Making Sense of the Social Side of Web 2.0

There was an interesting article recently in the Boston Globe on marketing and the new media, Hidden messages: Is new technology empowering consumers -- or marketers? By Joseph Turow. It talked about a number of ways that marketing in making use of the new internet. There were a couple of interesting quotes at the beginning.

“Where the old-media system was one-way, today's new media technologies allow consumers to talk back -- and tune out. On Internet message boards and blogs, people can slam products they don't like, celebrate certain brands over others, and help shoppers find the cheapest prices….James Stengel, Procter & Gamble's influential marketing chief, proclaimed in a much-discussed 2004 speech that ``consumers are less responsive to traditional media" and ``are embracing new technologies that empower them with more control over how and when they are marketed to."

How do you make sense of this participant discussion? How do you find out what is being said about you and your products in the new web? How do you find the most influential discussants? The available data is only beginning to be tapped. Currently, a number of Web 2.0 search tools such as Google consider participant behavior to enhance their search results. There are other approaches emerging that also feature social network analysis in their search results but look more deeply into the social side of web content.

For example, iQuest measures the “betweenness centrality” - are you between important web sites and how important are the connections that passed through your site versus others on the whole web. iQuest correlates well with Google but it is harder to spam because of the indirect social network measures. Both tools return the appropriate sites for the search term with links to those sites. However, a big difference between the two occurs in the results displayed as iQuest also shows you the social network analysis.

iQuest is also different from other social network analysis services because it also contains a content analysis tool and looks inside the content of electronic communication. Most social network analysis tools simply look at the relationships between participants in this communication. This allows a hybrid tool like iQuest to show you who is talking to whom, what they talk about, when they talk, and where those conversations take place on the Web. You get to see the social side of the search results and look directly into the participant behavior behind internet content creation. For example, this can create a visual display of what the Web is saying about your products and services and the role they play in marketplace conversations. It can let you know who are the major players in important conversations and how they are connected. You can see the gatekeepers, leaders, influencers, coordinators and innovators in each topic. You can better understand the evolving community.

Many Web 2.0 services such as Google and Amazon open up their data for others to add value. This becomes a fertile source for search combined with social network analysis. For example, you can see the relationship between the top sites on Google searches such as Cambridge Real Estate or to see the relationships between top players in the community. You can also look at the interactions of team members on a project workspace, the nature of collaboration on a wiki, who links to your blog and who links to them, the evolution of a social bookmarking term, or the patterns of communication in a community site such as Live Journal or MySpace. One of the cornerstones of most Web 2.0 applications is open architecture and this offers access to understanding the social patterns within participation.

Comments

[Tomoaki Sawada]

Bill, I came across very interesting you gave on Creativity, Innovation and Problem Solving across distributed networks
July 24, 2006 at iQuest front page. I wonder if there is any Podast or script that covers the content of this presentation. Best regards

[bill Ives]

Tomaoki -

Thanks for your interest. Unfortunately, this audio does not exist. I should start thinking about this medium more.

Bill

[bill Ives]

Tomaoki -

Thanks for your interest. Unfortunately, this audio does not exist. I should start thinking about this medium more.

Bill