Right Relevance: Top IIoT Influencers in June 2017

Right Relevance: Top IIoT Influencers in June 2017

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is changing the industrial landscape rapidly. To stay competitive and make the right decisions industry’s leaders need to understand the potential of IIoT and to be informed. This is one of the reasons why Right Relevance in collaboration with IIoT World analyzed the trends and identified Top 50 IIoT Influencers. The IIoT Communities were detected using two graph algorithms. For sub-graphs, Right Relevance used Neo4j & R. Graph visualizations are done via Gephi.

The report leverages tweets sampled from June 1st to June 15th, 2017, and along with Right Relevance topics, topical communities and articles data form the basis for the analysis.

This report is a summary of graph analysis of engagements and conversations including retweets, mentions and replies of tweets related to the subject of ‘Industrial IoT’. The phrase used for gathering tweets is “iiot”. Most of the summary report is extracted from the analysis collateral in the form of tables and graphs.

Top 30 IIoT Influencers around the World

The first two lists represent the top 30 accounts listed by PageRank & Overall measures. Top overall influence is measured by combining the quantity of connections (Retweets, mentions, replies), the quality of the connections (measured by Page Rank) and the reach of the users tweets. These are adjusted to discount the skew towards users with a very large number of followers (often referred to as becoming ‘viral’).

Compared to the previous IIoT Report published in April, PageRank brings up Evan Kirstel (@evankirstel) on the top position, followed by Bill McCabe (@IoTRecruiting) and Carol Rudinschi (@IIoT_World). In 4 months after launching, IIoT_World becomes number three IIoT influencer in the World. Ipfconline (@infconline1) holds number 4 position in Industrial IoT space, followed by GE Digital (GE_Digital).

Top tables, in general, look total different from the previous analysis. Accounts such as @CBInsights, @NpappaG, @kubernan, @techcrunch are gone, but there are new IIoT influencers such as Carol Rudinschi (@IIoT_World), Network World (@NetworkWorld),Deborah Sherry (@deborahsherry), David Oro (@DavidOro), Michael Fisher (@Fisher85M), Siemens (@Siemens), Steven Max Patterson (@stevep2007), HPE IoT (@HPE_IoT), Dan Yarmoluk (@DanYarmoluk), Pradeep Rao (@pradeeprao_), @Ahmed Al Naggar (@AAlNaggar), The Manufacturer (@TheManufacturer), Rockwell Automation (ROKAutomation), TechRepublic (TechRepublic), PTC (@PTC), ThingWorx (ThingWorx), TNW (@TheNextWeb), ReadWrite (@RWW) and Marc R Gagn MAPP (@OttLegalRebels).

The following accounts are in the top 30 IIoT Influencers as in the previous report: ThingsEXPO (@ThingsExpo), Predix (@Predix), David Oro (@DavidOro), Scott Amyx (AmuxIoT), IoT One (IotoneHQ) and Ludmila MorozovaBuss (TopCyberNews). A majority of these accounts are part of the most highly engaged community visualized in the graph (Purple).

IIoT_World has been moved up appreciably. In the last two months, it moved up to 3^rd place in Top Overall from place number 32. Also, GE Digital has moved from position number 29 to position number 5.

Who are top 10 IIoT Influencers and why?

1. Evan Kirstel is a Thought Leader helping B2B clients with Social Media in Enterprise, IoT, Telecom, Cloud and DigitalHealth. Social Business had been a personal passion of Evan, as he grown his Twitter (123K+ followers) and LinkedIn (14K connections) network while helping dozens of clients grow from zero to Tens of Thousand of engaged followers. His connections are a “Who’s Who” of the B2B Enterprise IT, Telecom and Cloud landscape, and growing by thousands monthly. Evan holds a BSc in Electrical Engineering.
2. Bill McCabe spent his early career as a CPA with a major accounting firm. What he learned from accounting is that he didn’t want to spend his whole life doing it. That knowledge engendered a change of address from the accounting firm to a marketing and public relations company. Bill found his niche in recruiting and consequently spent the last 19 years in IT recruitment, in particular in executive search helping candidates and hiring managers in the software and professional services industry. To say that he is uniquely qualified to know the kind of candidates that major companies are looking for is a mild understatement. Crossing over to IoT, a field about which he knew a great deal and wanted to know more, Bill became very passionate about IoT and big data, making it a point to learn the past, present and future of the arena. In IoT, Bill found his real space in life. Candidates he places are among the top 5% in their field and are top producers for their new companies. Bill loves what he does and takes infinite pride in putting together the right candidate with the right company. He has been applauded and lauded as one of the top fifty Twitter influencers in IoT, landing at number 17. Named an BM IOT Futurist at IBM INterconnect as well as IOT Emerge in Chicago in Sept 2016.
3. IIoT World™ (@IIoT_World) is the first Global Digital Publication dedicated 100% to Industrial Internet of Things/Industry 4.0, being a minority (woman) owned business. IIoT World™ combines journalistic coverage with data analysis to expose the stories, players, trends, and innovations that shape the IIoT.
4. Ipfconline – it is a web agency based in France, founded by Pierre Pinna (@pierrepinna). The agency is specialized in e-commerce, webmaster, SEO, Digital Marketing, AI, Big Data. It tweets about BigData, Digital Marketing, IoT, IIoT, AR, Fintech, being in the top 5 influencers in these areas.
5. GE Digital is the first big company that appears in Top 5 IIoT influencers. Even the information is not updated (the cover photo is about an event that took place in Berlin two weeks ago) and there is not too much activity in the last few days (a tweet every two days or even less often) the account has been moved up to about 24 positions. This might be the result of a great activity during the GE’s event in Germany and due to a large number of followers.
6. Network World (@NetworkWorld) is the premier provider of information, intelligence, and insight for Network and IT Executives. The editorial focus is on delivering news, opinion and analytical tools for key decision makers who architect, deploy and manage business solutions. NetworkWorld.com is a part of the IDG (International Data Group) company.
7. ThingsExpo (@ThingsExpo) is a brand for events, produced by SYS-CON Events, a part of SYS-CON Media (www.sys-con.com). The primary company’s goal being connecting technology companies and customers through a comprehensive content stream – featuring over forty focused subject areas, from Cloud Computing to Web Security.
8. Predix (@Predix) is a GE Digital’s Platform for big data at an industrial scale with industrial-strength security to be deployed on machines, onsite, or in the cloud.
9. Deborah Sherry (@deborahsherry) is the General Manager and Chief Commercial Office of GE Digital in Europe. Her mission is to deliver the next industrial revolution – Industry 4.0. Deborah leads the GE Digital business in Europe, driving strategy, sales, service, marketing and operational activities.
10. Mike Quindazzi (@MikeQuindazzi) is the Business Development Leader for the Pacific Southwest region for PwC. He has 25 years of management consulting and industry experience. He is currently leading revenue growth and market development for a $600 million business unit to record growth.

What is interesting from this top is that 30% of top 10 IIoT voices in June 2017 are from GE Digital. Other 30% are represented by media and 40% from people with excellent marketing skills. What about big players focused on delivering Industrial IoT solutions/products?

 Top connectors in IIoT space

Things changed in regards to top connectors too, compared to the previous report on IIoT. @IIConsortium, the top connector in March, doesn’t qualify in Top 30 connectors now.

Evan Kirstel (@evankirstel) is top 1 connector in the first two weeks of June. The second top connector in the World is @IIoT_World, followed by @IoTonSteroids, which has tweeted/retweeted more than 24 000 tweets, the number of followers being still low (under 500). @OttLegalRebels is prominent here as it has built up influence and value as a news and information hub.

@ipfconline1 seems to be constant as the agency was listed in the previous report too. @GE_Digital  and @Konecranes are new appearances in this top. Konnecranes is the account of a world-leading group of Lifting Businesses™ serving manufacturing and process industries, shipyards, ports, and terminals.  @IotoneHQ is the account of a leading global platform for connecting Industrial IoT, @iotworldnews is the official account for the world’s largest IoT event series #IoTW17 (US) & #IoTWE (Europe).

@PTC, @IIoT_Viewpoints, @IIoT_daily, @shyamvaran, @Fisher85M, @kai_at_ProSyst, @mclynd, @BoschSI, @pradeeprao_, @HPE_IoT, @SAPLeonardo, @automationworld and @iotagenda close the Top 30 of IIoT connectors. @RalphRio from ARC web is not in the list anymore, but @IIoT_Viewpoints, which is the Twitter account for ARC Web blog is now listed as a connector. Some of the publications that appear in this table are listed due to their recent events where a lot of people attended and mentioned these accounts. The value of this measure lies in that it bubbles up accounts with potentially real influence regarding news and information dissemination on this subject.

Users connectedness is measured using an algorithm called Betweenness Centrality. This measures how well a user is connected to all other users compared to everyone else.

Top Interesting IIoT profiles

Right Relevance among the other three classifications (Top Overall, Top PageRank, and Top Connectors) recommend high interesting profiles. The Interesting metric finds smaller users who made a relatively high impact. It compares how well a user does in the overall ranking compared to how well they would be expected to do given the number of followers they have.

Steven Max Patterson (@stevep2007), a tech journalist, is in top 10 interesting profiles. Some big players in the industrial market like Rockwell Automation (ROKAutomation), @Schneider Electric, @PTC, @ThingWorx (a PTC business and an award winning IoT solution) or @Avnet are in this top too. Also, IIConsortium is part of the list and the following publications: TechRepublic (@TechRepublic), Industry Week (IndustryWeek) and The Manufacturer (@TheManufacturer).

Communities and sub-communities (“Flocks”)

The engagements or “flocking” in the context of a subject (topic, event, etc.) can lead to the building of temporal communities with local influence that is not obvious by the standalone influence of the individuals or without the context of the event. The subgraphs aka communities formed by applying community detection graph algorithms are termed as ‘Flocks’.

The largest sub-graph/community is composed of several sub-communities that form smaller flocks. The top 10 flocks in Tableau are listed below: @evankirstel, @IoTRecruiting, @IIoT_World, @GE_Digital, @Datafloq, @IndustryWeek, @SchneiderElectric, @IIoT_Viewpoints, @ThingsExpo and @deborahsherry.

Among top hashtags used by IIoT communities used between June 1st – June 15th were: #IoT, #IIoT, #internetofthings, #bigdata, #AI.

To have access to the full data in an interactive way and to download the top 50 IIoT influencers Report and we will also give you access to Tableau Online Dashboard to visualize graph analysis results via charts and tables. Insights include flocks, top trending terms, top hashtags, top Users/accounts, RR topics, top tweets and several other measures. Faceting is supported per flock, RR topic and Twitter/RR account.

IIoT Communities Graph

One high engagements area (in Purple) is leading to a community around accounts that are mostly industry analysts, thought leaders, publishers, news curators, etc. Analyzing this graph is easy to understand how Industrial IoT players collaborate to spread their messages via Twitter.

Bill McCabe (@IoTRecruiting), Evan Kirstel (evankirstel), David Oro (@DavidOro), Ahmed Al Naggar (@AAlNagar), Carol Rudinschi (IIoT_World), Scott Amyx (@AmyxIoT), Daniel Elizalde (@delizalde), Kohei Kurihara (@kuriharan), Jim Marous (@JimMarous). Michael Fisher (@Fisher85M), @ipfconline, Mike Quindazzi (@MikeQuindazzi), Toby Ruckert (@tobyruckert), IoT on Steroids (@IoTonSteroids), Glen Gilmore (GlenGilmore), Marc R Gagn MAPP (@OttLegalRebels ), Carolina Higgins (@Info_Data_Mgmt ) from PWC, Pradeep Rao (@pradeeprao) from IBM, Kirk Borne (@KirkDBorne), Brett Lewis (@SirBrettLewis), Pinna Pierre (@pierrepinna) et al. form a heavily engaged community in the graph.

Carol Rudinschi (IIoT_World) is very centrally located in the graph. It’s level 2 ego network graph validates this observation. Also there are some companies well connected (in the purple area) like McKinsey Company (@McKinsey), Unified Inbox (@unifiedinbox), FreeWave Technologies (@freewavetech).

Reasonably well-engaged community (in blue) is centered around IoT One (IotoneHQ). There are some interesting and consistent IIoT communities formed around @Ludmila MorozovaBuss (@TopCyberNews) and TechNative (@technative) (in orange), IIoT/I4.0Viewpoints (@IIoT_Viewpoints) – in yellow, and like in the previous report, around (@ThingsExpo) and CloudEXPO (@CloudExpo) conferences (in green).

Many companies have clear and cohesive communities of their own but are not well connected to each other. These are GE Digital (in green), HPE IoT, Rockwell Automation (in gray) Schneider Electric (in yellow), Siemens (in gray) or Caterpillar, SAP Leonardo (green) or IBM Watson IoT, Deloitte & PTC.

 

Right Relevance also generated a graph with IIoT influencers’ rate of retweeting information related to Industrial IoT, showing how important is the collaboration between influencers, companies, media, etc. All these forces coagulate a big community that is eager for information in order to take right decisions in their businesses related to Industrial IoT.

There are some figures that retweet the most and are retweeted: Bill McCabe, David Oro, Prashant AI, Scott Amyx, David Holm, Anita Pralija, Kirk Borne, Carol Rudinschi, Evan Kirstel, ipfconline, Michael Fisher, Ahmed Al Naggar, IoT One, Ronald van Loon, Mike Quindazzi, Pradeep Raao, Ludmila MorozovaBuss, Kohei Kurihara, Brian D Colwell, Don Gordon, Deborah Sherry, Knud Lasse Lueth, Craig Resnick, IIoT/I4.0 Viewpoints, Ralph Rio, IIConsortium.

Conclusions

• The biggest IIoT communities are centered more around individuals or media outlets than around companies.
• Big companies have not a clear strategy on Twitter and do not collaborate with top IIoT Influencers. They have their communities, and some of them are big, but they are not well connected or even isolated. For example, GE’s community is centered around GE’s products and employees and some partners – GE Digital EUfoundry, General Electric, Deborah Sherry, Predix, GE Digital, Beth Comstock, Shyam Varan Nath, some tights with IIConsortium and with TechNative (@TechNative), The Manufacturer and Jonny Williamson (@Jonny_Will_28 ) from The Manufacturer. Siemens is mentioned mostly by Atos and Antonio Santos (@akwyz), IoT Guide, Ayyeka, Brian Buntz (@Brian_Buntz) from IoT Institute (@IoTiNews), IoT World News.
• Things in IIoT space are not yet crystallized as everything is happening too fast. More than a half of influencers in March are gone in the first two weeks of June, which means that in Industrial IoT there is not enough consistency yet. Compared to the previous report, there are many new influencers with a big potential. If the things look approximatively the same after a couple of months, it means that IIoT begins to have a solid shape.

The IIoT Communities were detected using two graph algorithms: Walktrap and InfoMap. For sub-graphs, Right Relevance used Neo4j & R. Graph visualizations are done via Gephi.

There are several more IIoT communities that are outside the scope of this report. Please contact biz@rightrelevance.com for details. 

About Right Relevance

Right Relevance (RR) provides curated information and intelligence on ~50 thousand topics. This includes:

• Topic relationships including related topics & semantic information like synonyms.
• Topical influencers (~2.5M) with score and rank.
• Topical content and information in the form of articles, videos and conversations.

Additionally, Right Relevance provides Insights that combine the above Topics and Influencers information with real time conversations to provide actionable intelligence with visualizations to enable decision making. The Insights service is applicable to events like emerging technologies, issues, conferences, product launches, competition etc.

About IIOT WORLD, a woman owned business

IIoT World™ is the first Global Digital Publication dedicated 100% to Connected Industry, Industrial Internet of Things, Industry 4.0.
Our associates are handpicked with one characteristic in mind: digital transformation DNA and draw from the insights, hands on
experience of the world’s best newsrooms & industrial enterprises to deliver content and coverage across a wide range of industry
categories.

IIoT World™ combines journalistic coverage with data analysis to expose the stories, players, trends and innovations that shape the IIoT.