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c h a p t e r11: THE SOCIAL GRAPH■A business or cause-based organization could tap this directly. Running in real
time against an API from a firm like Klout (see the sidebar and further description in
the following “Measure the Social Graph” section), a retail establishment could quickly
connect with influencers as they enter the store. A cause-related organization might
reconfigure its own social graph, in real time, based on who checked in to an event.
The organizers or ground staff at the event could quickly see how these people were
related to other event attendees and then act on that (better) information to make the
event more meaningful for these attendees. This is, in effect, what highly connected
professionals do when they first walk into a networking event: They sort out quickly
who is relevant to the achievement of the personal or professional objectives they have
set for the event, and then create a path from the people they know to the people who
can help them achieve those goals. A malleable social graph can do the same thing, but
with the power of a network that is orders of magnitude larger.
The connection to business is this: In real life, most people have a few dozen
“connections” and an address book with a few hundred people in it. The value of these
connections is context-specific. The best known real-life connections are probably per-
sonal, family and friends while the address book is dominated by business contacts.
People manage their connections within these contexts. On the Social Web, having
hundreds or thousands of connections—links, friends, and followers—is common.
Social business applications that present (only) the relevant portions of someone’s social
graph given the immediate context—think Twitter Lists—allow for easier (and there-
fore more frequent) use of that business application. Social applications like Foursquare
and Gowalla that show which of one’s friends are (also) nearby based on one’s current
location are beginning to make inroads into the business applications that extract from
a larger social graph only those connections that are immediately relevant.Spot Influencers
Within any community or social construct—the kind of social space that is defined by
the existence of a social graph—some participants are more influential or more valu-
able than others in any given situation. Reputation management—touched on earlier
and in Chapter 4, “The Social Business Ecosystem”—governs the visible aspects, the
signals or markers, if you will, that identify the influencers, the leaders, and the experts
within a social network, generally based on content contribution and the ratings or rec-
ommendations of other participants within that community.
Examining a particular member’s social graph on its own provides a potentially
different—and not always consistent—view of influence within a social network. The
social graph provides an insight into influence and reputation through a study of how
participants are connected. Somewhat esoteric terms like “adjacency” (the relative
connectedness of individuals in a network) or “centrality” (the relative importance of
an individual in a network) can also be used to determine “who matters, to whom,