Ask any teenager and they will likely be able to explain social networking, thanks to the huge popularity of MySpace.com and similar web sites. Many adults in the workforce are also participating in social networks of one form or another—dating and contact sharing sites, for example—and find themselves with connections to thousands of contacts. The next step is to be able to analyze these connections to determine relative power and roles in the network.

Social network analysis can be applied in many situations to gain valuable insight. Imagine if you could choose a new director for your board based on an analysis of that director’s power in your industry. Or apply the technique in your organization to understand how work really gets done and to identify leaders to nurture. Your own contacts would be much more valuable if you could weight the relationships to determine the most influential individual for each situation.

Social network analysis is a powerful tool for understanding how groups of people actually interact. Centrality analysis is key to that understanding, looking at:

• Betweeness: determined by calculating the shortest path between all individuals in the network.
• Distance: identifies the individual with the shortest average distance to all others.
• Closeness: similar to betweeness but takes into account any weights that may be associated with relationships.
• Degree: determined by simply counting the total number of relationships (all types or just specific types) connected to a particular individual.
• Bridging: finds individuals that are spanners between different clustered groups of individuals.

The Cogito Knowledge Center is in use today helping intelligence analysts create social networking systems with millions of people, tens of millions of relationship types and more millions of activities. The Cogito Knowledge Center is ideal for social network analysis, supporting easy import and data fusion, weighting and centrality analysis.