Twitter and the Social Graph
A recent article over at Read Write Web overviews the growing prominence of web apps that make use of the the so-called social graph, in this case based on social network data from Twitter. Websites like Twiangulate and Hivemind enable users to tap into data such as whom they aren’t following but should be, what untapped connections they may have to influential tweeters in their field of interest, or what their “follow” lists might share in common with other users — be they friend or foe. Users can use this valuable social data to make beneficial connections they might not have otherwise found, gain followers that count, keep an eye on competition, or find out about opinion leaders for a particular topic.
“Services like this stand in an interesting place online: they aren’t too hard to build and they delivery [sic] huge value to their users,” the article points out, “but so far they have had a hard time getting people to try them out.”
On a consumer level, the lack of action on this front is pretty easy to understand. It makes sense that the day-to-day users of Twitter and related sites might not yet see the value of tapping into social network analysis (though the irony, of course, is that most of them are already relying on social network analysis every time they act on a friend “suggestion” on Facebook or elsewhere). What’s slightly more difficult to understand is why any company would fail to take advantage of such a tremendous resource — in failing to employ effective social network analysis, they forfeit valuable opportunities to gain new business as well as to maintain the current customer base.
As companies continue to discover the tremendous value of modern social marketing (I’d trust a friend’s recommendation much sooner than a telly’s talking head any day), it becomes increasingly important for them to understand not only who their customers are, but whom these customers know, how well they know them, and what the lot of ‘em know and care about. The answers to these questions can lead companies towards valuable improvements such as increased precision and efficiency in their media planning or marketing placement. Similarly, by using social data to better tailor their products, communication, and marketing, businesses can develop stronger and deeper customer relationships that will prove both more enduring and more valuable.
These are precisely the sort of questions that sociomantic labs answers for our customers. The technology that Twiangulate and related websites use to tell you about the Twitter community is similar in design and function to that on which the sociomantic labs database is built: our technology explores and defines the web of relationships that people have on the internet, the strength of those relations, and the topics that are relevant to the members of that social graph. The good news (for our clients) is that instead of just tapping the Twitter user list, we have the ability to crawl all over cyberspace, gathering public data that be used to compose our global social graph. Right now we have profiles on more than 30 million people from all over the world. That’s a pretty hefty amount of social data, to say the least!