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The difference between a social network and social graph

The internet as we all know it is rapidly changing. Within the past few years social interaction and communication has heavily influenced how people use the internet for business and leisure. I wanted to share with you what I’ve learned about social interaction on the internet and how social networks have strongly affected the internet and our lifestyle as we know of it today. When you see how these social interactions work and why they’re taking place you’ll see how marketing strategies introduced here will bring a whole new element to what you know about marketing online.

What I plan to do is share with you how and why these systems work and how you too can begin to use these system in your marketing campaign. Before I just jump into these systems and ideas, I want to make sure you have a full understanding on what a social graph is and how they work. I want to show you all of the many features of Facebook, from the most basic to the highly advanced. What this will do is build a solid foundation of how social graphs and networks work, particularly Facebook, which will in turn make it much easier for you to understand how these marketing systems, concepts, and ideas work. It would be very difficult for you to understand how to market on a social graph in terms of the ways I’m going to show you without understanding what a social graph is. Remember these ideas are very new and different from things you’ve probably seen before and if you don’t understand the foundation to which they are built on, they simple will not make sense or work for you.

I’ve followed many social networks such as MySpace (http://www.myspace.com), Bebo (http://www.bebo.com), Friendster (http://www.friendster.com), Livejournal (http://www.livejournal.com), Orkut (http://www.orkut.com), Buzznet (http://ww.buzznet.com), Twitter (http://www.xanga.com), Xanga (http://www.xanga.com), and many more. Over the past couple years I’ve really followed deeply with the Facebook (http://www.facebook.com) movement and their continually rapid success. From its simplest form to its continually evolving and improving system, Facebook has continued to push the envelope on exactly what a social network is. Facebook has taken social networking to a whole new level, creating and evolving a social graph (Don’t worry; I’ll explain to you later what a social graph is). Studying the intricacies of the system and the many features of Facebook has giving me a whole new insight on how to market on the internet.

What is a social network?

A social network’s definition could be defined from its name, a network of people who socialize through multiple media mediums such as pictures, videos, and messages. A social network allows people to shared similar interests, events, groups of friends, and thoughts. A social network makes relationships between its users.

How does a social network work?

Typically a social network allows its users to create a profile. A profile contains information about the user such as date of birth, relationship status, political and religious views, school and work history, a short bio, favorite interests, and more. Users can become friends of other users by simply asking for mutual approval. John sends Marv a friend request; Marv accepts the request; John and Marv are now friends on the social network. Users can exchange messages with friends. These messages can be private or public. Public messages are typically shown on the user’s profile. These are similar to comments on a blog. A private message is only visible by the user it was sent to. These are similar to sending an email.

Social networks allow the users to express their personality and interests about themselves. A lot can be learned about an individual, just based on their profile. A profile typically will show all of a user’s friends as well. Just by viewing one’s profile you can learn their favorite movies, music, school they attend, and whether or not they are in a relationship. There is no limit to what you can find on a user’s profile. It’s hard not to state the obvious, but privacy of an individual seems to be forgotten about completely. Most, if not all, social networks have an in depth privacy system that allows each users control of who can see what on their profile. Users could even hide the profile completely from anyone that is not their “friend.” Also, since all of the information on a profile is published solely by the user, the amount of information you’ll find about that individual depends on what they feel like sharing.

The network of users is based strongly on the social interactions of one another. Users can invite friends to events, request them to join a group, share photos and videos, exchange messages, and see who else they are socializing with. In a nut shell, that’s how a social network works.

Why does a social network work?

There are many reasons I’ve learned on why a social network works, first, timing. There couldn’t have been a better time than now for social networks to grow at their exponential rate. A social network would not be possible without the internet and the speed of users’ internet connections. The internet allows users today to share pictures, video and other media with ease. Also, it’s obvious that the growth of social networks has a strong dependence on the younger generation (under 25).

Younger generations are growing up with the internet. It’s become an integral part of their lifestyle. So it is only obvious that they would use the internet to socialize. They want to share information about themselves and communicate with others, but this is difficult before social networks due to the fact that most people simply didn’t know how to make a website. Social networks make it easy for a user to create a simple website (profile) and communicate with their peers. It allows user’s a creative outlook on self expression.

Second, a social network works because it makes it easy for people to organize information about their social life. Social networks allow users to keep track of events, friend’s contacts, birthdays, and employment status. It allows them to create photo albums and share them with their friends. Social networks can become a central site that makes finding the information about you and your social life simple.

Social networks work also because of curiosity and boredom. It’s hard not for me to say this, but so many people are naturally curious about their peers and during times of boredom they’re going to search social networks. I don’t know if I’m just speaking from the people I’ve talked to, but I’ve spoke with a lot of people on this subject matter and more often than not people look towards social networks in times of boredom. They’re something intriguing in all of us about the voyeuristic approach to a social network. I’m not saying people are stalking individuals (even though they very well could be), but it’s almost a new way of keeping in touch or staying close with friends and family whom you may have grown apart from in time. Social networks have made it so simple to keep up with everyone’s busy lifestyles today.

There are many other reasons social networks work, but the ones I’ve outlined are the most obvious and dominant. It’s become apparent that so many websites have adapted the social network experience on their site because these concepts work so well, especially with the demographics of the web users today.

What is a social graph?

Now that I’ve outlined a basic understanding of what a social network is, I want to raise the stakes one level and explain to you what a social graph is. A social graph is a smarter, more intellectual social network, a higher level of complex networking. This can get really confusing fast so I’m going to go slow. I want to make sure you understand what a social graph is so that you can see why such a system is enjoyed and used by so many millions of people. I’m going to explain this concept in terms of nodes and edges. A node is any entity on a social network such as an individual, group, photo album, or event. An edge is any connection that connects one node to another. Typically a social network is one dimensional. This means that there exists only one edge between two nodes. For example, John and Marv are friends, where John and Marv are two nodes connected by one edge (friendship). There cannot be another edge that connects John and Marv. Since there can only be one edge between John and Marv then, naturally, we can assume that all edges between nodes is known as friendship. This is where a social graph changes everything. A social graph allows two same nodes to be connected by an infinite number of edges. Now if there are multiple connections between the same two nodes, then we must label or categorize the different type of connections to distinguish the differences. For example, John and Marv are friends and they went to the same high school. Now there exist two edges between the same two nodes. So we must categorize the two different edges. The diagram below illustrates this concept.

This multiple connection difference may seem subtle, but this actually opens up a whole new, multi-dimensional web of networking. A social network just acknowledges the fact that there is a connection between two nodes, where-as a social graph identifies what type of connection is made between two nodes. This concept allows for reason to have multiple connections between the same two nodes. Allowing for multiple connections complicates the web of relationships ten-fold. Having the ability to create such detailed categorization on how the network is created allows for a smart approach of interaction and yes, marketing.

So a social graph is just a more advanced form of a social network, actually categorizing and allowing for multiple relationships between the same two nodes. This already happens in the real world, if you think about it. You may be friends with someone you went to high school with. There are two different types of relationships here, friendship and attended same high school. The same concept follows through on a social graph. The social graph is just one step closer to recreating the social world, on the internet. Hopefully by now the idea of what a social graph is makes sense.

What is Facebook?

Facebook (http://www.facebook.com) is a social graph. Facebook’s network of users has increased to currently over 60 million users. Facebook started as a social network for college students in February 2004 and has now opened the network to the public, allowing anyone to join. Facebook is a free service and generates its revenue from advertising. The network is also responsible for uploading over 60 million photos weekly, making it the largest photo sharing website on the internet. Facebook has all of the features you’d expect from a social network including the creation of a profile that shares a variety of interests, make connections with friends and family, and multiple forms of messaging. Facebook has also opened up an API allowing developers to create new features and interactions for Facebook users. This adds a whole new element to the social graph (The Facebook API will be explained later) Facebook has an ever evolving privacy system overlapped within the network. This privacy allows for protection of the content published by each individual user. There are an extensive number of features found within Facebook. I will outline many of the basic features so that you get a better understanding of what Facebook is.

What I will do is explain to you the core features and how they are used. This will build a foundation of how Facebook works for the user. Once you understand how it works for the user I explain how to approach Facebook’s social graph for your marketing strategies. What you’ll see is majority of users don’t necessarily use Facebook looking to purchase anything, but the thing is, everybody’s in the market for something. The idea is to find out what they’re looking for, as a consumer, using the social interactions and features of Facebook. Once you find what they want, you want to leverage the social graph to build credibility. Then make them an irrefutable offer.