(Room No. 106)

Business Applications of Social Network Analysis: A Computational Perspective (Room No. 106)

Paper Session 2 (Room No. 134)

Paper Session 3 (Room No. 134)

A social network is defined as a social structure of individuals, who are related (directly or indirectly to each other) based on a common relation of interest, e.g. friendship, trust, etc. The past few years have seen a tremendous growth in online social networking platforms, from general purpose ones like Facebook and Google+ to special purpose ones like LinkedIn (for business) and World of Warcraft (for multi-player gaming); as well as platforms like Twitter that are difficult to classify. The enthusiasm with which society has adopted these platforms is nothing short of amazing, with over 800 million users for Facebook, over 40 million users for Google+ in just a few months, and over 100 million for Gmail. From a usage perspective, over 50% of Facebook users log on every day (http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics)  spending an average of 14 minutes per day (http://mashable.com/2010/02/16/facebook-nielsen-stats/ ), while an average World of Warcraft player spends more than 4 hours per day, a truly surreal statistic! In addition to connecting people worldwide, such platforms are providing an opportunity to truly understand the psycho-sociological motivations for human behavior to a granularity unprecedented in human history.

Social network analysis (SNA) is the study of social networks to understand their structure and behavior. It has been an active field of research in the social and behavioral sciences, and is rapidly generating a lot of interest in computer science, especially since new computational techniques and tools are needed for the multi-terabyte datasets being generated from online social networking platforms. This has led to a number of multi-disciplinary projects, involving teams of behavioral scientists and computational scientists working together, to develop novel methods and tools to explore the current limits of behavioral sciences.

Findings from social and behavioral sciences, both theoretical and empirical, have found applications in the business domain for a long time – including consumer marketing, brand management, product positioning, public relations and image management, decision making, team formation, process management, etc. Deeper insights from the new way of doing social and behavioral sciences are leading to a rethink of all these functions. Innovative companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook, and others are charting new paths.

This talk consists of three parts. First, we describe findings from the Virtual World Observatory (http://vwobservatory.com/ ), a multi-institutional, multi-disciplinary project which uses data from commercial multi-player games to study many fields of social science, including sociology, social psychology, organization theory, group dynamics, macro-economics, etc. Results from investigations into various behavioral sciences will be presented. Second, we will present commercial examples to show how various business functions are changing. Third, we will present some promising directions for businesses to take, as well as researchers to explore.