At the heart of public relations practice is the relationship. Whether they are internal or external, relationships are the currency that we deal in.

One metric that we don’t pay enough attention to is how networks of affinity build around a brand. A network analysis can help with this. The challenge is that network analysis does require some knowledge of statistics or at least an ability to use network analysis software.

You definitely want to use social networking software app that has a good GUI. Otherwise it is can be challenging to enter everything via the command line.

The other point to pay attention to regard the app is its ability to visualize data – preferably generating interactive visualizations. That allows you to play with the data visually when you are doing more qualitative interpretations of the graph. Here’s an example of a data visualization generated using Netminer:

 

You should do some research to find out more about social network analysis. It is fascinating stuff and extremely useful for understanding relationships on the web and elsewhere. This wikipedia page has an excellent summary of social network analysis software.

The main points to bear in mind when you are doing this kind of work are the following:

• These software programs tend to store information in a database structured as a graph, rather than as a table
• The nodes on your social network graph represent the individuals in the network
• The nodes can be “decorated” with features such as age, gender, SES (socio-economic status), etc.
• You can “strengthen” the arcs between the nodes to indicate the number of times that individuals have exchanged information.

Have fun learning about social network analysis!