How social graphs can unlock potential of virtual relationships
In the virtual world, six degrees of separation - the theory that you are only six steps away from knowing any other person in the world - has probably narrowed down to three.
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn et al have played a big part in fostering social connections. Moving beyond social connections, the next step they did was to create digital maps of all the people you are linked to - these are known as social graphs. Facebook pioneered this concept with its Open Graph, which mapped out people and their relationships. Businesses that used Facebook's Open Graph took it to another level when it mapped out other parts of the graph - things like what people you are linked to care about, are talking about and are buying.
Websites like TripAdvisor have grown thanks to the way they have used these social graphs almost like a digital handshake. For instance, if you were to log into TripAdvisor and look up reviews of a hotel, chances are the reviews posted by your Facebook friends will appear right on top. The idea is that you would prefer "wisdom from friends" rather than "wisdom from strangers". It is inherent human psychology. This is why the accommodation review site created TripFriends, a side application that lets you see which of your friends have been to a place you want to visit and lets you ask them questions.
Savvy e-commerce marketers today use social graphs in some form or the other to propel their businesses. On food review site Zomato, for instance, if you log in through your Facebook or Google account, you get notifications of your friends' activities on the site - what they have reviewed, rated, recommended.
Now imagine if a website were to integrate dozens of social graphs together - it would get a whopping data mine full of personal information infused with social context. Sites like Amazon use this cleverly to offer you a list of recommendations of books and products based on your preferences displayed in other sites. The more a customer is open and shares information across the web, the richer the social graph, and more useful the service the sites can provide (though, of course, many people refrain from sharing due to privacy concerns leading to blank spaces in these social graphs).
In a recent paper in Harvard Business Review, Sangeet Paul Choudary, Founder and CEO of Platform Thinking Labs, and entrepreneur-in-residence at INSEAD Business School, forecasts that the next step in the evolution of the way companies use social graphs is to draw commercial graphs. "Commercial graphs depict relationships between businesses based on their actual interactions as they are captured digitally," he writes.
There is no end to the possibilities that Choudary outlines. He says that drawing on all the data on review sites, reputation scores of businesses can be created. Based on interaction data, he says, "Commercial graphs can visually display three things - companies in an ecosystem, the relationships among them and the reputations they have earned through mutual dealings."
Now aggregate these commercial graphs and a company will soon be able to benchmark its performance against each other on its business dealings across the web. As somebody said, doing business on the web is all about getting close and personal and drawing out the connections.
WHAT'S TRENDING IN THE SOCIAL MEDIA SPACE?
Social Toon
Now Wear Your Social Media!
Imagine wearing collars that buzz, and a T-shirt that lights up when it spots people with shared interests! Social textiles is the next frontier breached by a group of MIT students.
The students from MIT's Tangible Media Group and Fluid Interface Group have created a social garment which pairs to a smartphone via Bluetooth and alerts the wearer when people with similar interests and backgrounds are nearby. It even lets the wearer know if people are compatible organ donors. The social garment was created because the students questioned if the current form of social media was really making our relationships better.
As they say: "Current technologies are good at connecting people at distance, but less so at connecting them within the same environment." So at a crowded banquet, vegetarians can spot each other. Or in an industry conference setting, executives who want to network with likeminded ones can get connected. What next!
Pinterest Woos Men
Almost three quarters of social scrapbook site Pinterest's users are women. Somehow, men have kept away, perhaps, inhibited by the sight of girly things - dresses, shoes, fashion, craft - that greet you. The perception is that the boards are all about weddings and cakes and home decorations. In a bid to correct the balance, the image sharing network has now launched a new feature to its Guided Search that allows users to fi lter results according to gender. With this, the site hopes that men will be able to fi nd more masculine content. And it will grow its traffic.
