A Social Network Visualisation Graph for a Local Business

Thanks to a couple of weeks of trying, and some major digging into APIs and other coding options... I have gathered enough data to put together a rudimentary network of FB relationships of users interacting with Lawrence Companies (LC). I've got some feedback on what that looks like, and some decisions that can be taken now that the data can be put in one place for review. I offer up a couple of options of what can be done with these types of data... after all, you never offer up just one option to a client... or potential client.

To recap, I gathered all the reaction data to LC's FB page since 2011, as well as comments, counts of shares, and mentions. I chose, for the purpose of this graph, to focus on the reactions. There were 3 times as many reactions as shares, mentions, and comments combined, and I've yet to find a way to track shares to individual accounts.

The resulting pull of friends data resulted in 18,940 data points. I forced reciprocal relationships in the data, as FB doesn't make a clear distinction between following and friends. For the purpose of this graph, the assumption is that if you show up on someone's friends list, that you have a reciprocal relationship. Additionally, this graph represents only relationships, and not conversations. I've chosen to identify relationships among those who reacted to posts from LC's FB page.

On to the data. I chose to filter based on a degree range of 6, and removed outliers (of which there were 6) with no connections to the central group. I've anonimised the graph data, because nobody wants to see their friends on FB made public. You will note there are 35 data points, but that the number 7 shows up twice. The repetition is deliberate and not an error. Employees are noted with green nodes, and non-employees with red.

The key question I had was how robust the networks of those reacting were. As stated in the previous post on this topic, approximately 20% of the volume of reactions came from employees. It's also no surprise to me that the most robust networks are employees (1,5,6,7,8,12, and 16). The selection bias of the reactions is most likely the cause... but please note 1,5,7, and 8 have very central positions in this graph... hence a lot of strong connections. The duplication of 7 as an employee and a non-employee results because of that node having multiple FB accounts, and identifying with multiple employers. Had the reactions come from larger non-employee populations, we might have seen other robust networks represented.

So... that's a lot of gobbledy-gook, telling me virtually nothing. What do I do with this thing?

You ask yourself what the objectives of your social outreach is.

I mentioned in a previous post that there are articles discussing truck driver shortages. If increasing driver applications, or increasing incoming owner-operator applications is a key measure, then perhaps working with node 8, a maintenance worker with several truck driver friends may be a good target for beginning outreach. By leveraging experience of node 16, an IT employee, LC should be able to create podcast content that can be gathered from that node's driver friends and shared through LC's main content sites. And good old node 7... that driver has a robust list of other truck driver friends that should have content directed to them. Not on this graph, but also of importance, are the three interns from LC who have reacted to posts and have a group of friends including drivers.

How that content is distributed is another conversation for another post. Let's hold off until the next post for that.

Taking a few moments to gather my thoughts

I'm sitting back in the office, day after New Years. Honestly, wishing I could be at home, still asleep, hanging out with my family. But nobody pays me if I do that, so I have to head out into the digital mine and dig up some gold nuggets in the Internetz.
I spent a lot of my time this holiday break hanging with my family, going to a couple of museums in New York, and a local one. I'm lucky like that, having some disposable time and income. And, like many of the people I see out and about on a daily basis, I take photos and videos with my iPhone. In fact, I only take photos and videos with my iPhone.
I'm one of those geeks who also uses Instagram to capture, modify, and share a lot of my photos. I've also recently put my toe back into the PodCasting field by doing some short pieces on Audioboo. And all this got me to thinking.
How much of of the lives of a lot of us are now based on geo-location based digital media?
Then I geeked down for a second and asked, how much of our lives are now being created and shared in digital media?
Upside, it's easy. We can snap a photo, share it with our friends, and voila, a thousand or so words saved. We can record a quick audio thought, and voila, I don't have to make sure I spelled reciprocity correctly, and quite frankly, I could never describe exactly how loud those fire engines were anyway.
Then I got to thinking about what I do for a living, Social Media for a Big Pharma company. And I thought, Downside. Almost every big company relies on these text based Social Media listening reports to tell us what people are saying. Heck, most companies who provide the service are just now getting to the point that they can tell if the words people are using are a good or bad thing. Try finding a definition of bad that encompasses both the Webster and Slang versions, and you'll see what I mean.
Now, try applying that sentiment analysis to place, context, time, voice intonation, position in conversation, facial and body language cues, and anything else that can be conveyed in audio or video. And you'll see that there's a whole other set of layers. Or what about photos or videos with no text or audio... silent films are still powerfully used, as was seen in a Novartis video contest in 2010.
I'm not offering a solution here, I'm just pointing out that the human element of Social Media is becoming more and more important. That nut we thought we were all going to crack through language and sentiment analysis? It turns out that was just the soft, leafy seed pod surrounding some other casing that may ultimately contain a nut we need to crack.
Don't you hate it when somebody throws out an idea, and then doesn't sell you the solution that comes with it?