Thank you and all the best in the New Year!

- Greg

Thanks for the Good post and great learning.

It works better if we know where, whom and how to target. Many campaigns fail miserably because they do not connect these three heads.

At the end of the day connecting with the mind of the consumer is critical and i personally feel computers how faster in analysing the pattern can never go beyond the human mind.

Thanks again and have a great year end and start of a new promising year

Raghu

It’s a very good question and one I’ve struggled with myself. In the end, I think it is an efficiency question.

Imagine you want to travel to some city in Europe. The most obvious place is to look at airport hubs such as Heathrow and Frankfurt. Once you know that those hubs exist, it’s much easier to get where you need to go.

However, those hubs can be very expensive and time consuming. Discount airlines like Southwest and Ryan air have made a great business by avoiding the hubs. They can be much more efficient by exploiting inefficiencies in the network architecture.

Barabasi took a different approach by looking at network stability in the face of a network attack, “scale free” networks ruled by power laws are amazingly resilient lose a great many nodes and even a few major hubs and continue to function.

So hubs are very important, but not exclusive. Moreover, in the marketing arena identifying hubs is problematic. It’s not as simple as just flipping to the back of an airline magazine. So while it’s important to know that they’re there and very valuable to identify them, it’s also crucial that perfectly viable network paths aren’t being excluded.

- Greg

Wonderful posts. After reading this one and the one on the primal forces of social networks I have a question. It appears in the primal forces post you talk about not needing to target the hubs, since they’ll be infiltrated (my word) by an idea as long as it’s in their environment. However, here you talk about how important it is to target the network hubs. Not all all meaning to be a noodge about it, but it does raise a question–which is the most effective strategy for spreading an idea/message/communication around?

Is it case-dependent? Do we need to review each use case independently?

Am I missing something obvious?

Thanks again for the great material.

Adam

- Greg

Dave

No, but there are plenty of very sophisticated products for analyzing social networks in organizations. It seems to me that the only real difference is scale.

- Greg

Thanks

For me, the SNA stuff is the most interesting, with application ranging from biology to organizations.

- Greg

The SNA initiative, though a baby step now, is surely yielding me results.