Two weeks ago I was at SocialNow conference in Lisbon and was honored to have a short session on ‘social analytics’. The conference has quite a unique setup in that it is completely based around a fictitious company called Cablinc which is thinking of implementing an Enterprise Social Network. All speakers address the conference as if they are presenting to the company trying to either instill knowledge as a ‘consultant’ or get them to buy their product as ‘vendor’. Several speakers and vendors are invited around various topics and they are provided with information about the Cablink company as well as specific use cases they could use in their presentation.
As this is quite a different approach to what I would normally do I decided to really go ‘analytics’ on this challenge of talking social analytics as one of the ‘Consultants’ and build Cablinc a dashboard around the theme “What does Cablincs current usage of mail & file storage facilities say about the need for implementation of an ESN?“…
The first challenge of course was that as this is only a fictitious company I didn’t really have any real data about their files or mail usage so the first step was to make that up. It is interesting to see that with a little clever excel coding and some data randomization sites like http://convertcsv.com/generate-test-data.htm you can quite quickly create a test dataset. However, tweaking it to show the data in a way that fit my planned story, but keeping it realistic, was a bit more complicated. To keep the data somewhat relevant to real life cases I used similar ratios for categories and duplication percentages as we had encountered at other customers.
After that I build a few dashboards highlighting some of the use cases I wanted to discuss. The result was a dashboard story which I presented live on stage going through the various dashboards and use cases as I spoke.
This was the first time I presented without slides and I must say I liked it. The tableau storyboard option really allows you to build a story you can click through and having an interactive dashboard that I could immediately use to answer questions made it a fun exercise to do.
I’ve updated the story with additional text and explanations that I spoke about during my session to make it consumable for everyone and uploaded it to my Tableau public profile. It can be found here: https://public.tableau.com/profile/femke.goedhart#!/vizhome/MailFileanalyticsatCablinc-SocialNow2018/CablincSocialAnalytics or by clicking any of the images above.
Update 2-82018: The session was recorded and can be viewed here: