Identifying and analyzing Influencers in online social networks - Part 2
Multiple inference options exist for understanding the behavior of online social networks. One area of analysis is that of focusing purely on the content - discovering concepts, facts or opinions from the content posted by users. A second type of analysis focus on the community of users to discover networks (or sub-groups) in the community and learn how those sub-groups get formed or changed and the influence they exercise.
User analysis will provide a greater value over time as the analysis reveals the sources of ideas and not just the expression of an idea or concept. By identifying a user who adds greater than average value to the community, there is potential to increase their activity through managing the relationship with that user – this is a way to manage network externalities by providing incentives to continue behavior that generates positive externality.
By applying network analysis in the social media related to a B2C context, enterprises can aim to identify key influencers in the social media, understand their behaviors and explore how those networks change over a period of time. Some questions which may get answered in the process include:
1. Who are the key influencers in a social network? What are their attributes?
2. How do they exercise influence in the network?
3. How do network structures and positions change over time?
Comments
What about in a B2B scenario, how do you identify and analyze influencers in social networks.
Posted by: Siddhartha Dasgupta | March 11, 2010 4:18 PM
For B2B scenarios as well as within organisational settings, we can use techniques such as ONA (Organisational Network Analysis), which primarily rely on questionnaire based responses from participants to understand their network structure.
Posted by: Dr. Jai Ganesh | March 15, 2010 10:35 AM