Social Network Intelligence

As per wikipedia, “A social network is a social structure made up of a set of actors (such as individuals or organizations) and the dyadic ties between these actors. ” These actors have several attributes and analyzing the relationships using these various attributes provide better insights on the network as a whole or about an individual actor.

Only a handful of companies have the rich social networks and the associated data to be able to analyze and identify interesting patterns and metrics on a mass scale. Some of these are LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Each of these networks capture the relationships differently. They even differentiate the actors differently. For example, twitter accounts can be individuals or organizations. But on LinkedIn, the individuals and the organizations are separate entities.

Social Network Intelligence can be based either on static relationships alone or the dynamic content. Let me explain what I mean by this. Social Network is not just about having friends and followers. Those relations actually exist for the purpose of engaging in conversation. Hence, intelligence based on the static relationships alone provides more of a high-level, non-realtime intelligence while intelligence based on the conversations provide a dynamic and real-time intelligence. It’s not that one is better than the other. Users of this intelligence just have to understand that there these two types and which one is useful for the task at hand. For example, to know about the employees of a company, the conversations are not really needed.

Over the next several posts, I plan to focus on the intelligence based on the social network graph and the attributes of the actors in the network without regards to their conversations. Further, the topics are going to focus on analyzing the network with respect to a specific actor as opposed to analyzing the network as a whole. This is because usually each actor is interested about their own sphere of influence or those of their friends, relatives, customers, competitors and partners.

I am also going to make use of the Twitter as the social network. We will look into simple metrics such as “rate of accumulation of friends” and “rate of tweets” to more complex metrics such as “who are your most influential followers” and “what kind of global presence a company has”. Stay tuned!