In marketing, a thrilling fact is called "the network effect." This is the behavior of an item like a phone that is useless on its own becomes more valuable the more of them there are. Since Facebook and so on are considered to be "networks" then it reasons that the network effect should apply there. But that is a mistake.
The fact is that in technical terms Facebook is NOT a social network. It is a regular old networks that supports social networks. The infrastructures allows people to communicate with others and in one sense is not that different from the email or SMS. Think about this. What if, back in the 10's or so of the 20th century as phones were just getting put in people's houses a marketeer had thought "only businesses had phones, but now regular people do, let's call our phone networks 'social networks'!" Would the new name have changed anything about peoples patterns of use?
It is very likely that inexpensive phones and email have expanded our circles of contacts but what is the gating factor? It is our brains. We are not Cisco routers. We cannot add boards when we get too many messages, we just have to limit the throughput. Social networks, networks of people, do not exhibit the network effect. They degrade with new connections after a point. New technologies have allowed us to expand our contacts for many years, and some do, but most don't. Even those who do have small limits on the connections that are possible.
Social networking sites are infrastructure that lives on top of existing networks. They are not social networks because the social networks are the networks of people that use their software and they are networks that sit on top of other networks such as the Internet and the various networks that support it. They are a network layer. What is the value of a network layer?
They are very valuable to society, but they are a commodity business. The last few years has seen an increased in interoperability between the various platforms. Collaborative software, sharing objects across networks and so has been talked about and worked on since the 80's or longer, it is not a new idea.
Sunday, June 8, 2008
Organizational Network Analysis
I want to comment that several companies and consultants offer "organizational network analysis." For any of you doing due dilligence, it is important to note that this is a marketing term and is social network analysis. I believe this has to do with the idea that business people do not care about abstract things and only want to know the bottom line, which is possibly true in most cases. However, for any business person that does want to learn more about what he or she is potentially paying for, calling social network analysis "organizational network analysis" effectively hides it from scrutinity and makes it seem like it is something new.
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