I was encouraged to see that Social Network Analysis was working its way out of the “trough of disillusionment” and onto the “path of enlightenment”. We here at Exvisu have been working from the get-go on advanced analysis techniques to mine knowledge from these masses of information and have gone from explaining what blogs are to dealing with the “disillusionment”.
Many of our clients (mostly those in big PR firms), have tried web-based social media monitoring/analysis services and have been disappointed in the actual amount of added value for business these services provide (in fact, just this morning one of our clients made that exact comment). Online social media monitoring services have made excellent advances in designing dashboards for presenting collected social media data and are completely sufficient for illustrating the most obvious trends in data, but the analysis part of social media analysis is usually quite light, as automated “one fits all” analysis tends to be.
The maturing of social network analysis spells a bright future for providers who have the expertise to adjust the analysis of social network data to create concrete solutions and solve real problems businesses might have. The NYT described this well earlier this month in an article about the increasing role of statisticians in social media analysis.
Let’s just hope that we can keep riding the wave onto the “plateau of productivity”.
8 comments ↓
Nice to see it’s on the upswing. RE: “Many of our clients (mostly those in big PR firms), have tried web-based social media monitoring/analysis services and have been disappointed in the actual amount of added value for business these services provide.” What type of analysis are they looking for?
I’m in the middle of some research on online sentiment analysis/opinion mining and from what I’ve seen, some of these tools are quite good. Maybe we’re talking about different technologies – I’m learning that “Social Network Analysis” is quite a broad term.
Hi Naumi,
social network analysis is indeed a broad term. In fact I often think that it should be broken into two terms: socail network analysis and social network monitoring. The latter would be more associated to the what referred as online social network analysis.
The difference being essentially the flexibility to mine social network data that comes with a deep understanding of data mining techniques. One of my favorite online sentiment ‘displays’ is the site We feel fine, a service I blogged about in an earlier blog post: http://www.exvisu.com/2007/11/27/we-feel-fine-blog-emotional-intelligence/
I definitely agree that the time for more sophisticated SNA is at hand. In my opinion, there are a few areas for further development. 1-relationship based analysis and not just simple counts and averages of friends and posts. Even applying something as simple as Google’s pagerank and eigenvector centrality to a network will yield better insights. This will allow brands to hone in on the true gatekeepers in their brand’s blogosphere. (2) Correlating social analytics metrics with performance metrics, such as web site visits, purchases and revenue. That’s the only way to tie social media costs to ROI.
cheers,
Nick
http://www.sonamine.com
nick@sonamine.com
Hi Nick, excellent comment.
Social Network Analysis is going to mature and I think your two axis are definitely worth pursuing. Tying Social network presence to ROI is always a dicy engagement and if you have a system in place that does it I would be very interested to have a long chat with you!
We are currently trying to go a third way which is to look at the semantic networks created in social network… how content is related as well as actual social connections.
BTW, it has been years since I have heard someone use the term eignevector!
Hi Claude, interesting that you should mention the semantic side of things. Ironically, the same type of analysis that applies to relationships among people also apply to the underlying content. Eg. you can infer the relationships between the content of the communication between people to form a reference vector.
Let’s talk offline on the ROI. Drop me an email when you get a moment.
Nick
Hi Nick,
indeed I think you completely understood where I am was going with the semantic link network. I took a close look at your services and I have a few questions about what you do… when can we set up a call?
Claude,
The essence of my post wasn’t on Cloud Computing & micro-blogging but on Web 2.0 tools (including SNA) on the Slope of Enlightment, bound to be integrated by enterprises. My point was that Gartner is adding his Hype Cycle to all the analysts that are claiming that Enterprise 2.0 is coming to maturity.
Hi Nick,
I’m doing a PhD thesis on semantic social network analysis and we propose a method based semantic seb frameworks to handle not only the structure of the social network but also the semantic of the ontological primitives used to type the actors and the relationships of online social networks. We have an accepted paper at the 8th International Semantic Web Conference:
“Analysis of a Real Online Social Network Using Semantic Web Frameworks” , the presented slides are available here:
http://www.slideshare.net/ereteog/analysis-of-a-real-online-social-network-using-semantic-web-frameworks
and the paper here:
http://www-sop.inria.fr/members/Fabien.Gandon/docs/ISWC2009_ereteo_et_al.pdf
Regards.
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