Founder of NodeXL visits campus, presents on social network analytics

Marc Smith discussed the capabilities of NodeXL, an add-in for Microsoft Excel that supports social network and content analysis.

Marc Smith, founder of NodeXL, presented to Elon students, faculty and staff about social network analysis and NodeXL, a free add-in for Microsoft Excel that lets users explore network graphs of social media, in a workshop on April 4. 

Smith, who was also a presenter at the 2018 Elon Business Analytics Conference, discussed the importance of finding who is at the center of different discussions in social media networks.

He proposed that content leaders are not necessarily those with the most followers. Through NodeXL, users are able to find the people who occupy key positions in social media conversations as well as clusters in the crowd, he said.

Smith is a co-founder of the Social Media Foundation, which is dedicated to fostering research on contemporary network society with the help of NodeXL. Currently more than 200 universities are using NodeXL Pro.

Smith was one of several presenters at the Elon Business Analytics Conference on April 5.  At the conference, he presented “Charting Collections of Connections in Social Media: Creating Maps and Measures with NodeXL.”

This workshop was hosted by the Center for Organizational Analytics.