Social Network

Michel Bruley
WA - Marketing Director

Extract from various presentations: B Wellman, K Toyama, A Sharma, Teradata Aster, …

February 2012

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 Social Network

A social network is a
social structure between
actors, mostly individuals
or organizations

It indicates the ways in

which they are connected
through various social
familiarities, ranging
from casual acquaintance
to close familiar bonds

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 Society as a Graph

People are represented as

nodes

Relationships are represented

as edges: relationships may be
acquaintanceship, friendship,
co-authorship, etc.

Allows analysis using tools of

mathematical graph theory

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 Social Network Analysis
Social network analysis [SNA] is the mapping and measuring of
relationships and flows between people, groups, organizations, computers
or other information/knowledge processing entities:

Little Boxes Glocalization Networked Individualism

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 Connections
Size
– Number of nodes

Density
– Number of ties that are present / the amount of ties
that could be present

Out-degree
– Sum of connections from an actor to others

In-degree
– Sum of connections to an actor

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 Distance

Walk
– A sequence of actors and relations that begins and
ends with actors

Geodesic distance
– The number of relations in the shortest possible
walk from one actor to another

Maximum flow
– The amount of different actors in the neighborhood
of a source that lead to pathways to a target

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 Some Measures of Power & Prestige

Degree
– Sum of connections from or to an actor
• Transitive weighted degreeAuthority, hub, pagerank

Closeness centrality
– Distance of one actor to all others in the network
Betweenness centrality
– Number that represents how frequently an actor is
between other actors’ geodesic paths

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 Cliques and Social Roles
Cliques
– Sub-set of actors
More closely tied to each other than to actors who are not
part of the sub-set:
– A lot of work on “trawling” for communities in the web-
graph
– Often, you first find the clique (or a densely connected
subgraph) and then try to interpret what the clique is
about

Social roles
– Defined by regularities in the patterns of relations
among actors

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 Network Analysis Example

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 Centrality: strategic positions
Degree centrality:
Local attention

Closeness centrality:
Capacity to communicate

Beetweenness centrality:
reveal broker
"A place for good ideas"

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 Social Network Analysis: what for?

To control information flow

To improve/stimulate communication
To improve network resilience
To trust

Web applications of Social Networks examples:

– Analyzing page importance (Page Rank, Authorities/Hubs)
– Discovering Communities (Finding near-cliques)
– Analyzing Trust (Propagating Trust, Using propagated trust to fight spam -
In Email or In Web page ranking)

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 Tangible Outcomes from SNA
Organisational Re-structures
Sell More that work

Better Knowledge Preserving Expertise

Sharing

Building Better
Communities

More Innovation Competitive Intelligence

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 Ways to use SNA to Manage Churn

Reduce Collateral Churn

– Reactive
Has churned
– Identify subscribers whose loyalty is
threatened by churn around them
Prevent collateral
Reduce Influential Churn churn
– Preventive
– Identify subscribers who, should they churn,
would take a few friends with them
– Need to go beyond individual value to
network value !
• A subscriber with negative margin can have
very significant network value and still be very Prevent influential
churn
valuable to keep

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 Cross-Sell and Technology Transfer

2 smartphone users around you 

smartphone affinity x 5 !!
Adopted

Leverage Collateral Adoption

– Reactive
Offer product
– Identify subscribers whose affinity for products is
increased due to adoption around them & stimulate
them

Identify influencers for this adoption

– Proactive
– Identify subscribers who, should they adopt, would Push for adoption
push a few friends to do the same

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 Acquisition – Member gets Member

Campaign Topic
Acquire New Members

Description
One of an Operator‘s major objectives is to keep (or even extend) the market position.
As the main competitors are making ground by eg. attractive tariffs or through the
acquisition of new retail partners, acquisition of new customers becomes a very important
objective.

This campaign format focuses on influencers in social communities, who are most likely to
recommend a (off-net) friend to become a new subscriber of the Operator.
The recommendation itself, as well as the subscription is incentivised for both, the subscriber
and the recommending person.

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 Householding / Family identification

a) Identify « same household »

relationships
– Construct probable household units
• Identify onnet penetration
• Identify competitor position
– Identify probable decider(s)

b) When multiple SIM cards purchased by

same person, identify that other family
members are using Sims
– Age-related calling patterns

Combination of a) and b)

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 Community Identification and
Marketing
Households / Families

a)Seasonal workers

b)SMEs

c)Students

d)Schoolchildren

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 Customer Lifestage analysis
Analysis based on identifying critical life stage events using
social network changes

a) Going to University

b) Moving

c) Changing job

d) Starting a relationship – Moving as a couple

e) Imputing demographics

– Age related patterns in the social network

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 Winback
Campaign Topic
Retention

Description
SNA offers an opportunity to detect potential churners earlier (possibly before they have
completely ceased all on-net activity) and also identifies the individuals who are likely to
have the best chance of persuading them to return. The aim is to use SNA to detect
potential churners during the process of leaving and motivate them to stay with the
Operator.
Current Approach: New Approach

Active Inactive

Churn detected Churn detected

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 Competitor Insights

a) Tracking dynamic changes in social networks based on competitor marketing

activities
• Reaction and impact of mass market campaigns
• Introduction of new products and tariffs
• Network evolution

b) Improved accuracy in estimating operator market share

• What does a competitor’s mass market campaigns do to the
market?

c) Segmenting competitors’ subscribers

• Tracking segments based on selected SNA KPIs

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 Other business applications

Facilitate Pre- to Post-Migration

Identify Rotational Churners, switching between operators

Identify Internal Churners

Better customer lifecycle management by tracking customer network

dynamics over his Lifecyle with the operator
– Networks grow and change over time. This will influence how the operator
interacts with the customer

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 Teradata Aster: See the Network
Understand connections among users and organizations

Challenges Examples
• Large number of entities with rapidly
growing amount of data for each
• Connectivity changing constantly

Aster Data Value

•SQL-MapReduce® function for Graph
Analysis eases and accelerates analysis
•Ability to store and analyze massive
volumes of data about users and
connections
• Link analysis: predicting connections (among
• High loading throughput and incremental people, products, etc.) that are likely to be of
loading to bring new data into analysis interest by looking at known connections
• Influence analysis: identifying clusters and
influencers in social networks

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 Teradata Aster References

Social Network & Relationship Analysis

Select Aster Data Customers in

Digital Marketing Optimization

Analysis of user behavior,

intent, and actions across
search, ad media and web
properties, in order to
drive increased ROI.

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