Using Social Network Data to Identify Key Influencers for Social CRM Activities

Background

Social networks have been studied fairly extensively over two decades in the general context of analyzing interactions between people, and determining the important structural patterns in such interactions. In recent years research has focussed on online social networks. Online social networks have rapidly grown in popularity, because they are no longer constrained by the geographical limitations of a conventional social network in which interactions are mainly bound to face-to-face meetings or personal friendships. In addition, social networks are extremely rich, in that they contain a huge amount of content such as text, images or video for further analysis. Generally, social networking sites are just online equivalents of offline social networks. A social network is defined as a network of interactions or relationships, where the nodes consist of actors, and the edges consist of the relationships or interactions between these actors.