See this event –

Web Mining and Social Network Analysis

http://kmblogs.com/public/item/174497

Cheers,

-j

Very interesting post and one that got me very excited on my own blog about measuring the aspects of social networking and improving what’s already there. Good luck on getting there and I wish you all the best.

Christian,
Thanks so much for a very thoughtful and insightful comment. However, I believe that web analytics is moving more into marketing performance management and as company’s begin to use social networks as part of their marketing arsenal, it will become ever more important to measure the impact that these social networks are having on their business. For example, a traditional web analytics solution could develop a tool to track usage of a widget on a social network such as facebook’s open api. The idea of confluence on loyalty/discount card as well. Tracking how informal exchange/comment flow and the influencers/those will social capital, and their subsequent (if any) impact on a company’s conversion rate (financial values) will be more tricky (value network analysis is also interesting in this regard) – but I do believe that this is one of the ways of the future.

Thanks for an interesting post! I also find it interesting to explore how social network analysis can be combined or merged with web analytics. At the outset, however, it seems to me that there are some fundamental barriers to this potential merger.

The reason is that web analytics (as it is practiced on traditional, non-social websites) is primarily concerned with how visitors interact with the website, whereas social network analysis focuses on how individuals interact with each other. As such social networks require a fundamentally different analytical approach – an approach which goes beyond click stream analysis and which is much more sociological in its orientation.

The question here is much more how people position themselves relative to each other by means of what they write about, how they write, how often they write and, of course, to whom the link and receive links, to whom they leave comments etc.

It seems clear that social network analysis can be enhanced by web analytics, but it is less clear to me how web analytics of traditional websites can benefit from social network analysis.

Mike,
Thanks so much for the positive feedback and glad we are of the same mind!

Judah,
Thanks for your informative and thoughtful comment that has really added to the value of the blog post. I hadn’t actually heard of pay per post – but blogvertise does the same thin (definitely controversial). Understanding true influence of informal exchange/comment flow (when we have so many spammy exchanges that need to be ignored) is going to be tricky. And I still am completely unaware of how mainstream web analytics solutions will incorporate these ideas/ways of measuring into their offerings.
Thanks for your feedback!

John (jheuristic),
Value networks do seem to be a thorough way of analysing actual company performance because they measure financial values as well as the informal exchanges/comment flow – which is very interesting indeed how to link these in a meaningful way. Thanks for your contribution – much appreciated.