Social Network Analysis for Startups

This dialogue occurs frighteningly often in the life of any SNA researcher. And the answer of “Yes, but it’s much more than Facebook” does not cut it. In fact, SNA is an extremely versatile methodology that predates Twitter and Facebook by at least 30 years.

In a few words, Social Network Analysis (SNA) can be described as a “study of human relationships by means of graph theory.” However, this sentence leaves a lot to be unpacked.

In a way, SNA is similar to many statistical methods. The fact that economists use regression analysis extensively doesn’t mean that the technique is limited to the study of economics. Similarly, while studying the social media is a great way to apply SNA techniques—not only is the data easily available, but the opportunities for studying are numerous and lucrative. In fact, I am willing to bet that 9 out of 10 of my esteemed readers have picked up this book for this very reason.

Ten years ago, the field of social network analysis was a scientific backwater. We were the misfits, rejected from both mainstream sociology and mainstream computer science, applying strange mathematical techniques to strange sorts of data and coming up with pretty pictures that were very hard to read and results that made sense only within our narrow community. Social network data was difficult to gather and hard to come by (see Appendix A); most ...