This is another in a series of my notes on Lotusphere 2012. I am very pleased to be back again after last year with support from IBM. These notes cover the “Innovation Lab Tour,” hosted by Irene Greif, IBM Fellow and Director, IBM Center for Social Business.

I was impressed by the extensive set of projects displayed. I have seen the innovation lab on several occasions on site and thought that was the strongest set so far. Here are some of the highlights. These are less than half of what I saw but these are the ones I had the most personal interest in.  I am going to do a longer follow up interview on the Social Intelligence dashboard and will have more on it here in a few weeks.

Much of the focus seems to be on analytics. Since I began my career as a research psychologist these apps really appeal to me. Here are a few.

SaND for Activity Stream Management and Analytics

First, I looked at SaND for Activity Stream Management and Analytics. I think that Activity Streams are one of the biggest opportunities in social business. I spoke earlier with Suzanne Livingston about the enhanced activity stream in Connections 4.0 so I was especially interested in how IBM could use analytics with it.

The IBM site described SaND as “an aggregation platform for information discovery and analysis. It leverages the complex relationships between content and people that surface through social applications. Its integrated index supports the combination of content-based analysis and people-based analysis over a rich data foundation… Through its aggregation model, SaND supports queries over any entity in the system, be it a textual term, a person, or a tag; it retrieves a ranked list of entities related to that entity. More specifically, it can find the social network of a person based on a flexible set of relationships. SaND supports a generic model that can easily be extended with new data sources, entity types, and relationships.”

In this case they were looking at a Connections activity stream. You can see the volume around discussion topics and there is some sentiment analysis. It helps you decide what you might want to explore further within an activity stream.It will learn how to be more helpful based on your actions. You can do searches and add filters to these searches. They hope to eventually make it part of the Connections product which I think is a great idea.

Community Insights

This is a tool to help community leaders better understand the people, content, and actions within their community. Then they can take action to enhance the community. It is still a work in progress but they plan to make it available to all internal IBM communities. Here is a sample screen shot.

It shows you lets you know who is on the community, what they do and who can you reach for expertise. It provides access to the characteristics of the knowledge base and shows what content is valued by the community. You can follow participation and better understand what actions you need to take to make the community better.

The IBM Gamification Engine

This one is not analytics but it is hot topic so I had to check it out. Gameification uses game thinking and mechanics to further engagement help solve problems. The IBM Gamification Engine is a set of widgets such as leader boards, badges and points that provide a gamified user experience. Here is a sample screen where an award message pops up.

The idea is to drive further involvement through fun competition. I guess it puts a positive spin on the concept of “gaming the system.”

Analytics Driven Social Q&A

This tool provides an enhanced social Q&A experience through intelligent question analysis and routing technologies than integrate with social apps. It works with Connections profiles to provide re-asking capabilities based on search results for similar questions and routes questions to the right experts base don past actions. It can also refine questions to improve the answer quality and synthesize questions and answers. It can route questions to both individuals and communities.  Like community insights, the plan is to eventually integrate it w into Connections.

REACH: Relationship Analytics for Connecting Humans

No, this is not a dating service. It does help people find someone in their social directory that they may have forgotten about or barely know. What happens next is up to them. It collects data about social interactions, extracts the contacts and uses multiple facets to characterize each contact. It then presents a ranked list of contacts based on what you are looking for.

There were many more. As I mentioned I am going to do a deeper dive into the Social Intelligence dashboard and will be reporting on it here in a few weeks.