Can Social Network Analysis Help You Improve Your Social Media Strategy?

2009 - Connected Action - Marc Smith - Social Media Network Analysis

View more presentations from Marc Smith.

In  our book, The Networked Nonprofit, co-authored with Allison Fine, we provide an overview of mapping your social network in Twitter and other sites using some of the social network analysis tools available.  

As someone who loves to play with analytics, visuals, maps, and other geekery, I've been wanting to explore in more depth the how-to and the techniques.   To take my learning deeper on  social network analysis and mapping techniques and how they can be applied them to a social media strategy, I took a workshop with Marc Smith.  He is a self-described "Internet Sociologist" and developer of NodeXL. The workshop was organized by colleague, Tatyana Kanzavelli

This FREE software works as an add-on template in Excel, allows you import data from Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Email and create social network analysis maps.  It doesn't require that you know a programming language, although you need to understand the basic vocabularly of social network analysis and how to translate this to your social media strategy.   After all, data is only as good as it is actionable!   Otherwise, you waste a lot of time creating meaningless, but cool maps.

What I liked best about this workshop and the instructor is that it wasn't on the software features. He gave context of social network analysis, explained the value proposition for using it to help you make social media strategy improvements, and walked us through some examples in the software.  I learned a lot but need to spend more time with the tool and terminology - and apply it to a real world situation.

What I'd love to see is a cheat sheet that maps out the technical social analysis terms with strategy tactics so you knew which analysis run to make what decisions.  Or, a guide to before/after maps so you could see how visualizing your network helped you improve strategy.  

I loved getting context in workshops and Marc didn't disappoint.  For example, I learned that the first ever social networking analysis map was created by Jacob Moreno. It looked at the relationships between players on a football team. Who liked each other, who didn't.  Apparently this team chemistry is important to winning.

My notes:

• People are using social media for social interaction and leaving what Eugene Eric Kim called "ant trails."  Social networking analysis can track those interactions (replies, commenting, like, etc) and help you make decisions with your strategy.

• Without social networking analysis, it's like a weatherman trying to predict a snowstorm without seeing a whole weather map.   It gives you a 10,000 view of your ecosystem.   Without this visualization, it's like three blind men touching the elephant.  There's too much unstructured data (comments, replies, likes, etc) - you need to see a picture or map.

• When you map your network, it tells you a story.  Who is connected to whom?  How are they interacting?  Where are the clusters?   Who are the influencers? Who are the bridge builders between clusters? Who is in the edges?  Who isn't connected? Who should I spend my time responding to and cultivating?   The analysis looks at frequency of interaction, relationship structure (two-way, one-way), and helps reveal structural similarities.

• An individual's online social behavior and connections can be looked at against social networking analysis characteristics and different profiles or roles are then created.  He showed an example of this in an online community SNA and pointed out the lurkers, conversation starters, trolls, based on particular patterns in the map. 

• He covered social network analysis 101 and key metrics including  centrality, cohesion, density, and betweeness.   That last one, "betweeness" describes how long the path is between people. There is great power and responsibility in the people have high betweeness.   To illustrate this, he showed a social network analysis based on voting record of senators.  Not surprisingly, it clusters into two groups, plus there a few senators who ranked high in "betweeness."  Can you guess who they are?

• Social network analysis help you figure out who, where, how much, and how people in your network are connected.   Seeing these relationships in aggregate helps you make decisions.

How are you using social network analysis concepts to help guide your decisions in social media strategy for external communications?   Have some examples? Share them in the comments.

Comments

[SEO Denver]

Market success really depends on social interaction.

Loved the 'ant trail' analogy. This would seem to provide such a granular level of feedback and analysis that it would be foolish to ignore. The more insight, the better the decisions!

Very interesting piece!
Thanks,
MAS

[Debra Askanase]

This is absolutely fascinating, Beth. I thank you for putting up the notes from the workshop, so all of us can benefit. (I did go to NodeXL and I have to admit, it's a bit intimidating.) Here are my burning follow-up questions: 1. Has this been applied to help create a social media strategy yet? 2. What practical things will this chart be able to provide, in your opinion? 3. Am I correct in assuming that "frequency of interaction" between people implies stronger ties? If I am correct, then I see this as a key piece of information to discern who influences whom online. In other words, if I'm mapping out an online campaign and looking at this social networks map, I might be able to figure out who could influence the intended targets/decision-makers. That seems to me to be - invaluable!

[Beth]

Yes, the main value is to identify influencers.  He had examples of it being used to evaluate against a social media strategy.  You have to understand sna to get the most use of out it.

[John Haydon]

Beth,

Great post - and thanks for the nodes, I mean notes. Especially the questions: "Who is connected to whom? How are they interacting? Where are the clusters? Who are the influencers?"

I wonder if Mark mentioned any on-line tools that folks could use. For example, Twitter-friends has reports that creates social maps.

John

[Drororbach]

Very interesting workshop summary, and helpful slideshow from Marc Smith. I've recently started using Klout, which seems to leverage the SNA theory and present results in a very simple, easily understandable fashion. Looks like it's worth checking out NodeXL.

[Billjohnston]

Hi Beth, as always, thanks for the post and the perspective. I took Marc's SNA workshop as well, and found the concepts and content very valuable.

I published my notes from the class as well. You and your readers may find some helpful bits:
http://billjohnston.net/notes-and-reading-list-from-the-social-networ