Managing Roles and Markets

A market administrator creates markets, assigning market experts and social media experts to collect and analyze content in them. When a person is an expert, their profile lists the areas in which they're an expert. For example, imagine someone is a market expert for three markets. Their profile will list each of their expert roles, providing links to those three markets.

Here's a description of each of those roles:

Market Administrator

A market administrator is the principal administrator for markets. They create markets, assigning and managing social media experts and market experts.

An administrator with Full Access or Manage System permissions can assign the market administrator role by using the admin console. (For more about permissions, see Managing Administrative Permissions.)

To assign the market administrator role to people, use the following steps:
  1. In the admin console, go to the Market Administrators page.
  2. To select a person:
    • Type their name in the box provided and click their name when it is listed.
    • Click Select People to browse for the person, select the check box for the person you want, then click Add Selected People.
You can remove a person by clicking the Remove button corresponding to their name.

Market Expert

A market expert manages a market (although they don't create them). They can be responsible for creating create observations to capture the data they notice. They also create viewpoints to synthesize analysis from thoughts and observations. (See Working with Markets, Observations, and Viewpoints for more.)

Among the things that market experts do are:

To assign the market expert role to someone, use the following steps:
  1. In the end user UI, go to the market to which you want to assign a expert.
  2. Under Manage, click Manage market experts.
  3. To select a person:
    • Type their name in the box provided and click their name when it is listed.
    • Click Select People to browse for the person, select the check box for the person you want, then click Add Selected People.
  4. Click Close to close the dialog box.

Social Media Expert

A social media expert has access to the Social Media Console. Using the console, they monitor the web for key terms and searches. They collect their findings as observations. A social media expert will likely have a very active role in collecting information from web-based resources such Twitter and other sites.

Note: Your license might put a limit on the number of people who can be social media experts.
To assign the social media expert role to someone, use the following steps:
  1. In the end user UI, go to the Market Summary tab.
  2. Click Manage social media experts.
  3. To select a person:
    • Type their name in the box provided and click their name when it is listed.
    • Click Select People to browse for the person, select the check box for the person you want, then click Add Selected People.
  4. Click Close to close the dialog box.

Markets

Markets are places to focus research, analysis, and conversation related to an area of the more generic kind of market. Markets provide a way to collect information and collaborate around it -- whether the information is from a community or the larger Web.

Only market administrators can create markets. A market inherits its permissions -- who can see them, contribute content, and so on -- from the place the market is in (such as a space).

To create a new market, use the following steps:
  1. Click the New menu, then click Market.
  2. On the Create a new market page, enter the following:
    • A name for the market. The text you type here will be used to create the URL at which the market can be reached with a browser (although most people will just use links in the user interface).
    • A description. This should be something that makes it easy for people to know what your market is about.
    • Tags. Type words (separated by spaces) that help to categorize the market. People can use tags to filter their searches when they're looking for content and places.
  3. Browse for an image to represent the market. This will be displayes on the market's home page, as well as in pages that list the market among other content and places.
  4. Select check boxes for features the market should have. By default, these include observations and viewpoints, which are essential to making a market useful. But you might want other features as well -- will documents and blog posts be useful in the market, for example?
  5. When you're finished, click Create market.

After you've created the market, you're not quite finished until you've assigned one or more market experts to keep it going. (You could be the market's expert, of course, in which case you don't need to do anything more.) For more information, see the "Market Expert" section.

You can also delete a market. When you do, you delete all of the content inside it and remove any associations -- roles assigned to people, notifications, and so on -- that are specific to the market.