Do you want to be more relevant in your organization?
Do you want to boost your personal and proffesional career?
Have lunch with two people you think they should get to know each other.
Jeremiah Lee, reyagroup

I attended a speech today by Jeremiah Lee from reyagroup about corporate culture and social networks. He changed my mind about social network graphs and now I consider them a very valuable tool to measure the health of your organization and identify the people that connect people together. As Jeremiah said “Social Network analysis is a powerful tool for diagnosing and changing organizational culture”.

When you think about the relationships in a company you probably have this structure in mind:

Hierarchy structure

That’s exactly the picture that comes to my mind. It is a functional structure that tells us to whom you report. But in reality that’s only half of the picture, the hierarchy graph ignores hidden informal relationships. That information is graphically represented on a Social Network graph.

This is a Social Network Graph. Every time I saw a social network diagram in the past I thought: Bullshit! That thing is not useful for anything.

Why are relationships important? Because they are the most direct way to spread information. If you want to have a organization in learning mood, where people educate themselves and take the initiative to research new ways of doing things you need to facilitate the flow of information. One of the ways to do this is create a central repository of internal information (Please do not use ‘Data Warehouse’, it’s a term I consider serious bullshit). What about the rest of information? You need to make the people of your organization the knowledge repository and facilitate people to become as interconnected and interdisciplinary as possible.

How does the graph look like?
The social network graph represents the person as nodes of the network. The lines between the nodes show the relation between persons and the size of the node increases with the number of connections. The concentration of relations is shown in the graph as clusters of nodes.

The graph looks beautiful for a presentation, but what information does it really convey?
The graph is an alternative view of the functional relationships described on the hierarchy graph. You can see the intensity of personal interactions and the degree of knowledge exchange between clusters . You may discover that people interact with the head office but different branches with different functions or different locations have no interaction at all. You may also discover critical people that have relationships between clusters without that role actually being an explicit function of their job.

How to get data to build the graph?
The psychologists at this company conducted a survey which they distributed all over the organization to measure the relationships at staff and management level. Jeremiah showed us a short survey with six basic questions that I consider enough for basic purposes:

• Choose people you feel energized by when you interact with them.
• Choose people you typically get information from.
• Choose people who provide you with the most valuable connections.
• Choose people you like to work with.
• Choose people you feel personally comfortable sharing opinions with.

I think the result of this survey is important to measure the hidden relations that
exist but nobody knows about. If I had to do this in my organization I would also do a
statistical analysis of the email flow within the domain (Using the From: To: and CC:
headers) and the conversations on the corporate microblogging and chat system. I would
later weight every source of data and combine them accordingly.

How to build the actual graph?
I don’t know if its the best software, but I’ve been playing with Gephi. It is GPL and runs in multiple platforms.

What happened with AOL, Compuserve and Infovia in middle 90′ is that they created a lot of content in a proprietary and inoperable way. High quality (by that time) message, chat and web publishing applications. In US that kind of systems were the first contact with internet for millions of people. In Spain Infovia was the closed network that provide the infrastructure for the first providers and Internet companies.

But when the magic of the open protocols like http gain a critical mass, everybody wanted to surf on the primitive wild internet instead of surf on a controlled closed bubble. Some years were necessary before the quality of the new and open internet was on par with the previous proprietary versions but it didn’t mattered. At the end, AOL, Compuserve and Infovia accepted the new situation, took to pieces the closed networks, and mutated as normal providers or disappeared.

Now we are in a similar situation. We have a lot of different social networks but all of them are inoperable between them. For example, you can’t write a profile on Facebook and make it automatically appear on Bebo. You update an event on Tuenti and it don’t magically update also Facebook. You tell twitter what are you doing but Facebook didn’t realize that unless you install glue in the middle.

In my opinion there are two big problems here. On one hand the local social networks with local content are always going to be stronger if they are big enough to be interesting for their users. That means that it’s impossible for a single company to have all the social network users in the world, because the people will always prefer a localized version. Facebook don’t have anything to do in Korea and Japan if they don’t place cute hello kitties all over the website. In the case of my country, I think that if there is a well designed Spanish social network (Tuenti anyone?) is going to be very difficult for Facebook to gain a important market share because the people is lazy to update more than one service. And the more popular service will be always used because it just works.

On the other hand, the social networks believe that all their value is on the information of their user’s profiles. The bigger the network the bigger the business. In my opinion that is completely flawed because is not entirely true. The more people, the more interesting content the site has so it attract more visits, which means more advertisement so you get more money. But only *having* that information on itself *has not value*, you need to offer something interesting before.

Two things can happen. The companies can buy each others in a movement resemblance of the internet bubble or simply glue their databases and create bigger networks. That means interconnect their networks. It won’t matter because the history tell us that it’s inevitable for an open protocol to appear.

So what will happen if a well designed open social network protocol appear in the next months? New companies will start to work together to make reality a decentralized global social network. And new business models will appear, with the objective of creating applications for a common global social network. And new buzzwords. Web 4.0 at least. Who knows!.

And meanwhile, Facebook, bebo and the bigger social networks will need to adopt the common global network, the global resource or die. Like AOL did.

The virtual worlds are another interesting case. The biggest contender is Second Life, but it may appear another competitors using open protocols in the future. If you have the option of creating an island with your own content hosted in your computer or creating it on the closed servers of Second Life using and paying for the official content what will you choose? Did this sound similar to creating a website for AOL/Compuserve/Infovia or creating it on the web?

Social networks like we know now are doomed.

Now we only need to decide what open protocol we’ll use.

Javier Olivan, of facebook (maybe the only spanish guy there?)

After the general presentation a bunch of local businesses introduced several applications. One of them interesting and very well localizated (la porra) and others losing the main point of Facebook. While in Canada I installed the facebook developer application and I read a bit of the documentation. It’s easy to build “something” making use of the viral marketing so it’s possible that I will burn some time playing with the platform in the following months.

Martin Varsavsky speaking about facebook and of course fon. If we owe something to Martin is his insistence in making visible the Spanish bussinesses in Silicon valley and the rest of the world.

I don’t know how important will be facebook in Spain but maybe they arrived a bit late. Now there are several facebook clones and at least one of them (tuenti) is almost a exact clone of the facebook’s core applications from the user pointview. However Tuenti don’t have as much users as facebook and more important, they don’t have the cool API for developers facebook has, which can be something that move the scale to facebook’s side the second the spanish teenagers discover all the stupid crap games facebook has in their application directory.