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Dr. Juha Vesanto from Xtract held a guest lecture at Helsinki University of Technology about the data analytics process and how to turn data into solutions to business problems. Other guest lectures were Jyrki Alakuijala from Google.

I was with the engagement marketing guru Alan Moore in Library House’s Media Tech event in London this week. Alan presented Xtract and Social Marketing Intelligence to the audience, which included many people from the leading media and investment companies. Advertising and social networks were the main topics in most of presentations this year. Antti Örling from Blyk (Xtract’s customer) especially emphasized the value of targeting and relevance in mobile advertising. He mentioned that Blyk achieved 12% to 43% response rate in their mobile campaigns, compared to the norm of 3% to 6% in mobile and 0.2% in the internet.

People still have a lot of questions, e.g. “how will social network, mobile advertising and business models be like in the future?”. But people see the value of targeting and relevance in digital advertising, and understand the “hot media” needs social marketing intelligence.

You can also read more from Alan’s blog.

One interesting problem in social networks is to identify the various roles of people. Some people forward information between communities, others are the central players in communities and some are peripheral persons with only a small social network.

At Xtract, we have studied the roles in social networks for a long time. Our Alpha User concept is directly related to finding the central players in networks. During the years, also other network roles have been analyzed by us.

In the academics, there is also same interesting research being done on the topic of finding network roles. One interesting paper is Classes of complex networks defined by role-to-role connectivity profiles (pdf) by Roger Guimerà et al. They separate the roles in networks into six groups.

Another interesting paper with quite similar aims is Node Roles and Community Structure in Networks (pdf) by Jerry Scripps et al. They have given descriptive names to the different types of people found in social networks. Big fish are the persons who have many friends but belong to only one community. Ambassadors have many friends and belong to multiple communities. Bridges connect communities and loners have only a few friends and participate in just one community.

The scientific work done on finding network roles provides both inspiration and directly applicable methods that can be used to help clients understand their social neighborhoods.