This post reflects on the article 3 Ways to Use Social Network Analysis for Marketing which makes the case that the science of networks (or Social Network Analysis, SNA) is largely omitted by the marketing industry as a whole. SNA research has gained a lot of momentum throughout the last fifty years and has been used as an important tool to solve problems in areas such as counter-terrorism, ecology, disease prevention and even for inter-organizational structure evaluation.

A notable use of SNA occurred in 2009 when leaders in the SNA field Christakis and Fowler managed to prevent a large outbreak of the H1N1 influeza virus on the Harvard University campus by isolating the networks of infected members. Imagine if we applied a similar framework to predicting the diffusion of a marketing campaign? (or other)

SNA research is being applied in even more innovative ways, such as by consultants Funds@Work AG and SONEAN GmbH with their work in the investment industry. Areas of work include looking at the networks of Shariah scholars in Islamic finance, mapping out the historic ties between executive and non-executive directors in Europe’s top 50 companies and even mapping out investor, entrepreneur and organizational networks in the German VC/Start-Up space.

What we can learn from this is that the potential applications and insights are endless. From my perspective, it makes sense that the next big revolution in digital marketing strategy will take place when marketers are able to bridge the gap between academic knowledge in SNA and practical applications to the field. Think about it, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other popular tools are known as Social Networks, yet, we rarely think of solving marketing problems from a Network Perspective. Interestingly, when you look at the most effective marketers and marketing campaigns, you realize that they are actually intuitively applying SNA theory.