Approaching Social Networking from a Social Sciences Perspective

Social Media is restructuring society, marketers need to adapt if they are going to participate in the opportunities this offers us.

Throughout time, communication systems have formed the foundations of society and have determined the development of civilisations. The parameters of communication have always been time and geography. Some communication occurs over time when the transmitting party and the receiving party are not in the same time dimension, for example reading books. Other communication requires the parties to be in the same geography and time, for example face to face. There are many permutations in between.

Witness when people wandered the earth in tribes, much of their communication and therefore cultural development was related to the welfare of the tribe and restricted to their direct contact with one another. The communication was primarily face to face in an instant of time and very little evidence of what was said remained except in the individual memories. Then mankind developed iconography to communicate over time and distance by leaving messages for each other that could be interpreted despite the intervals of time.

The printing press extended peoples’ ability to share ideas and enabled anyone who could read to participate in society’s dialogue. This was an early form of mass, one directional communication over both geography and time.

Enter network technologies

Imagine how big the world became with the advent of network technologies like telephones, where numbers of participants and geographies were no longer the constraining parameters of civilisation. As a communication tool however, telephones are primarily immediate. People speak directly to each other and the telephone does not automatically capture the conversation in a format that can be analysed over time.

When a society shifts from one communication model to another, all institutions in society get reinvented according to the new logic of the medium. The advent of the interactive web means that mass communication is no longer a broadcast communication, instead we have multiple people creating data by participating in network communication, unfettered by time or geography, on a scale we have never seen before.

Markets are systems where people and businesses are connected and influence each other. As businesses, we will benefit from approaching social networking from a social sciences perspective, and using metrics and visualisations of the dynamics of the system, which can be translated into action plans for communication.

For the first time we can capture and analyse data about network communication, because we are freed from the constraints of time and geography.

Visualisation

We can use visualisation to understand the structure of networks in the market, how individuals are connected within their communities and how communities are connected. By understanding these structures, we can design strategies to move messages, products or ideas backwards and forwards through the network efficiently.

Instead of using pure segmentation based on the psychographics and demographics of our audience, we can now enhance our marketing with the behavioural analysis of networks and patterns of communication.