Social networks online, such as Facebook and Myspace are becoming more and more important. Increasingly, marketing through these online social networks will become ever more prevalent. For example, a friend of mine has launched his “socialight” application onto Facebook’s open API (which means external programmers can add programs and applications to facebook – not just facebook employees) – where you subscribe to an online and mobile phone GPS “stickies” service. Another example might be someone with a lot of social capital (ie contacts and influence online), in turn influencing their friends, contacts and others exponentially in theory due to the fluid nature of a social network to buy a product or service. Related to this but slightly different, Blogvertise is a service which pays bloggers to promote a product or service related to the blogger’s field of expertise. You get the gist. This is all seriously fascinating marketing.
The 2 things that absolutely fascinate me are:
1. The major challenge facing marketing strategists in how to increase the effectiveness of social network based marketing strategies.
2. The future marrying of web analytics and social network analysis and resulting improved marketing effectiveness and business intelligence.
Measuring the influence of myspace visitors
MIT Media Lab / Social Media Lab designed a flexible tool for the content driven exploration and visualization of a social network. Building upon a traditional force-directed network layout consisting of nodes (profiles) and ties (friend-links), the system shows the activity and the information exchange (postings in the comment box) between nodes, taking the sequence and age of the messages into account.
In the myspace service network-only visualization methods are no longer sufficient to meaningfully represent the community structure. Numerous commercial profiles, fake/spam/celebrity profiles and tools such as automated friend adders result in a huge numbers of connections, many of which carry little information about a person’s actual social ties and behavior. The average myspace user has more than 130 friends, but there are also profiles with over a million “friends”. By going beyond the “skeleton” of network connectivity and looking at the flow of information between the individual actors, the authors hope to create a far more accurate portrait of online social life.
Visualisation of the true influence of comment flow of myspace visitors:
What is social networking analysis:
Social network analysis has emerged as a key technique over the last century in modern sociology, anthropology (good thing I am a qualified anthropologist), sociolinguistics, geography, social psychology, information science to measure what individuals do and the many types of relationships between one another. And now social network analysis becomes important in web analytics. Social network analysis sees social relationships in terms of nodes and ties. Nodes are the individuals (visitors) within the networks, and ties are the many types of relationships between the individuals.
Two Social networking analysis metrics (an introduction merely):
Read Judah’s thought provoking post for more social networking analysis metrics and opinions.
Betweenness:
Degree an individual lies between other individuals in the network i.e it’s the number of people who a person is connected to indirectly through their direct links.
Centrality Closeness:
The degree an individual is near all other individuals in a network (directly or indirectly). It reflects the ability to access information through the “grapevine” of network members. Thus, closeness is the inverse of the sum of the shortest distances between each individual and every other person in the network.
Marketing in social networks
Jason Ethier has written a good paper on social networks. He tells us that the main questions for researchers in social network theory are which types of social networks can be used as a basis for marketing strategy, how to identify and measure social networks, how to mobilise and manage social networks, and which marketing decisions can benefit the most from social network concepts and methods? Researchers have found that consumer networks that are not under the control of a corporation work best for marketing purposes which is why networks such as facebook and myspace are so successful. Corporations identify and measure social networks by collecting information from their customers. One method of doing this is by distributing loyalty/discount cards (large retailers do this) in exchange for customer information.
To conclude:
Social network theory and analysis and their marrying with web analytics is certain to become ever more prevalent as more companies learn of the marketing potential of social networks. And hopefully will become more mainstreamed into web analytics as a whole and into the web analytics solutions themselves. (hopefully anyway)
I welcome your feedback, thoughts or complete disagreement – so please share your thoughts and most importantly, THANKS FOR READING!
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July 2 2007
See value networks.
http://www.value-networks.com/
-j
July 2 2007
Hello Marianina,
Interesting post. I tend to agree!
Have you seen Pay Per Post? My colleague Ted Murphy created it–it’s very controversial. But it is an example of site that combines social media with web analytics to drive their revenue model.
What MIT is doing is quite interesting indeed. It’s really laying down a framework for understanding confluence across a social network. I see uses for customer acquisition and loyalty programs…
Your mention of widgets is a good talking point too… how are we going to measure them across sites? Will API’s be developed for getting data from widgets across sites? Your blogging brings up some excellent thinking/talking points.
Keep it up!
Judah
July 2 2007
Great post. I agree with this analysis and predict the future to join them together thoroughly.
July 3 2007
Hello,
Is there any tool which I can use to measure the social network based result.
I have been using google for web analytics, will check with them, what they have to offer.
July 3 2007
Deora,
Thanks for your question. I am not sure that your exact question is though. Would you like to see how many visitors come to your site from social networks? I am not sure what Gostats offer. However, as far as I know all analytics solutions (including Google Analytics and statcounter – which are both free) offer the ability to drill down on your visitors by referring sources ie the site that originally sent them to your site. In this case, filter your search by looking up facebook or myspace etc within referring sources and you will be able to see incoming traffic/visits from social networks. Hope this answers your question – let me know if it doesn’t.
Mike,
Thanks so much for the positive feedback and glad we are of the same mind!
Judah,
Thanks for your informative and thoughtful comment that has really added to the value of the blog post. I hadn’t actually heard of pay per post – but blogvertise does the same thin (definitely controversial). Understanding true influence of informal exchange/comment flow (when we have so many spammy exchanges that need to be ignored) is going to be tricky. And I still am completely unaware of how mainstream web analytics solutions will incorporate these ideas/ways of measuring into their offerings.
Thanks for your feedback!
John (jheuristic),
Value networks do seem to be a thorough way of analysing actual company performance because they measure financial values as well as the informal exchanges/comment flow – which is very interesting indeed how to link these in a meaningful way. Thanks for your contribution – much appreciated.
July 4 2007
Great post.
July 4 2007
Hi Marianina,
Thanks for an interesting post! I also find it interesting to explore how social network analysis can be combined or merged with web analytics. At the outset, however, it seems to me that there are some fundamental barriers to this potential merger.
The reason is that web analytics (as it is practiced on traditional, non-social websites) is primarily concerned with how visitors interact with the website, whereas social network analysis focuses on how individuals interact with each other. As such social networks require a fundamentally different analytical approach – an approach which goes beyond click stream analysis and which is much more sociological in its orientation.
The question here is much more how people position themselves relative to each other by means of what they write about, how they write, how often they write and, of course, to whom the link and receive links, to whom they leave comments etc.
It seems clear that social network analysis can be enhanced by web analytics, but it is less clear to me how web analytics of traditional websites can benefit from social network analysis.
July 5 2007
Yung,
Thanks so much for reading and commenting.
Christian,
Thanks so much for a very thoughtful and insightful comment. However, I believe that web analytics is moving more into marketing performance management and as company’s begin to use social networks as part of their marketing arsenal, it will become ever more important to measure the impact that these social networks are having on their business. For example, a traditional web analytics solution could develop a tool to track usage of a widget on a social network such as facebook’s open api. The idea of confluence on loyalty/discount card as well. Tracking how informal exchange/comment flow and the influencers/those will social capital, and their subsequent (if any) impact on a company’s conversion rate (financial values) will be more tricky (value network analysis is also interesting in this regard) – but I do believe that this is one of the ways of the future.
July 10 2007
[...] Marianina Chaplin, over at Web Analytics Princess, has written a couple of very interesting posts on “Social networking analysis meets web analytics meets marketing effectiveness” & also “Value networking analysis versus social networking analysis“, along with a link through to the Value Networks Consortium articles. [...]
July 11 2007
Hi Marianina,
Very interesting post and one that got me very excited on my own blog about measuring the aspects of social networking and improving what’s already there. Good luck on getting there and I wish you all the best.
July 11 2007
Hi –
See this event –
Web Mining and Social Network Analysis
http://kmblogs.com/public/item/174497
Cheers,
-j
August 15 2007
[...] Social Media Analysis Marianina Chaplin, over at Web Analytics Princess, has written a couple of very interesting posts on “Social networking analysis meets web analytics meets marketing effectiveness” & also “Value networking analysis versus social networking analysis“, along with a link through to the Value Networks Consortium articles. [...]
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