Analysis of 4 Networks of Community of Influencers

Last year, we outlined important factors when looking at the communities of influencers (or tribes) that power the social web: Relevance, separation, shape and size, interconnectedness and influence.

So we picked 4 different groups of community from various industries and looked at their interconnections:

• Lifestyle (10 communities): mommy, beauty, fashion, deco, food, daddy, celebrity, baking, craft, fitness
• High Tech infrastructure (10 communities): Cloud Computing, Virtualization, Security, Storage, System Admin, Telecom, Unified Communications, IT Ops/Outsourcing, BPO, Information Architecture
• High Tech Software (10 communities): RIA, Sharepoint, UX/UE, Web2.0, Open Source, Agile, Enterprise 2.0, Ruby on Rails, Microsoft, SW development general
• Healthcare (10 communities): Nurse, Doctor, Neuroscience, Nutrition, Life Science, Healthcare System, Disability, Diabetes, Addiction, Mental Health

We took only the top 60 influencers from each community (sometimes as deep as several thousands) and used our social network analysis capability to map the aggregated network.

As mentioned previously, communities tend to remain separate from one another, thus the importance of carefully choosing the one(s) that is(are) the best fit for a particular marketing program. What the following maps also show is that each community displays a unique clustering pattern within the group, allowing marketers to identify ‘neighborhood communities’ around specific ones.

Lifestyle

Healthcare

High Tech Infrastructure

High Tech Software