Business Structures Revealed through New Analysis Technique
April 7, 2013
Now here is an interesting implication of social-graph analysis in business. The MIT Technology Review reports, “Social Networks Reveal Structure (And Weaknesses) of Business.” We’ve known for some time that, through the analysis of connections, social networks can reveal even more about us than is obvious to most users. Now, researchers at Israel’s Ben Gurion University used this concept to derive an impressive amount of information about businesses. The article reveals that the team begins:
“. . . by using a search engine to find the Facebook pages of a number of individuals who work for a specific company.
“Using these individuals as seeds, they then begin crawling the social networks, sometimes jumping from one network to another, looking for other individuals at the same company. These in turn become seeds to find more employees and so on.
“They end up with a basic network of links between employees within the company. It’s then that the fun begins.
“Using standard measures of connectedness, Fire and co then identified people in positions of leadership and by adding in details such as location, mined from the Facebook pages, they reconstructed the international structure of these organisations. They also used community detection algorithms to reconstruct the organisational structure of the company.”
Wow. The researchers used their method on several “well known hi-tech companies” and found startling details. For example, they found a cluster of comparatively disconnected folks at a large organization, and discerned they belonged to an acquired startup that had yet to be well-integrated into the company. This sort of information can be used by companies to monitor themselves, but it could also be used by potential investors (for good or ill for the business, I suppose, depending on what turned up.)
More ominously, competitors could use the information to their advantage. Now that this technology is in the news, many companies will want to prevent such details from emerging, but how? Researcher Michael Fire advises them to “enforce strict policies which control the use of social media by their employees.” Immediately, I might add. And, I suspect that whatever was previously considered a “strict policy” must become even more strict in order to avoid exposure from this technique.
Won’t employees be thrilled?
Cynthia Murrell, April 07, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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