"Six Myths About Informal Networks - And How to Overcome Them" and "The People that Make Organizations Go - Or Stop" both discuss social networking analysis.
Businesses today are creating extensive diagrams, graphs, and charts to describe the different roles employees play in informal networks. The main categories of employees are central connectors, boundary spanners, information brokers, and peripheral specialists.
To simplify the four main roles, lets take a look at AU. AU is the company and the different school are the different divisions. The central connector is the friend that knows everyone and everything going on, the boundary spanner is the friend who is in one school but still spends time with friends in other schools, the information brokers the friend who is always trying to get all the friends from different schools together, and peripheral specialists the friend to go to from each school if you have a specific question relating to their school.
Looking at it this way, most of us have been doing social networking analysis for years. Now companies are paying consultants and specialists thousands of dollars to analyze companies to create more efficient informal networks for more efficient flow of social capital. I could do that.
"Six Myths About Informal Networks - And How to Overcome Them" http://itec335.wdfiles.com/local--files/reading-capital/myths.pdf
"The People that Make Organizations Go - Or Stop"
http://itec335.wdfiles.com/local--files/reading-capital/people.pdf
Social Gaming is Taking Over
14 years ago
After reading this I think may just add "social networking analysis" to my resume under "Skills".
ReplyDeleteThis was definitely an interesting take on the article and a very intuitive way to take some sort of analysis that sounds really complicated and simplify it to a point where it sound ridiculous even to call it analysis.
I feel like there is a definite difference between doing analysis and doing the behavior that is being analyzed. Just because I drive a car, that does not mean that I am analyzing why it is making a creaking sound when I go too fast or why it stops when I hit the breaks.
ReplyDeleteWhat you did is a good example of social network analysis but thinking that way is not what people do on a day to day basis. They just talk to their friends, go to class, and do what they need to do.