What the numbers say - 2015 in the life of Maven7

2015 is slowly coming to an end, and while we are already fully focused on the future, let us reminisce about the year behind us. Maven7 has had an exciting year, packed with great challenges, great projects and even greater moments.

Strategically, 2015 was of key importance as the company received a set of Series A funding, making the total investment in Maven7 $2.3 million to date.

Team-wise, we have grown to 32 with the joining of 8 new mavens across our Development, Analyst, Sales and Marketing departments. With this expansion came an increase in our consumption as well. We have gulped over 11,000 liters of water, 10,300 cups of coffee and over 5,200 cups of tea. Oh and about 600 shakers of whey protein (gains gains gains!!!). Let's not talk about food, we eat a lot…especially when waiting for flights, all 56 of them this year.

We need to fuel ourselves though, this year we have passed the milestone of "220,000 work connections analyzed" with OrgMapper, and our Diktio Labs team was on a roll as well. They have analyzed over 20 million Facebook likes and 38 million Tweets to date. No wonder we need those 7,300 cups of coffee…

If you were to call us all at the same time, you could expect 8 iPhones and 24 Androids to ring, but call us before 7 P.M., otherwise we might be at an ice-hockey match or a pub quiz. Our analyst, Balázs attended 43 ice-hockey games this year and as far as our trivia-fondness goes, our quiz-enthusiasts answered over 2,000 questions (most of them correctly). We are a fun-loving bunch, but we also put great emphasis on supporting charities and other serious causes too, hence the heroes and heroines of the office donated 15 liters of blood this year.

All in all, 2015 was a challenging, but fun year in the life of Maven7 and we can hardly wait for the new year to come with everything it holds for us. 

Happy Holidays and see you in 2016!

What the change management community looks like on Twitter - mini research

Change Management has been amongst the top corporate priorities for some time now, yet it still poses serious challenges to even some of the most flexible and responsive organizations. For Change Management to be effective and successful, it is absolutely essential to identify the most influential members and change agents within an organization's internal stakeholder network. And that is exactly what we do with our cloud-based organizational diagnostic tool, OrgMapper.

This time, however, we wanted to see who these influential key players are online, thus we used Diktio Labs, our online community mapping suite, and conducted a mini research to identify whom the Twitter community considers Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) when it comes to the topic of change management, and the ideas that connect them.



How we did this

We monitored a specific set of keywords related to Change Management from September 14 to October 7, 2015,­ and mined over 17,000 tweets, tracking the activities of 9,054 users. The below image showcases the network of key hubs.



Each node (lilac dot) in the above network represents a Twitter account; the more interaction a user gets, the larger their node and label will be. For a better visual experience, the network is filtered to only depict edges (connections) that form amongst people who interacted with each other at least ten times. The thickness of the edges indicates the number of interactions between given users. Arrows indicate the direction of the interaction.


Key findings

Our analysis revealed a list of keywords most frequently used in conversations related to Change Management. On the below chart we filtered out the obvious "Change", "Management", "Organizational" and "#ChangeManagement" keywords in order to provide a more accurate picture of other relevant topics. The results demonstrated that innovation, culture and behavior are often mentioned together with Change Management.







A different approach to visualizing key topics related to Change Management.





Top Key Opinion Leaders in Change Management

In order to be considered a KOL in our mini research, users had to have more than 500 followers, and at least 10 tweets and over 10 incoming interactions during the analyzed time period. To calculate and determine the rankings of Key Opinion Leaders, we have taken into account their:

• number of incoming replies, mentions and retweets
• number of followers
• number of tweets

Based on our analysis, the final list of KOLs in the topic of Change Management is as follows:

1. @mikelehroza
2. @brunogebarski
3. @jasonlittle
4. @aharrell2000
5. @consultparagon
6. @innovate
7. @bizlibrary
8. @brainzooming
9. @malati_shinazy
10. @ms_mac4

As you can see, being an online influencer is not solely about the number of followers a user may have. Our top list includes Twitter accounts with as few as 820 followers all the way to 61,000.





Why influencer marketing is important

Great marketers know and engage their target audience's key influencers. Conducting an online community mapping analysis enables you to identify key opinion leaders who are really capable of getting through to the audience you want to engage, and the main topics that trigger and drive them. Value-driven influencer engagement will not only help strengthen your KOLs advocacy, but also prompt them to get involved in your communication campaigns.


For more information on online influencer identification, contact us at info@diktiolabs.com. 

Maven7 Welcomes New Director for Its OrgMapper Business Line

It is our pleasure to announce the appointment of Hiske den Boer as Director of our OrgMapper business line. Hiske is joining us to oversee service delivery, as well as business- and product development related to organizational network analysis. 

"With our recent round of funding we felt the time was just right to appoint a strategic leader who can help us take advantage of the tremendous opportunities in the marketplace, and bring new insights into our operations." – said András Vicsek, Maven7's co-founder and head of research. "We are delighted Hiske accepted our invitation."

"I have been working with Maven7 part-time since last year as a senior business consultant" - commented Hiske, "mostly assisting clients in understanding what benefits organizational network analysis can provide for their organizations. Now I'm looking forward to diving in deeper and making a real impact on business objectives, whilst also growing our team of OrgMapper experts."

Over the past 17 years Hiske has worked for multiple management consulting firms, including Accenture and PricewaterhouseCoopers, leading numerous large-scale HR projects, and is now ready to take OrgMapper forward and further expand its global reach and capabilities.

We are collectively really excited to work with her, and about the new energies, ideas, and skills she brings to the whole Maven7 team.

Welcome on board, Hiske! :)

Maven7 Raises a Total of $2.3M to Bring Network Science to Commercial, Mass Audience

June 8, 2015, Boston, MA - Budapest, Hungary

Maven7, a leading player in network science-based business analytics, has raised over $1.5 million in 'Series A' funding led by venture capital management firm, Perion. The funding is earmarked for market expansion and the further development of Maven7’s business analytical tools.

"With this investment round, the international sales of our already successful solutions receives yet another boost. After a successful US and Latin American market entry, we are working on acquiring further customers, entering new markets, and introducing new products." said Peter Ruppert, CEO and co-founder of Maven7. "We are proud to have Perion on board, and are excited to move forward with the resources to help make our vision a reality. Our focus is to put more and more powerful tools into the hands of our customers, with which they can quickly and profoundly understand how the complex networks most important to them operate, and thus gain concrete financial benefits." added András Vicsek, co-founder and head of research.

Perion led this round of funding because it believes in Maven7's dynamic growth, and that the startup has a continued potential to become a multi-million dollar company. "We invested in Maven7 for its strength in leveraging and expanding the latest findings in network science, its proven ability to provide immediate business benefits. I am intrigued by what I have seen so far; Maven7 is in a very exciting space, bridging the ideas of enterprise intelligence, big data and social analytics, and can't wait to see how far it will go." explained Gábor Vitán, CEO of Perion.

Maven7 empowers strategic leaders to make better-informed decisions by introducing network science into the business planning process. Via its two distinct product suites, OrgMapper and Diktio Labs, Maven7 provides organizational network analysis to HR practitioners, online community and influencer mapping solutions to marketing professionals, and big data analytics.

Among its co-founders are some of the biggest names in network science, including award winning scientists, Albert-László Barabási and Tamás Vicsek, through whom the Budapest and Boston-based startup also has very close working relations with the prime academic think tanks of the discipline.

Maven7 opened its first overseas office in Boston last year, and already has a prominent presence on the European, Latin American and US markets.

Maven7 raised more than $750,000 from Primus Capital in seed in 2014, putting the current total investment at over $2.3M.

About Perion

Perion is a member of Hungarian Venturio Group, with funds supported by the European investment fund initiative, JEREMIE. Perion aims to invest $16 million in promising Hungarian ventures during its investment phase ending in 2015. With the IT sector being one of its main focus areas, Maven7 is the 4th investment on the venture capital management company's portfolio.

About Maven7

Maven7 supports business decisions by transforming large amounts of hard-to-interpret data into actionable business intelligence. Based on the methodologies of network analysis and data mining, Maven7 has developed its own proprietary network mapping tools, including OrgMapper and Diktio Labs, to conduct analyses in organizational development, social media, the pharmaceutical/medical industries and many other fields.

About Diktio Labs

Diktio Labs takes marketing to a whole new level of targeting and efficiency by enabling organizations to know exactly who will prove receptive, influential and responsive to their messaging prior to a campaign launch. Diktio Labs works directly with end-user clients and also partners with a number of marketing advisors, consultancies and agencies to deliver its technology into a fully integrated campaign.

About OrgMapper

OrgMapper is an easy-to-use cloud-based software application developed to gather, measure and visualize organizational interrelations. Via organizational network analysis (ONA), it maps the human side of organizational processes; it reveals hidden informal employee networks, exposes critical connections, departmental and hierarchical links, uncovers the barriers to information flow, and identifies key individuals who connect departments and products, or are influential to their colleagues.

About Primus Capital

The Primus-managed Venture Capital Fund was launched in 2010 with $28M of core capital. It currently has 14 companies on its portfolio, all of which are built on innovative technologies and sell to international markets. Through the Primus-provided funding and expertise, Maven7 achieved a significant increase in value recently.

Media contacts:

Dávid Kálmán			Zsuzsanna Blau
Senior Analyst, Perion			Head of Marketing and Communications, Maven7
Phone: +36 20 239 0914			Phone: +36 30 210 4830
Email: kalmand@perion.hu			Email: zsuzsanna.blau@maven7.com

How the HR Tech Europe conference went down on Twitter

HR Tech Europe, the self-proclaimed fastest growing HR event in Europe, took place on March 24-25 in London. The conference drew HR practitioners from far and wide to discover the latest trends in HR technology. Although we could not be there in body to showcase our cloud-based organizational diagnostic tool, OrgMapper, we wanted to show some spirit and decided to map the social activity around the event.



How we did this:

In order to map the structure of the online community around the conference, we tracked Twitter with our online community mapping suite, Diktio Labs, between 6 am, March 18, 2015 and 11:50 pm March 26, 2015, and looked into the network of all relevant interactions. We downloaded 11,013 tweets containing the hashtag #HRTechEurope.

Each node (blue dot) in the below network represents a Twitter account; the more influential a user is, the darker and larger its node will be. For a better visual experience, the network is filtered to only depict edges (connections) that form amongst people who retweeted each other at least three times. The thickness of the edges indicates the number of retweets; meaning, the thicker the edge, the more often a user retweeted another user. Arrows indicate the direction of the retweet: the head of the arrow points at the retweeted user.

Click here to enlarge

Our key findings:

@hrzone was the most retweeted user with 493 retweets, followed by @oraclehcm, @let_anita, @david_green_uk, @mervyndinnen, and @rohitbhosale. The network is well-connected, though @rohitbhosale and @emee_insights form almost a separate cluster but still connected via @violazoldy.

We also took a peek at the most trending hashtags, but excluded #HRTechEurope (which was used extensively throughout this period). We found that #HR was the most widely used hashtag, with 605 mentions within the community, followed by the hashtags #ngarh and #Gamification.

In 2015 online influencers can make or break a brand. Instead of concentrating on HOW MANY people are talking about your business, focus on WHO is in the middle of these discussions. Great marketers know and engage their social media influencers. Building close relationships with your influencers will not only help strengthen their advocacy, but also convince them to get involved in your communication campaigns.

For more information on online influencer identification, contact us at info@diktiolabs.com.