Mining Social Networks For Profit

Every­one knows that the value is in the net­work. SNA is a won­der­ful tool for aca­demic and I am using it to map my local webs of com­merce. The folks at Spoke how­ever are doing this one step bet­ter. They have the typ­ic­ally enorm­ous and touted list of key decision makers and influ­en­cers at com­pan­ies around the world. Noth­ing short of a big Spam list there. How­ever, on join­ing the net­work, you con­trib­ute your own con­tact list. Again noth­ing revolu­tion­ary in that…but here’s where it gets inter­est­ing. The little cli­ent that har­vests your con­tacts for Spoke also meas­ures how con­nec­ted (inbetwee­ness in SNA-speak) you are based on fre­quency and nature of con­tact based on your email his­tory. Sure its not flaw­less, but when you over­lay this with all the other par­ti­cipants they are build­ing one mega web and are cre­at­ing a poten­tially rich map of influ­ence flows. It raises some ser­i­ous pri­vacy and trust issues, but it is clearly push­ing the envel­ope one step bey­ond. Many CRM apps are out there try­ing to build sim­ilar webs in an auto­mated fash­ion, but gen­er­ally require huge rejig­ging and manual cre­ation of hier­arch­ical rela­tion­ship by thew user. Few actu­ally auto­mate the pro­cess, let alone start to weight the res­ults through con­tac­ted­ness (not con­nec­ted­ness) min­ing. Intriguing.