Online social network: Social Network Analysis of proprietary micro-blogging

 

KATE EHRLICH

IBM RESEARCH| CORPORATE

 

Many of the technologies once only available on the internet are migrating behind the firewall for exclusive use within an enterprise. Micro-blogs are one of the recent technologies to move into corporate use. In this study, we examined the network structure, represented by who “follows” whom, for a group of over 800 people who had been using a proprietary micro-blogging tool for at least 3 months. The social network of micro-bloggers provides a glimpse into patterns of internal knowledge sharing enabled by new social media. The results of our analysis suggest that the private social network of these micro-bloggers has many of the small world properties found in larger, public social network sites especially that there were a few people who had many followers (ie high in-degree) while the majority were followed by only a few people. The people who had more followers also had more posts and were themselves following a larger number of people. These highly central people were not only well connected but were also providing some brokerage as measured by betweenness centrality, and had few constraints. All these measures were correlated with the number of posts. However, when we looked at people who were providing some brokerage function within an affiliated group or between groups, where groups were based on functional organization or country, there was no correlation between brokerage and the number of posts. Consistent with some other recent studies of online social networks (e.g. Thelwell, 2008), we found a mixed effect of homophily. There was no evidence of gender homophily, but people were more likely to follow those from the same functional group or the same country. There was an overall moderate level of reciprocity – people following people who followed them with no additional effect of homophily. These results point to the importance of visible activity, such as micro-blogging, for the structure of internal social networks. We discuss the implications of these results for the role of social media in information sharing within the enterprise.