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Social Network Analysis is at the basis of what we do every single day and it should be understood by Entrepreneurs before starting their own ventures.
The first step an Entrepreneur must do is to understand society. If you want to improve our lives and if you want to create a product that help us in the every day activity you must understand us. This is pretty obvious, an Entrepreneur can not find a need in our modern society without studying and analyzing it in depth.
The Analysis of a Social Networks is not so easy as you could think, it requires tons of tools and computers to run a lot of calculations and then shift them in a comprehensible form for human beings. The most useful tool, in this case, is math and a particular theory called Graph Theory, which lets us translate tons of numbers stored in matrices into a Graph.
A graph is a set of points connected by lines. This is the simplest definition possible, but you can imagine it as a huge map in which every single point stands for an agent and the line for an action. In the case of Social Networks, the points stand for the people, which are part of the graph, and the lines stand for a relationship between the points.
This simple graph represents my Social Relations on Facebook. As you can easily see every single point is a friend of mine, and the lines that connect the points are the “friendships” between the points. From a first look at the graph you will notice a few understandable concepts in graph theory.
The points that are isolated from the graph and from the other people are called peripheral points. These points haven’t any friendship with my other friends. The only thing that make them in the graph is the friendship which they have with me. For this reason these points do not play a key role in my Facebook’s ecosystem.
On the other hand there are several points which could play a terrific and important role in the graph because they are “gatekeepers” or “bridges”. These points connects various part of the graph and are crucial for the existence of the social graph. They usually connect two or more small and tiny graphs included in the main network.
However the most important points are the ones that have a high level of centrality. The concept of centrality is based on the concept of a star. A person with high centrality is a person who is well connected with all the people in the graph, so in a social graph, the most popular person in the graph should be the one with higher centrality.
The centrality is measured in so many ways, but the most intuitive one is the one that takes into account the degree. Every single point in the graph has a degree. The degree is the number of connections that the point has with the the whole graph; so if a point has two friends, its degree will be two. For this reason the a point with a good centrality is a point with a high degree.
Another interesting aspect about Social Network Analysis is Density. The aim of this measure is to see how much all the points are connected within together; so if a graph is well connected, the density will be pretty high, on the other hand if the connection within the graphs are not much, the density will be very low.
Although this is just a brief introduction, you can easily understand the power behind Social Network Analysis. If you understand how society connects, if you see the patterns between our daily life, if you comprehend the way we behave, you will probably find the next big thing.
Entrepreneurs have always existed because Society has always needed something to play with or to live with. The most remarkable tool, which comes to my mind, is Dropbox. Dropbox was invented without people didn’t know they needed it. However Drew Houston understood what society would need in the next five or ten years. For this reason, Entrepreneurship is all about studying what you care about and understanding how it works.
If you want to be in the enterprise market, study what people do at work. If you desire to work in social, study society and how it shapes. If you want to be in the ecommerce system, study what people do when they buy something.
It has always been a matter of studying and anticipating something.
