latest version of its business intelligence tool: Harvest Reporting Server. The company also announced the appointment of Marc A. Smith as the new chief social scientist.

 

Telligent’s Harverst 2.0 is an intelligent social analytics tool that is interactive and allows enterprise organizations to build their own analytics portfolio according to the business needs and goals. It also provides detailed analysis and as well as current trends on how people are contributing within a community.

 

This helps enterprise organizations to prove the value of their social computing investments. With user-friendly format, the tool provides easy-to-use menu tabs including dashboard, activity, content, groups, moderation, sentiment, and users.

 

The latest version of the Harvest 2.0 features ‘social fingerprints’. This enables enterprise organizations to view the unique social fingerprint of every member of the community and thereby quickly analyze how they contribute.

 

One more new feature of Harvest 2.0 features ‘scorecards’. It provides summary of important information and thereby helps community managers and business owners to quickly understand the pulse of the community.

 

The new feature ‘sentiment and tonality’ provides results on what community member are saying —either positively or negatively. This helps organizations to know instantly what people think about them.

 

The latest version of Harvest 2.0 also features ‘forecasting’ along with ‘widgets and RSS’ facility. The software can predict future behavior based on current trends. The reports created within Harvest are reusable as either widgets or through RSS, thereby allowing the reuse of data back into the community.

 

With Marc A. Smith as the new chief social scientist of Telligent, he will be leading the company’s Research & Development efforts about advanced social analytics and business intelligence specifically focusing on augmenting Harvest intelligent tool, in order to offer customers with vital ROI (return on investment) measurement of their communities.

 

Smith has expertise in sociology of computer-mediated collective actions. For more than 15 years, Marc is actively involved in defining, understanding, and describing the valuable relationships that people form in online communities and social media.

 

Smith holds a Bachelors degree in science in International Area Studies from Drexel University, an M.Phil. in Social Theory from Cambridge University, and Ph.D. in Sociology from UCLA. He still remains an affiliate professor of sociology at the University of Washington in Seattle. He has as well published many peer-reviewed papers, which contains info on the ways online groups operate and how it can be enhanced.

 

Marc has also served as the senior research sociologist for Microsoft’s (News - Alert) R&D team, before joining Telligent. He is also a co-editor of Communities in Cyberspace (Routledge), a collection of essays exploring the ways identity, interaction, and social order develop in online groups.

 

Telligent’s Community Server offers a comprehensive integrated platform that utilizes social media to enhance customer relationships and brand engagement, increase ROI, and as well offers channels for customer insight and feedback.