Marc Smith
Chief Social Scientist | Connected Action
Belmont, CA, UNITED STATES
Internet sociologist, using social network analysis and visualization to map and understand social media
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Biography
Marc Smith is a sociologist specializing in the social organization of online communities and computer mediated interaction. Smith leads the Connected Action consulting group and lives and works in Silicon Valley, California. Smith co-founded the Social Media Research Foundation (http://www.smrfoundation.org/), a non-profit devoted to open tools, data, and scholarship related to social media research.
Smith is the co-editor with Peter Kollock of Communities in Cyberspace (Routledge), a collection of essays exploring the ways identity; interaction and social order develop in online groups. Along with Derek Hansen and Ben Shneiderman, he is the co-author and editor of Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a connected world, from Morgan-Kaufmann which is a guide to mapping connections created through computer-mediated interactions.
Smith's research focuses on computer-mediated collective action: the ways group dynamics change when they take place in and through social cyberspaces. Many "groups" in cyberspace produce public goods and organize themselves in the form of a commons (for related papers see: http://www.connectedaction.net/marc-smith/). Smith's goal is to visualize these social cyberspaces, mapping and measuring their structure, dynamics and life cycles. He contributes to the open and free NodeXL project (http://www.codeplex.com/nodexl) that adds social network analysis features to the familiar Excel spreadsheet. NodeXL enables social network analysis of email, Twitter, Flickr, WWW, Facebook and other network data sets.
The Connected Action consulting group (http://www.connectedaction.net) applies social science methods in general and social network analysis techniques in particular to enterprise and internet social media usage. SNA analysis of data from message boards, blogs, wikis, friend networks, and shared file systems can reveal insights into organizations and processes. Community managers can gain actionable insights into the volumes of community content created in their social media repositories.
Smith received a B.S. in International Area Studies from Drexel University in Philadelphia in 1988, an M.Phil. in social theory from Cambridge University in 1990, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from UCLA in 2001. He is an adjunct lecturer at the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland. Smith is also a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Media-X Program at Stanford University.
Industry Expertise (10)
Media - Online
Internet
Market Research
Information Services
Training and Development
Direct Marketing
Think Tanks
Advertising/Marketing
Research
Social Media
Areas of Expertise (10)
Social Media
Social Networks
Business Collaboration
Information
Visualization
Social Science
Social Marketing
Networks
Infoviz
Collective Action
Accomplishments (4)
Ph.D. in Sociology from UCLA (professional)
2001 Ph.D. in sociology - dissertation: Mapping social cyberspaces
Member of the NodeXL project team: Social Media Network Analysis with no Coding! (professional)
NodeXL makes social network analysis as easy as making a pie chart. Over four years the NodeXL project team has released over a hundred updates to enhance the tool so that it is the easiest path for non-programmers to access, analyze, and visualize networks, often from social media sources like Twitter, Facebook, email, flickr, YouTube, and more.
Author of Analyzing social media networks with NodeXL: Insights from a connected world (professional)
Analyzing social media networks with NodeXL: Insights from a connected world is a introduction and guide to the use of social network techniques to better understand social media.
Author of Communities in Cyberspace (professional)
Communities in Cyberspace was among the earliest studies of the emerging world of social media, online and virtual community, social software, collaboration, and social networking.
Education (3)
Drexel University: B.S., International Area Studies 1988
UCLA: Ph.D., Sociology 2001
Dissertation: Mapping social cyberspaces
Cambridge University: M.Phil., Sociology 1989
Social Theory
Affiliations (6)
- Stanford University
- University of Maryland
- Connected Action Consulting, LLC
- Social Media Research Foundation
- International Network for Social Network Analysis
- Association for Computing Machinery
Links (5)
Event Appearances (16)
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Predictive Analytics World 2011 New York City, USA
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3rd International Conference on Digital Culture Seoul, Korea
2011-11-08
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Social Media Lecture Series Purdue University
2011-09-23
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Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication St. Louis, MO, USA
2011-08-09
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Nextwork New York City, USA
2011-06-22
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Quantified Self 2011 Mountain View, CA, USA
2011-05-29
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Lipari School on Computational Social Science Lipari, Italy
2011-07-19
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Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral School Oxford, England, UK
2011-07-13
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Global Spa Summit Bali, Indonesia
2011-05-16
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Web Science Trust Graduate Summer School Galway, Ireland
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Convergence Technology 2011 Seoul, Korea
2011-11-03
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Personal Digital Archives 2011 San Francisco, CA, USA
2011-02-24
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Mobile Web Africa 2010 Johannesburg, South Africa
2010-09-29
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Predictive Analytics World San Francisco, CA, USA
2011-03-14
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Local Social Summit 2011 London, UK
2011-11-10
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USC Marshall School of Business: Communication Technology Executive Roundtable Los Angeles, CA, USA
2011-03-10
Sample Talks (1)
Mapping social media: finding key people and groups in the conversation crowd
People are talking about your product, group, business, event or service in social media - do you have a map to the the key people and groups in the crowd? Using tools from social network analysis and visualization it is now as easy as making a pie chart to map the connections among the people who are talking about the topics of interest to you. Using the free and open NodeXL application (http://nodexlcodeplex.com) you can quickly collect and map conversation networks on a wide range of topics.
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- Keynote
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Social