T e a m S im p l i c i t y R e d es i g n R e c o m m e n d a t i o n

C LOUD S URFER
Deep Profile Tag-Cloud Service
March 18, 2010

Team Simplicity
HCDE 518

Fernmarie Brady
Tom Fisher
Tim Garret
Sarah Warren
Table of Contents

Executive Summary .............................................................................................................................1

Summary of Benefits............................................................................................................................2

The Design Brief...................................................................................................................................3

Introducing the Humans We are Designing for............................................................................4

Assessing the Need for Deeper Profiles ........................................................................................5

3 Key Insights About Strategic Networking ..................................................................................6

Our Solution: Cloud Surfer ...............................................................................................................7

How It Works ......................................................................................................................................8

System Monetization ........................................................................................................................ 11

The Value to Social Networks: Organizes the Network by Knowledge............................. 12

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Executive Summary

Cloud Surfer is a service that provides a deep profile for an individual in the form of a portable
keyword tag-cloud sidebar “plug-in” that represents the person's expertise (and other categories).
With the person's approval, it “bolts on” to their profile page at the social communities they
belong to, such as LinkedIn, and possibly also the intranet of the enterprise that they work for.
It requires little effort by them to make, can be customized, and belongs to them.
It's free for life. It benefits social networks and businesses because profiles are often incomplete.
It also organizes the network by knowledge. With the add-on, you can quickly understand a
person's expertise without having to decipher it from their job title etc. By clicking on a keyword
tag in a person's tag cloud, you can find other people (and also information for the tag).

How it works
The Cloud Surfer service automatically pulls keyword tags by data mining a person's interactions-
from the information that they create, share, and pay attention to. It creates a keyword tag cloud
representation of your expertise (etc.) that is relevant. Unprofessional or inappropriate tags are
removed automatically.

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Summary of Benefits
Key benefits that make a difference: We identify a deeper profile as the thing that makes the
most difference to strategic networkers. To be successful, they need to be able to deeply profile
others and be profiled, and automatically provide value to others.

Benefits to strategic networkers and the social communities they belong to:
• Intranet search is often poor. Many times it is under funded and content lacks structured
metadata (Peter Morville, 2009). Letting employees tag content makes it easier to find.
This substantially improves productivity, because it reduces the enormous amount of time
spent by employees searching for information or subject experts within their organization
• The tool is free for life.
• Users can immediately improve their profile on any of their existing communities.
• The tool will extract valuable identity information by leveraging from the data you already
create-no extra time is required.
• The tool automatically creates the deep profile that strategic networkers desperately need.
• Automatically adds value with every interaction.
• It's useful because you can find experts or find information (bookmarked by “experts”).
Benefit to companies:
• Improves productivity, because it reduces the enormous amount of time lost by employees
searching for information, or experts within their organization.
• Employees can find people with the expertise to provide answers to questions (that can't be
answered by Google or need to be verified by a trusted source).
• Employees can find information easily.
• Employees can find each other because they are connected by their knowledge
and interests.

Benefit to social networks:

• Members often are too busy to write detailed profiles. With the knowledge-cloud sidebar
these people will still provide useful information.
• Creates a knowledge network that's valuable for searching for information, not just people.
• Users don't have to guess what someone's expertise is by looking at their current job title.
• Split of the advertising revenue (see monetization).
Who pays for it (monetization)?
• Paid for by an advertising model similar to Google. Keyword tags are auctioned off. Small
ads appear on search results pages (after someone clicks on a keyword).
• Free to the user, forever.
• Social networks get a small split of the ad revenue.
• Social networks that don't want keyword advertising will pay a per user licensing fee.
It's a service business so they keep paying, as per terms they cannot charge the user for
the cloud.
• Businesses probably will not want advertising so they pay a yearly licensing fee for the
service.

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The Design Brief

“Most professionals are good at maintaining friendship networks and operational networks
through email or Facebook or LinkedIn, but the notion of strategic relationships is foreign to most
professionals. The next generation of networking tools must go beyond simple contact
information and support the ability to both profile and provide value as automatically as possible.
Your class project is to observe users as they go through their daily process of connecting with
friends and business colleagues and look for opportunities to redesign existing tools to support
strategic networking.” -Skip Walter
The tool should help a strategic networker with at least these two challenges:
1. Figure out future priorities and challenges.
2. Identify stakeholders who can help support future initiatives.

A Strategic Networking Primer

According to Ibarra and Hunter in their 2007 Harvard Business Review article “How Leaders
Create and Use Networks”, the most successful leaders are the ones who build strategic
networks. As shown in the table below, purpose of a strategic network differs from operational
and personal networks.

Types of networks Network’s purpose

Operational network Getting work done efficiently.
Personal Network Develop professional skills through coaching and mentoring;
exchange important referrals and needed information.
Strategic Network Figure out future priorities and challenges; get stakeholder
support for them.

What gives leaders with a strategic network a competitive advantage is that when the time comes
to make decisions that address the future of their organization, they already have people they trust
in place who can provide them with fresh perspectives on the challenges they face. These persons
are other business unit managers in lateral and vertical positions, both within their company and
external to it.

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Introducing the Humans We are Designing for

The team initially chose LinkedIn, a business-oriented social networking site, simply because we
were more familiar with it than other networking tools. The element of LinkedIn that motivated
our team’s redesign effort was the LinkedIn user profile page. However, as advised, instead of
honing in on the tool itself, we quickly shifted our focus from the tool to how “humans
strategically network.” Our goal was to observe networkers at as many of these events as
possible, and use insights from this research to motivate design efforts on the user's behalf.
Many individuals grow their networks passively. For example, when a co-worker leaves the
company they may add them to their network to stay in touch.
We define our users as: future facing individuals who purposefully spend time each month
actively building a strategic network with people whose expertise they hope to tap in the future.

This brings us to introducing Bob:

Bob's goals
• To use his existing web tools in order effectively identify individuals
who can help him reach future goals.
• To quickly and efficiently profile himself.
• To successfully learn about people prior to asking for a referral
or prior to meeting them face to face.
• To learn of ways in which he can add value to his network.
• To dedicate more time to his family without sacrificing his ability Bob Davis
to maintain a strong network. Principal Software Manager at SoftTech
Enterprises

Bob is a 34 year old Principal Software Manager at
SoftTech and, he also aspires to emerge as a business
leader in the upcoming years. Even though Bob is an
excellent manager, to him meeting new people, and
having spontaneous encounters with others can be
dreadfully painful. Nonetheless, he know he is bound
for greater things and his desire to grow within his
business is far greater than his discomfort with people.
Therefore, Bob decided to stretch him self outside his
comfort zone in order to reach his business objectives.
He started by leveraging from his personal/business
network, but he quickly realized that he was struggling,
he was not reaching his goals from tapping into his own
network. Hence, he sought to acquire a new strategy.
After reading the HBR article “How Leaders Create
and Build Networks” Bob realized that the word
“work” is part of networking. He was delighted to learn
that his mistake was failing to embrace strategic
networking, up until that point he was only using his
personal and operational network. He immediately
knew that he must attend at least two networking
events per week in order to start getting use the notion
of networking, and to learn how to do it effectively.
Eventually, he was exposed to new business
opportunities and met individuals who offered
perspectives on what the future might hold for his
business – that is what he desperately needed to
succeed.
Today, Bob considers himself a strong networker, but
finding new people is a time consuming task, not to
mention the effort that he has to go through in order
to find ways to add value to his existing and prospective
network.
Bob highly desires a tool that would facilitate his deep
profiling of others, a way to meet prospects face to
face, and an automatic way to find insights on how he
can establish a trusting relationship with others. He is
looking for ways to sustain his level of networking
exposure. Once he accomplishes this, he can dedicate
more time to generating new ideas for his business—
rather than spending valuable time trying to figure out
who can help him execute those ideas.

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Assessing the Need for Deeper Profiles

The research activities were chosen to find and develop context for the eventual building of a
prototype application. The results yielded some useful information, such as establishing people's
preference to meet others face to face. It was hard to draw strong conclusions that lead directly
to our recommendation. This was because it was difficult to observe strategic networking since it
happens at multiple times and places, not just at events.
Because we had a limited amount of time for research, we also chose to include the best
observations from other teams. We reviewed our’s and other group’s research reports to identify
key observations and insights. This was done to add breadth to our research. Comparing all this
research also confirmed patterns in the data and helped us to validate trends and key insights.

Research activity Description Key Insights

Deep hanging out Attended social networking events, People prefer meeting face to face.
observed and became involved with the Professionals do not have much free time.
activity.
Interviews with Independent interviews with structured Give back to the network.
contextual inquiries and unstructured questions. Some people like to deeply profile others
before meeting
Iterative protyping based Used the Elito Framework to organize Find a way to consolidate online
on Elito framework observations, identify trends prior to interactions to allow for rich profiles of
methodology develop prototypes, then iteratively individuals.
validated with user feedback.

The biggest insight from face-to-face networking, was that people like to deeply profile others
before meeting them. This supported our findings that a deeper profile is the thing that would
make the most difference to strategic networkers. Establishing a sense of trust and managing the
vast amount of information available from web sources, email, and live events was also identified as
a concern.
These findings drove the team to explore the development of a broader application that addressed
the uncontrollable use of the myriad of online applications people use in the “wild”.
To reach the broadest audience, we focused on identifying behaviors and mapping features that
would help people make meaningful strategic connections.

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3 Key Insights About Strategic Networking

(Please see the spreadsheet: Key Insights Organized using the ELITO framework in the Appendix
for additional insights.)

1. The best time to build a strategic network is before you need to leverage it.
You have to give a lot to your network before attempting to extract value.
“An important part of personal development networking and strategic development networking is
‘giving’ to the network quite a bit before trying to get something out of the network. To do a good
job of exchanging value (and scaling to hundreds if not thousands of participants), you need to
have good profiles of the other users and a good profile of yourself.” -Skip Walter/HBR

2. Most people already have content all over the place whether it's local or at various
places online.

“We need to help people link all their disconnected content together into a single online
identity—the Centralized Me. it's badly needed because our content is all over the place.”
-Michael Arrington

3. Strategic networkers would be willing to share a deep profile of themselves

if they knew that the information would be walled of in a secure, private network,
similar to an intranet.
People don't want to share all their information with the general public, but may be willing to
share it in a secure manner if there is a lot to be gained by doing so. (Paraphrased from Skip
Walter).

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Our Solution: Cloud Surfer

Automated profiling provides deeper profiles than those that are currently available. The system
mines a user’s professional expertise and related interactions—communicating information,
creating it, and consuming it, both internal and across the web. Keyword tags are captured by
automatically pulling from disparate sources to create a tag cloud of an individual's expertise.
These tags are then used to create “clouds of knowledge”
accessible inside a walled garden.
Cloud Surfer provides a deep profile for
individuals in the form of a portable keyword
tag-cloud sidebar “plug-in”. With the person's
approval, it “bolts on” to their profile page at the
social communities they belong to, such as LinkedIn,
and possibly also the intranet of the enterprise that
they work for.
Cloud Surfer makes it easy for Strategic
Networkers to create a deep profile that stays up to
date. It does this by pulling content from all their
online activities automatically, as well as what is
published about them. The tool lets Strategic
Networkers manage what gets published to
their profile.
Cloud Surfer is a profiling tool that helps
Strategic Networkers identify the right people
to network with, enabling them to easily build a The user helps the system identify their content: (1) dynamic content that changes
over time (such as blog posts, news written about them or their products (2) static
network of people who can later help them face content that doesn't change, which gets uploaded or is filled out in forms. All the
two primary challenges: content is stored in a secure database.

• Figure out future priorities and challenges.

• Identify stakeholders who can help support future initiatives.
Cloud Surfer supports the above challenges by allowing users to:
• Have the system create a deep profile for them with little effort or writing required.
• Successfully deep profile others prior to asking for a referral or prior to meeting them face
to face (given that everyone will have their own deep profile).
• Add value to their network by automatically and dynamically sharing relevant information.
• Leverage from their existing network domains without having to sign up for yet another
online tool.
• Make it easy to locate subject matter experts who can answer or verify information.

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How It Works
There are two primary customers/applications:

1. Business intranets
Automated profiling begins by collecting content they have published to the companies intranet.
The second step is to index an employees e-mail. In her book “The Social Factor”, Maria Azua,
vice president of Cloud Computing Enablement for IBM Enterprise Initiatives, explains the
technical details of how this is done (special note—privacy concerns and recommendations for
how data is handled are italicized):
Linguistic tools can extract relevant keywords while cloaking the context of the private
communication. Keywords are then stored in a hidden, indexed portion of the profile, or they
can be clustered and placed in the profile. Searches for these keywords or related topics
(using the technique of expanded search term with a thesaurus) results in a hit on the target’s
profile. Although this technique works well, it has one drawback. Although most companies have a
policy that all e-mail and other employee communications are not private, some sensitivity should be
exercised with regard to the perception of employee privacy. At a minimum, the employee should
have the opportunity to edit the keywords to filter out anything they consider non-business-related.
This review of keyword topics, however, places the burden back on the employees to interact with
their profiles. One solution is to use subject taxonomies. These are terms relevant to the enterprise,
which are used to cluster topics. Based on document or e-mail scanning, a small set of higher-level
categories can then be suggested to an employee using these terms. When accepted, the terms would
help identify employees with the strongest affinities to a category and would be displayed when
browsing or searching for similar content.
Additional profiling sources for the other touch point that people have across the web can also be
included, starting with primary sources (see figure 1-Table: A person's primary sources of social
interactions). These sources are also discussed in the Social Communities section immediately
following.

2. Social communities such as LinkedIn, Plaxo, etc.

Automated profiling begins with the person providing a few of their online identities (user names
for online entities) to the system for primary sources (see the table: A person's primary sources
of social interactions on the next page).
Because people often have multiple identities and touch points across the web, and to avoid
overwhelming users before they see the value of the system, we propose that the system start by
learning just a few of a persons primary interaction sources, by having them complete a short form
for the most popular ones.
Then over time the system can periodically prompt the user to ask them if they would like to add
a new source from a list of recommendations. This way users can immediately see the value of the
tag cloud with minimal effort. The system starts by collecting key words from a few primary
sources including: e-mails, a person's blog, tweets, browser or online bookmarks, favorite blogs,
and perhaps their virtual bookshelf.

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A person’s primary sources of social interactions

Communication
Description Examples
interactions
E-mail & attachments A person's e-mails and attached files. PDF's, Word files
Blog An individual's journal that he makes public for all to see, inviting Blogger, WordPress
responsive comments from his readers.
Wiki A (public, protected or private) Web site where multiple people can pbwiki, wikispaces
collaborate to create a work together by easily adding to or editing
the content of the site.
Microblog A “mini blog” consisting of 140 characters or less (the maximum Twitter, Plurk, Jaiku
visible on cell phone screens) that answers the basic question
“What are you doing?” This message goes to the cell phones or
computers of those who choose to receive your updates.
Status update A form of microblogging, though it's frequently called a status Facebook, MySpace,
update on these sites. LinkedIn
Social networking site A Web site that allows people to share information about LinkedIn, Facebook,
themselves and to search for others for the purpose of giving MySpace, XING
information, receiving information, or forming beneficial
relationships.
Discussion forum A place where questions can be posed to the public or a specific Yahoo! Answers
(answers) community and then answers and threaded comments can be LinkedIn Answers
viewed by all. Slashdot
Content interactions Description Example

Local bookmarks Bookmarks for your browser Firefox bookmarks

Online bookmarks Tagging content is “assigning a piece of information with a keyword Delicious
that will help you find it later”
Blogroll Your favorite blogs (rss feeds that automatically update can there are millions
provide scannable content)
Virtual bookshelf A person's virtual book collection Library Thing
Podcasts A series of downloadable audio sessions that are sent to subscribers iTunes, Podcast Alley
on demand for play on their computers or mobile mp3 players.
Social discovery sites Communities that rate recent content on the web such as news, Digg, Reddit,
videos, and photographs Stumbleupon
Physical interactions
Conferences & Conferences and other events a person has attended or has Calendar, Meetup,
Trade shows events scheduled Upcoming
Presentations Presented to group SlideShare
The purpose of this table is to identify and also provide a brief primer on the primary sources of a person's social interactions that could be
data mined to gather keyword tags relevant to their expertise (in addition you could also collect and make available the person's bookmarks
and articles, if the information has been publicly shared, identifying the content sources that a person subscribes could also add value). It's
worth noting that the interactions in the table above are not just personal ones. They are increasingly done on the behalf of their organization.
For example, “at Zappos, 435 of its 1,300 employees are on Twitter. CEO Tony Hsieh has the esteemed destination of “Twitter rank: #1,”
with 800,000 followers.
Source for quoted descriptions (in italics): Social Media At Work: How Networking Tools Propel Organizational Performance,
by Arthur L. Jue, Jackie Alcalde Marr, and Mary Ellen Kassotakis (Jossey-Bass, A Wiley Imprint, 2010)

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Automatic Profile Content: Data Mined from Dynamic Interactions

The tool will pull from people's current interactions, and aggregate this content to their profile.
Users are able to manage content sources, and if desired approve what gets published.
Content comes automatically from a person's web interactions that act as sources. The user is
asked for URL's and user names. Data is acquired as legally as possible, starting with publicly
available RSS feeds, APIs and web services. RSS feeds can also be created by scraping web pages,
and how much of this will need to be done, depends on what the lawyers determine. In the future,
as open standards are embraced, a person's content will flow more freely. Many sites such as Flickr
already make it easy for other services to get a person's data out.

Static Profile Content: Manual Input by User

Static content is content used in a profile that stays the same or changes infrequently. To make it
easy for the users when they create a profile, our top priority is to minimize the required amount
of writing that users need to do. Besides a few brief questionnaires (forms to enter information
OR click on check boxes) most static content can be obtained in a few ways:
• By the user at the time a profile is created
• When they later interact with the site.
• Uploading profile information from existing documents such as resumes, Word files etc.
• Pointing to URLS of web pages for information elsewhere such as bios or about pages.
System diagram

Profile Sources Profile Display Profile Enrichment

Opt-in/permission Scheduled or manual service Form inputs

Email
Notes
Contacts
Profile Data View
RSS Aggregated content from
Web services data sources and data Manually added
Email API enrichment to form profile Tags
Content

LinkedIn Contact Info

Profile Refinement
Store/Retrieve
Personal
Twitter Rating
Scale

Make
Blogs
Groups

Search Analysis
Forums Sort Synthesis

Flicker

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System Monetization
Except for businesses, the service will be monetized by keyword advertising placed on search results
pages that result from someone clicking on a keyword tag. The communities listed below are
examples of walled gardens that could add value to their users by purchasing our product:

Private Networks Social Networks Enterprise Networks

• Angel Society • LinkedIn • Microsoft Employee Network
• UW Alumni • Plaxo • Boeing Internal Network
• KCCC • Meetup • Amazon, Google, T-Mobile etc.

The value to business: Information & expertise location through tagging

Researchers have shown that “the average enterprise worker spends more than 12 hours per week
searching for information”. [The Social Factor, Maria Azua (IBM, 2010)]. The value to businesses is
the productivity increase that results when enterprise workers are able to locate subject matter
experts in their organization. Automated profiling reduces the time spent searching for answers to
questions that cannot be answered with a Google search.
According to Maria Azua, “Web and intranet search has replaced most forms of traditional
document research to get immediate insight on business issues and to gather information necessary
for decision making. It is often the case, however, that an answer alone is not enough.
A recognized authority who can verify the answer—an “expert”—is also required. This is common
in customer interactions or when an employee campaigns for a particular point of view to his
management team or to an external partner. An intranet search of company resources for an answer
often comes up empty, so using one's business network can be an effective mechanism for accessing
the required information. In these cases, we don't necessarily need to find the definitive expert;
instead we just need to find the person in our network that can connect us with the expert.
The tag cloud that provides a trusted source of information about a person's abilities and experience
provides “an excellent way to locate people who have a vote of confidence from the community and
recognition for earlier accomplishments.”

Anticipated time savings

In order to quantify time saving, we have created a conservative estimate of anticipated savings in a
small organization or community. The anticipated savings is broken down into two areas.
Time saved finding subject matter experts (SME), and time saved extracting relevant data.

Estimated savings: By searching an automated profile

Time Savings Number of Users in

Frequency Total Minutes
Subject per Search a Small Community
per Month Saved per Month
(minutes) or Organization
Find Subject Matter Expert (SME) 3 5 60 900
Find Relevant Documentation 2 10 60 1200
(as extracted automatically by SME profile
Total minutes saved per month 2100

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The estimated time saved accessing data is calculated as the product of:
• Average time spent searching for data in folders, sending emails to asking for references etc.
(second column)
• An average number of instances in which the same search is performed on a monthly basis
(third column)
• Number of users that access data (fourth column)
Total dollars saved by small organizations:
The total dollars saved per month is calculated by multiplying 35 hours (2100 minutes) by the
hourly rate of the employee.
If we assume a hourly rate of $100.00 per employee, then the total monthly savings for a small
organization can add up to: $3,500
Of course, these are conservative estimates. In reality, individuals spend much more than 3
minutes per each search, and we can expect to support large organizations with hourly rates
much higher than $100.00 per person.

The Value to Social Networks: Organizes the Network by

Knowledge
Members often are too busy to write detailed profiles. With a knowledge-cloud sidebar these
people can provide useful information by merely pointing the service to a few urls and perhaps
supplying their user name for a few sites.
Tagging creates a knowledge network that's valuable to people who are searching for information,
or subject matter experts who have it. As per Maria Azua, “It is...highly unlikely that we will
stumble upon the expertise we need through casual contact, especially when deep expertise or
extended collaboration with a trusted source is called for. The challenge is to find experts outside
your existing network or local environment.” For example, take LinkedIn. Deep profiles only exist
for those who have invested quite a bit of time to write one. As a result, users are often left to
guess what a person's expertise is by looking at their current job title and guessing, “Ah this
person was director of communications, maybe they can help me write a press release”.
The business model we propose is to place keyword ads in the Serps pages that come up after
users click on a keyword term in a tag cloud. These ads provide advertising revenue that is split
with the social network, which is an incentive for them to include the sidebar.

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Bibliography
The Social Factor, Maria Azua (IBM, 2010)
Pro Web 2.0 Mashups: Remixing Data and Web Services by Raymond Yee (Apress, 2008)
Information trapping : real-time research on the web by Tara Calishain (Peachpit, 2007)
Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers by Michael Schrenk (No Starch Press, 2007)
Google Hacks, Third Edition by Paul Bausch, Tara Calishain, and Rael Dornfest (O'Reilly and
Associates, 2006)
Designing Social Interfaces, 1st Edition by Christian Crumlish; Erin Malone (O'Reilly, 2009)
Social Media At Work: How Networking Tools Propel Organizational Performance, by Arthur L.
Jue, Jackie Alcalde Marr, and Mary Ellen Kassotakis (Jossey-Bass, A Wiley Imprint, 2010)

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Appendix

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