Several of us attended the 2007 Politics Online Conference here in Washington recently. One of the more interesting sessions was on the "Metrics and Research of Social Networks." It was a nicely-designed panel because each presenter built on the previous one's points.

First we heard from Danyel Fischer of Microsoft Research. He presented findings from their ongoing analysis of Usenet groups. He described social networks as "showing who you are by who you know" or "who you reply to." He looked at not just who a person replies to, but who the recipient of a reply replies to. His findings show that in some discussion groups, the vast majority of participants don't do much. They reply to one person and move on. It's mostly a few very dedicated people responding to many other people; there are core members driving the show.

Next, Harald Katzmair of FAS.Research described their work in developing viral marketing strategies by first turning lists of people into maps that show their connections. Lists that are ripe for analysis include lists that show connections based on links between blogs, MySpace friends lists, or even "tell-a-friend" activity. Now, I'm going to grossly oversimplify Harald's discussion here, but he pointed out that it is the connectors that you care about most – people who can cross divides among social groups. For political messages, the secret is to come up with an issue that is likely to be passed along to majority of users within the context of a particular community’s underlying values. Essentially you need to bridge "red" and "blue" issues. Katzmair called these "bridging stories." An example story might marry a community's concern about "security" with "access to opportunity." That resulting viral story is "Support zero tolerance for the roots of crime." Another example: "Clean technology" and "Creationism" would yield a story about "Let's protect God's creation by making money with clean technology."

Finally, Fred Gooltz of Advomatic, and a veteran of John Edward's One Committee (Edwards has "friends" on more than 30 social networking sites, he noted). Social network sites, Fred argued, are actually more accurately described as "social linking" sites in that what you care about is creating the links. A bad social network is like a bad party where there are cliques of people who are only talking to people they know. (Imagine the diagram at left without the red connecting lines.)

To make connections between these cliques (Danyel and Harald might call them "clusters"), you need an amicable host to make introductions. For instance if Bill has five friends at the party but doesn't know Rebecca, and Rebecca has five friends at the party but doesn't know Bill, Jan must introduce Bill to Rebecca. Suddenly, Jan has connected the clusters and expanded the social network -- the red lines in the diagram at left. In other words, if you want your social network to grow, you need to have active "hosts" to make the connections. There's more of Fred's thoughts on his blog.