1.1 Introduction

Billions of people create trillions of connections through social media each day, but few of us consider how each tap, swipe, click and keypress builds relationships that, in aggregate, form vast social networks. Using these social networks people often collectively create assets of significant value. Passionate users of social media tools such as email, blogs, microblogs, messenger systems and wikis eagerly send personal or public messages, post strongly felt opinions, or contribute to community knowledge to develop partnerships, promote cultural heritage, and advance development. Encyclopedias, operating systems, books, currencies, sports leagues and social movements have all been collectively created via social media tools. Devoted social networkers create and share digital media and rate or recommend resources to pool their experiences, provide help for neighbors and colleagues, and express their creativity. In other cases individuals, groups, companies, parties and nations use these tools to attack, mob, or confuse these collective assets and prominent individuals. The results are vast, complex networks of connections that link people to other people, documents, locations, concepts, and other objects, not all of which are valid or humane.

As these webs of content and connection grow, so does their individual, social, political and economic impact. Social media networks are increasingly the way we see and know about the world around us. The profound ways social media are changing society call for better tools and research to understand and document the different kinds of social media formations and the critical events that can hit these collective systems. To create better social media environments we will need to better understand the dynamics and patterns of existing platforms. Sailing the seas of social media has allowed for new connections and movements, but not all of them have been positive. Since a rising tide lifts all boats, the power of social media to amplify collective action has led to the revitalization of violent and divisive organizations, as well as those seeking knowledge, understanding and peaceful cooperation.

The need for new tools to collect, analyze, visualize, and generate insights from these collections of connections is growing. In the same way that financial markets require accounting and auditing for proper operation, social media platforms are markets for ideas and attention that currently lack widespread tools for collecting and evaluating content. Left to their own devices, these markets of billions of messages, links, posts, edits, uploaded photos and videos, reviews, and recommendations seem to generate benign or even surprisingly positive results, though digging deeper can uncover concerted collusion and well funded manipulation. Like markets for stocks and other high risk assets, a variety of accounting and auditing tools and practices are needed to ensure a well run and sufficiently honest marketplace.

As social media have emerged as a widespread platform for human interaction, the invisible ties that have always linked each of us to others have become more visible and machine readable. The result is a new opportunity to map social networks in detail and scale never before seen. The complex structures that emerge from webs of social relationships can now be studied with computer programs that create graphical maps of these connections. These tools integrate methods from the study of social networks and content analysis to capture the shape of the virtual crowd, highlighting the leading topics within them, and identify the people who occupy the key locations within these landscapes of ties and links. Creating maps of a wide range of social media activity could be helpful. Mapping the positive examples of social media enabled collective action may guide us to best practices for cultivating the positive outcomes, while mapping examples of conflicts and manipulation can help develop the tools to detect, deflect and deter malfeasance and manipulation of marketplaces of ideas. Computer information networks give transport to valid and invalid information equally, and the current design of social media platforms may even amplify the sensational and emotional over factual and reasonable information. News mixes with fiction via computer information networks in ways that allow many people to confuse the one for the other. Like meteorologists monitoring the daily variations of weather while keeping a watchful eye out for storms, social media analysts may be increasingly called to map and monitor the landscape of social media to ensure the cultivation of the best authentic discussions. Social network platforms have removed many traditional gatekeepers from prior eras of mass media, but the resulting marketplace of ideas is both more diverse and less able to distinguish facts from the beliefs of groups. Maps of social media networks can guide new journeys through the landscapes of previously uncharted connected conversations, finding the valuable assets while avoiding the pitfalls.

1.2 A historical perspective

Network science focuses on the study of patterns of connection in a wide range of physical and social phenomena. Network researchers have explored foundational physical systems created by chemical and genetic connections, webs of consumption in which some animals eat others, and profound distributed human social phenomena such as collective action, empathy, social cohesion, privacy, responsibility, markets, motivation, and trust. In the past few decades, network researchers have developed new data collection methods, innovative mathematical techniques, and surprising predictive theories. Just as Lord Kelvin (1824–1907) encouraged careful measurement as the method of advancing science, the new sciences of collective action, collaboration, and productive communities require new forms of measurement. Similarly, where Newton (1643–1727) and Leibniz (1646–1716) created the mathematical methods of calculus to grasp the physical world of objects in motion, social scientists are developing advanced mathematical methods for capturing social network evolution, diffusion, and decay. Like Galileo’s telescope (1564–1642), Hooke’s microscope (1635–1703), or Roentgen’s (1845–1923) X-rays, new information analysis tools are creating visualizations of never before seen social structures. Jupiter’s moon, plant cells, and the skeletons of living creatures were all revealed by previous technologies. Today, new network science concepts and analysis tools are making isolated groups, influential participants, and community structures visible in ways never before possible.

Social network analysis is the application of the broader field of network science to the study of human relationships and connections. Social networks are primordial; they have a history that long predates systems like Facebook and WeChat, or even the first email message. Ever since anyone exchanged help with anyone else, social networks have existed, even if they were mostly invisible. Social networks are created from any collection of connections among a group of people and things. Social network science is itself relatively new, with roots in the early 20th century pushed forward by authors such as Jacob Moreno, Georg Simmel, and Linton Freeman. This in turn, built on two centuries of work in the mathematics of graphs and topology, also known as graph theory, developed by mathematicians such as Leonhard Euler.

In the 21st century, network science has blossomed alongside a new global culture of commonplace networked communications. Billions of people use desktops, laptops, tablets, phones, and other devices to routinely create rich digital artifacts that they share with individuals and groups sometimes as large as many millions. Widespread network connectivity has arrived in just the past few decades, and now billions of people have changed their lives by creatively using social media. We use social media to bring our families and friends closer together, reach out to neighbors and colleagues, and invigorate markets for products and services. Social media are used to create connections that can bind local regions and span continents. These connections range from the trivial to the most valued, potent collaborations, relationships, and communities. Social media tools have been used successfully to create large-scale collaborative public projects like Wikipedia, open source software used by millions, new forms of political participation, and scientific collaboratories that accelerate research. Unheard of just a few years ago, today systems such as WeChat, Instagram, Facebook, wikis, Twitter and others are now headline news with social and political implications that stretch around the globe. Most use of these tools has been beneficial but costly exceptions do exist. Violent crowds focused on mob justice have been inflamed in many regions through the use of social media. Like film, radio, and TV before it, Internet social media can have positive and negative impacts. As social media matures, our task is to domesticate it, mitigating its worst costs while amplifying its value. Despite the very different shapes, sizes, and goals of the institutions involved in social media, the common structure that unifies all social media spaces is a social network. All of these systems create connections that leave traces and collectively create networks that can be visualized, analyzed and compared.

1.3 The rise of enterprise social media applications

Social media are most visible in the form of consumer applications such as WeChat, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, but significant use of social media tools takes place behind the firewalls that surround most corporations, institutions, and organizations. Inside these enterprises, employees share documents, post messages and engage in extensive discussions, annotate documents, and create extensive patterns of connections with other employees and other resources. Networked communication has become an indispensable link to customers and partners and a critical internal nervous system required for every aspect of commerce. Enterprise social media tools cultivate the internal discussions that improve quality, lower costs, and enable the creation of customer and partner communities that offer new opportunities for coordination, marketing, advertising, and customer support.

As enterprises adopt tools like email, text and message boards, blogs, wikis, document sharing, and chat streams, they generate a number of social network data structures. Enterprise network datasets contain information about connections that can have significant business value by highlighting employees who play critical and unique roles. Some employees act as bridges or brokers between otherwise separated segments of a company. Others have patterns of connection that indicate that they serve as sources of information for many others. Social network analysis of organizations (often called Organizational Network Analysis or “ONA”) offers a form of MRI or X-ray image of the organizational structure of the company (e.g., see Chapter 9). These images can illuminate the ways members of an organization are actually connected in contrast to the formal hierarchies of traditional “org-charts.”

Technology consulting firms have highlighted the value of analyzing patterns of connection within an organization. The Gartner Group reported that social network analysis would prove to be a strategic advantage for a corporation, calling it an “untapped information asset.”¹ They recommend the analysis of “business intelligence on the ties, information flows and value exchanges” within a corporation. Network analysis can be focused, they argue, on three separate regions of commerce: organizational network analysis, value network analysis, and influence analysis, which map loosely to internal, vendor, and consumer populations. In each segment, network analysis is a useful method for identifying choke points and positions of leverage, locating expertise, and enhancing innovation.

1.4 Individual contributions generate public wealth and risks

Social media collective goods are a remarkable story of bottom-up individual initiative that leads to the creation of public value and wealth. Collections of individual social media contributors can create vast, often beneficial, yet complex social institutions. The intriguing challenge for the authors of this book and for a growing circle of social media analysts is to focus on individual behaviors while recognizing the emergent, collective properties of social media contributions. Seeing the social media forest, and not just the trees, branches, and leaves, requires tools that can assemble, organize, and present an integrated view of large volumes of records of interactions. Building a better view of the connected social media landscape can lead to improved user interfaces and policies that increase individual contributions and their quality. It can lead to better management tools and strategies that help individuals, organizations, and governments to more effectively apply social media to their priorities. And given increased awareness of intentional abuse and collective manipulation of these systems, often with political consequence, situational awareness of social media becomes a critical element for the hygiene of democratic discourse.

Many utopian commentators have reported and proclaimed the benefits of social media. However, dangerous criminals, malicious vandals, promoters of racial hatred, and oppressive governments can also use social media tools to enable destructive activities. Critics of social media warn of the dangers of lost responsibility and respect for creative contributions, when vital resources are assembled from many small pieces [1]. More recently, concern has focused on the ways malicious individuals, groups, organizations and even nation states can use social media to create impressions, shift understandings or erode trust [2]. While propaganda is an ancient human practice, new social media platforms change the speed, scale, scope, and possibly the effectiveness of adversarial information [3]. These dangers heighten the interest in understanding how social media phenomena can be studied, improved, and protected. Why do some groups of people succeed in using these tools while many others fail? How can successful groups resist invasion and internal division? Community managers and participants can learn to use social network maps of their social media spaces to cultivate their best features and limit negative outcomes. Social network measures and maps can be used to gain insights into collective activity and guide optimization of their productive capacity while limiting the destructive forces that plague most efforts at computer-mediated communications. People interested in cultivating these communities can measure and map social media activity in order to compare and contrast social media efforts to one another, and to learn from the best examples.

Around the world, community stakeholders, managers, leaders, and members have found that they can all benefit from learning how to apply social network analysis methods to study, track, and compare the dynamics of their communities and the influence of individual contributions. Business leaders and analysts can study enterprise social networks to improve the performance of organizations by identifying key contributors, locating gaps or disconnections across the organization, and discovering important documents and other digital objects [4]. Marketing and service directors can use social media network analysis to guide the promotion of their products and services, track compliments and complaints, and respond to priority customer requests. Community managers can apply these techniques to public-facing systems that gather people around a common interest and ensure that socially productive relationships are established. Social media tools have become central to national priorities requiring government agency leaders to become skillful in building and managing their communities and connections. Governments at all levels must learn to optimize and sustain social media tools for public health information dissemination, disaster response, energy conservation, environmental protection, community safety, and more. The disturbing reality that many disaster events attract misinformation that can have deadly consequence motivates many efforts to better analyze the flow of social media to rapidly identify and deflect inaccurate and dangerous information [5].

In this book we explore social structure and organization through the application of the methods and concepts of social network analysis. Network analysis is a relatively recent scientific method for describing and analyzing a web of links among entities, including people. Network analysis provides powerful ways to summarize networks and identify key people or other objects that occupy strategic locations and positions within a matrix of links. Network visualizations can graphically map these structures to complement numerical measures and enable people to gain valuable intuitions and insights into the shape, size, density, sub-regions, and key locations within a connected population. Over decades, scientists, technologists, and entrepreneurs have dramatically improved the tools, analytic methods, visualization approaches, and sources of data for social network analysis. Increasingly potent software applications are available to study these phenomena and uncover useful, actionable insights. Until recently, these tools demanded significant programming and data management skills that excluded many interested users. We focus on a social network analysis tool designed for ease of use and customized for application to social media, the Network Overview Discovery and Exploration add-in for Excel (“NodeXL”). NodeXL embeds the tools and features needed to collect, analyze, visualize and report on a network within the familiar framework of the Excel spreadsheet.

1.5 Who should read this book

Practitioners, researchers, and students interested in the study of social media can benefit from this book. Using this volume, business leaders, instructors, and students can apply principles of social network analysis to measure, analyze, and interpret real-world data from a variety of social media platforms. Readers will learn how to extract insights from networks to reveal internal business activity, external customer communities, and their local competitive landscape.

Professors and instructors in a range of disciplines may find this volume useful in semester-long courses as well as shorter units related to computing, business, and social sciences. Technical classes in computer science/engineering, information science, human computer interaction, information visualization, cybersecurity, and even social physics have been increasingly focused on the topic of “social computing” and “computational social science”. In business and management schools, enterprise collaboration and customer communities remain important topics for generating business value. Digital humanities scholars and instructors have increasingly used social media to understand and enable novel connections between people and cultural artifacts. In the social sciences, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, economists, demographers, political scientists, and other students of collective intelligence, collective action, and communities of practice have an opportunity to do data analysis at a scale never before possible with a less steep learning curve than demanded by programming languages.

1.6 Applying social media to national priorities

Government agencies around the world are attracted to the possibilities of improved delivery of services at reduced costs but challenged by the loss of content control, liability for libel, pornography, or terrorist use. Open access to vast stores of government data expands their value while potentially calling attention to unfavorable information that could be used by political adversaries. Government professionals are excited by the prospects of increased citizen engagement but concerned by what that engagement may mean for their control over the flow of information and their obligations to protect privacy, avoid censorship while preventing libel, and other inappropriate uses of government information technology resources. Across the planet, developed and developing countries are attracted to the potential to use social media to change their societies, from promoting energy conservation and smoking cessation to new levels of political engagement with citizens. But as governments increasingly erode their protections for civil liberties and information security, and some prominent politicians effectively leverage social media in ways that increase division and amplify violent conflict, the positive applications of social media are balanced by challenges and a growing number of negative examples.

Efforts by innovative citizen/residents have encouraged the idea that existing social media platforms can be harnessed for national priorities, such as disaster response. Social media has played a key role in major disasters ranging from Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in August 2005, to the Tōhoku, Japan earthquake in 2011, to the California wildfires of 2018. Volunteers created websites to coordinate assistance, offer food, provide housing, share photos, create maps, help find transportation, and eventually help rebuild. Despite improved outcomes, modest design changes in the way information can be gathered, aggregated, validated, and shared could have increased the usefulness of social media.

Disaster response is typically seen as a national government responsibility, but other services, such as community safety, are seen as a local government responsibility. Here too innovative individuals have created websites and services to enable resident-to-resident assistance, such as Nextdoor,² which describes its effort as follows:

Another successful community safety effort has been Amber Alert,³ named after a child who was abducted and murdered in 1996. This alerting system, now coordinated by the U.S. Department of Justice, claims to have directly assisted in almost 500 safe returns of abducted children. It may also have raised awareness enough to have prevented many other abductions.

Resident reports are being solicited for tornadoes, earthquakes, floods, or other natural disasters as well as for reporting on fraud, abuse, and waste of government funds. Positive contributions such as fixes to the Library of Congress Card Catalog or the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed service lead the way in suggesting further possibilities. The innovative Peer-to-Patent system (see Noveck's 2009 book on WikiGovernment [6]) invited specialists in certain technical areas to contribute information on prior art related to patent applications. Then a group discussion ranked the 10 items for submission to the patent examiners so as to speed up and improve their work at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Noveck summarizes her case this way: “Ordinary citizens have more to offer than voting or talking. They can contribute their expertise and, in so doing, realize the opportunity now to be powerful… Collaborative governance is an idea whose time has come.” [6, p. 190].

Volunteers to museums, parks, hospitals, or schools could also improve public services at national and local sites. Government-run websites such as http://nationalservice.gov now facilitate these service efforts. Data shows that a large percent of residents volunteer in the most active states (e.g., 43% in Utah; 35% in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and South Dakota), while the least active states lag far behind (e.g., Nevada, New York, Florida, and Louisiana all under 20%). Could increased visibility or awareness of volunteer efforts increase participation?⁴

Millions citizen scientists donate their resources, time, and skills to help classify galaxies, identify exoplanets, map invasive species, transcribe historical records, map neurons, and identify a cure for cancer. Sites like Zooniverse⁵ have attracted over 1.7 million community members have helped classify over 400 million items through their growing collection of projects. For nearly 2 decades, the SETI@home project has allowed volunteers to donate their computer's resources to analyze radio telescope data that aids in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.⁶ The Smithsonian Institution has created the ambitious Encyclopedia of Life⁷ project to achieve Edward O. Wilson’s goal of a web page for each of the estimated 1.8 million species on earth. The payoffs in scientific knowledge to support biodiversity and environmental preservation are potentially large, but the challenges of getting professional scientists, citizen scientists, and nature enthusiasts to work together are also substantial. Designers and community managers continue to search for the motivational structures and recognition strategies needed to gain broader participation.

Social networks also support rapid dissemination of public information (e.g., on flu vaccinations, weather alerts, or community safety threats). Many people are more likely to trust and act on cell phone calls or email messages from friends and family than from pronouncements by public officials on television programs or newspaper reports. Public officials can also disseminate less time-sensitive information on energy conservation strategies, environmental protection initiatives, or health alerts about obesity reduction or smoking cessation. Citizen-generated YouTube videos often have more impact than carefully scripted appeals by professionals at press conferences. Analysis of view counts and comments can show how effective various strategies are in reaching different demographic segments.

Leaders of many non-governmental community groups have come to appreciate the growing power of social media with their increasingly rich services. Communities can become energized by modern technology-mediated versions of parent-teacher associations, neighborhood watches, and disaster planning teams. Even smaller groups such as book clubs, high-school orchestras, or local birdwatchers benefit from use of communications tools such as Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, or Google groups.

1.7 Worldwide efforts

Although this book emphasizes examples that we are more familiar with in the United States, there are worldwide efforts to apply social media strategies and encourage further research and development. About a decade ago, during a time of relative optimism about the potential of the disruptive social media technologies, the European-based Institute for Prospective Technological Studies produced two thoughtful reports on The Impact of Social Computing on the EU Information Society and Economy⁸ and Public Services 2.0: The Impact of Social Computing on Public Services.⁹ The first report suggested that “social computing could play an increasingly important role in re-engaging citizens in political debate, in securing social cohesion and harmony, and it could provide a platform for dialogue on the grand challenges of the EU [European Union] and the rest of the world.” The second report encouraged “policy makers to seize the opportunities of social computing but also to mitigate any undesirable effects” and laments the “limited provision of citizen-centered public services by governments.” The report further warns “that the empowerment and transparency characteristics of social computing initiatives seem to disrupt existing power balances.” In the coming years, the impact of social media on political systems became apparent through the Arab Spring and the weaponization of social media by ISIS.

Meanwhile, a series of leaked documents by Edward Snowden and others revealed the extent to which the United States and other nationstates were collecting massive amounts of social media data. Additional cybersecurity breaches of social media websites and the clear abuses of privacy data by key social media companies including Facebook, helped pave the way for the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) legislation that became effective in 2018. Hailed as the most comprehensive data privacy legislation in the past 20 years, the new law has far reaching implications on the ways in which companies collect and use social media data.

Research efforts led by groups such as the European Society of Socially Embedded Technologies (www.eusset.eu) and international Web Science Trust (www.webscience.org) have helped shift the attention of researchers and policy makers from a purely technical focus to a social and socio-technical focus. Early position papers [7, 8] emphasized the need to develop strong scientific foundations for social media research that integrates sociotechnical systems thinking; a call that has largely been answered through researchers affiliated with the CSCW and ECSCW research communities. Hendler et al.’s [9] emphasis on the social nature of web technologies has been proven true again and again in the past decade:

The authors of this book see many opportunities for diverse academics and professionals to contribute to our understanding of how social media are already changing our world. We also see an active role for them in the design of future technologies, as well as future social, economic, and political systems. Methods such as social network analysis applied to social media datasets will no doubt be a key contributor to such efforts. Technology promoters succeed more often when they address usability and sociability, are alert to human needs and values, and are sensitive to balancing policies and norms.

1.8 Practitioner’s summary

Existing social institutions, educational curricula, business plans, and government policies are shifting as a result of social media tools and their application. Forward-looking universities are adding courses on the study of social computing, social informatics, new media, and digital society. Journal editors, conference organizers, and national science funding agencies are working to take advantage of the opportunities of using these new tools and techniques.

Individuals, organizations, and government agencies are devoting resources to using social media for their benefit while avoiding the dangers. Understanding how these social media networks thrive, change, or fail is a substantial challenge to researchers and professionals. Researchers in social network analysis have provided a set of concepts and metrics to systematically study these dynamic processes. Innovators in information visualization have also contributed to helping users to discover patterns, trends, clusters, gaps, and outliers, even in complex social networks. Each day solutions for better network insights are being found that bring competitive advantages to business product developers, opportunities for government agency staffers, and new possibilities for nongovernmental social entrepreneurs.

1.9 Researcher’s agenda

Now is an exciting time for those involved in the emerging discipline of social media network analysis. Researchers are designing novel collaborative technologies and social strategies that enable new forms of working and playing. They are also analyzing existing communities to find out what strategies and design decisions lead to success and avoid social problems. Although social media success stories abound, there are countless examples of failed attempts to effectively apply social media to achieve desired goals. Social network analysis offers a systematic method to evaluate social media efforts, replacing anecdotes with scientifically based evidence. Unfortunately, many observers see no urgency in changing business strategies, marketing plans, research directions, curricula, or government programs. We hope this book will change their minds by showing the compelling business opportunities, attractive research challenges, strong educational needs, and important national priorities that social media can address and network analysis can elucidate.

Just as the physicists of the 1940s were challenged and troubled by the awesome forces they unleashed, researchers studying these social phenomena may yet create technologies that release human chain reactions, harnessing vast amounts of human energy to overcome the social problems that challenge our world. In the past 400 years, scientists have focused on fundamental physical phenomena, such as gravity, magnetism, nuclear forces, and genetic information. Their work has produced profound changes in human life as we gain insights and control over core physical forces. Cellular communication networks, material sciences, and nuclear power are leading examples of the accomplishments of this vast intellectual endeavor. Similarly, biologists have revealed the core processes of all life, exposing the structure of DNA and opening the door to powerful techniques and practices that are only just unfolding. Because powerful technologies are eagerly sought by those who might put them to destructive purposes, urgent efforts are needed to ensure constructive outcomes. We believe that open discussion, broad participation, and respect for individual rights can help lead the way to more beneficial results.