How SNA can help companies to get a better understanding of the outcome of change projects

Problem: Identifying key employees in SMEs

Every time companies are facing significant structural change, there is the danger of manifold failure: failure of convincing employees about the long term benefits, failure of keeping the budget aligned for the change process, failure of acknowledging crucial elements of human network interaction.

After having sit in this class, I believe that SNA can provide insights, which can help to navigate through the stormy waters of any company specific change process. Given the scope of the topic and my experience in the corporate world, I would like to focus on one single example, yet I believe that with the necessary adjustments in e.g. the research question or the scope of the survey, the same reasoning can be applied to any organization.

Background

I have worked for three years at RheinChemie Rheinau GmbH (RCR), a company specialized in rubber,lubricant and plastics additives in the specialty chemicals industry. They are fully owned by LANXESS AG, a major player in the German economy who was also represented in the DAX between 2012 and 2015. Due to an apparent missmanagement at the top executive level the restructuring of the company was announced in September 2014. The three-phase program foresaw the merging of different business units to benefit from more synergies, honestly spoken the intention was cutting costs, an organizational restructuring in mainly the Sales and Marketing operations and a better diversification on its client base.

I was actually writing my bachelor thesis in the summer of 2015 about the roll-out and shortcomings of this change project as more than eight months after the announcement and first kick-off workshops with the top management and employees there was still confusion to be felt and everybody was unsure about his or her future role. Retrospectively I believe that this companywide "paralysis through anaylsis" state of operations was caused by an HR-related cause-and-effect scenario that was underestimated, misunderstood or simply not acknowledged for by the management team. In a very early stage of the transformation process, the company was visibly pushing people close to their retirement age to leave the company (cutting costs) in exchange for pay-offs depending on their role,function and time in the company. I have been told consistently by people who received these offers that they were very good from an employee perspective, independently of their decision to take or drop the offer itself.

After only a few initial job rotations the trickle of resignments got stronger and stronger and until end of January 2015, (the changes were implemented and officially valid from January 1,2015 onwards) roughly fifty people left the administrative departments of the company, amounting to a workforce reduction by roughly 20%!

How SNA could have helped RCR in turning the odds in favor of successful change

The corporate culture at RCR - and many other SMEs I was in contact with - is similar to a family environment. After a few months in the job, you know all about the colleagues you are directly working with.There are many occasional chatters in the hallway, people actually drop by your office to ask a quick question and then stay there for another 20mins or so, talking about everything under the sun except of job-related issues. The people, who were more or less chased away, were corporate veterans and based on the research I did for my bachelor thesis, I know that they were highly regarded in the organization/network and people were getting demotivated by their quitting and left the now less enjoyable workplace shortly after.

Doing a SNA prior to the restructuring announcement could have possibly helped to gain a better understanding of these invisible staff relationships. (Discussing whether top management needs to be aware of the company's grapevine, would belong in another paper) Furthermore in the dawn of a change project, management can utilize knowledge about networks to penetrate the company with new ideas and thus facilitate change.

Gathering the required data to perform a SNA

I think that the actual survey of the people wouldn't be that hard as the amount of individuals is manageable. I would ask all 250 people working in the administration as well as roughly another 40 employees out of production, mainly the supervisors, who often are in touch with staff from adminsitrative funcitons. A challenge for sure though would be the creation of an environment in which all employees are willing to participate and give honest answers. This could be achieved with extrinsic or intrinsic motivators, given my personal conviction though, I would go for an intrinsic apporach and talk with all potential participants about the purpose and benefits of such an analysis. I assume that at first they won't be pleased and might see it as an interference of their privacy but given time and the argument to make their work as enjoyable as possible (we have unlimited resources,right?) they might eventually agree and provide us with high input quality. Similar to our class survey, I would ask them two research questions with the purpose of getting to know something about their work-related network and their social network in the workplace e.g.:

• Whom would you intuitively approach for help and/or professional advice, once you need assistance with any given tasks or new responsibilities?
• Whom are you having lunch with?
• Whom are you socializing with outside of work? (can be an especially tricky one...)
• With whom are you enjoying to work together?
• Whom do you like to talk to during your breaks or idle times?

Providing a 5-point-scale for answering (Not at all-Very Frequently) gives a lot of room for analysis and can give more insights into different layers of interaction. The attributes or demographics would include gender, department, tenure, hierarchy level, age group and place of residence. Additional qualitative information which could turn out to be useful for the analysis and interpretation might include a question about whether the persons knew eachother before working in the same company or other considerations about possible touching points like childrens that could be of the same age,etc...

Important SNA measures

Given the overall goal to identify the individuals who are the informal leaders of the company and positively affect the motivation and involvement of others overall network measures are secondary and the focus should definitely be put on centrality measures. Since we were asking about two different types of leaders indicating different characteristics, on the one hand those people who are willing to share information and knowledge and thus people think of them as first contacts once they require help and on the other hand those individuals who make the workplace more enjoyable and fun a separate analysis of the networks is necessary although a person could stand for both.

Special attention shall be paid to a component analysis and its further breakdown into subgroups and probably most importantly in this scenario cliques. Especially on a high frequency of interaction/ties, strong cliques can be an indicator of dependencies. Nodes or individuals that are part of a strong clique can be strongly impacted by the quitting of one of the members.

Bridges linking different subgroups or even components with eachother and connectors those who can introduce you to so far unknown influential people (Eigenvector) are also essential players in the attempt of facilitating change.

The simple yet meanngful measure of degree connections (In- & OutDegree) is also interesting as it gives a picture of the popularity among colleagues.

Another way of understanding the directionality of the network can be given by the E-I-Index. Capitalizing on the attributes, management can get an impression whether information spreads homogeneous and therefore among those who are alike or among those whose attributes are different. The latter might be an indication about very good cross-functional or cross-hierarchical communication and thus decreases the importance of an individual egonetwork because it is more likely that people also approach those with heterogenous attributes.

Betweeness and closeness are less important as they provide information about nodes relative to others. Primarily we are interested in identifying individuals we need to bring along during the change (according to change management literature the so-called leaders or agents of change, not to be confused with the initiator(s) of change).

The number of isolates can indicate but should by far not be the only criterion upon which costs can be saved through offering a termination bonus payment and can definitely be worthwhile to be given a second look.

Conclusion

Having laid out how SNA can help with both problems, the urgent question from an employer side about which individuals are the less harmful to be removed from the network (of course this should be interpreted only as a starting point) and the problem about identifying those individuals able to promote change, I want to quickly put the discussed points into the bigger picture. Coming back to the above mentioned clueless and in the long term destructive or at least harmful approach of simply chasing away those that wont be in the company for long anyways but might be fundamental for its bonding, top management automatically delayed the turnaround point for the change implementation.

Any company must first develop an understanding of the importance of social networks in organizations before significantly disturb it by any means. In this specific case, SNA might have led to actions that would help ALL employees to carry or be carried through the implementation gap, typical for change. Based on the findings management could have also engaged much earlier with key employees to make sure that all the perspectives are considered and complications, existent in every project, could have been minimized. Benefitting from the familiar corporate culture instead of bringing up this family to oppose the new and unknown should make up for the costs of such surveys and increases chances for success. In the end prevention is always more effective as curing as postulated from the discipline of quality management.

Human Trafficking in China

I. Current situation

No matter in which country, human trafficking is an unlawful behavior. Human traffickers abduct mainly children, teenagers, and women, who are relatively vulnerable. In Asian countries, some poor people, especially those in the remote places, who do not have wives or children would illegal “buy” wives or children from human traffickers. On the other hand, some people would buy organs from human traffickers. Furthermore, some traffickers would use children as tools to beg money on the roads.

Even if in the modern society, social media makes us closer to each other and get more information than before, however, according to Global Times, about 70,000 children under 18 years old were trafficked in China. Comparing to the United States, in 2011, US Department of Justice statistics shows that around 797,500 teenagers and children would be kidnapped or trafficked every day. But 98% would be found back.

II. USA’s experience

There are three experiences China or other countries could learn from the United States.

Firstly, improve the relevant laws and regulations. President Reagan announced May 25th as the “National lost Children’s Day” and introduced the “Lost Children Assistance Act”, the bill advocates free alarm helpline for lost children across the United States, in addition, it builds up a center for lost children’s information collection and selection. This foundation is solidly built nationwide.

Secondly, FBI established the national service center for lost and exploited children. Multiple languages helpline is available 24 hours everyday. Try to rescue abducted children in the shortest time.

Last but not least, make use of “Children safety alarm system”. In the late 1980s, Wal-Mart firstly launched the system, named Code Adam, to keep children’s safety. If found children lost, parents could ask for launching the Code Adam and the supermarket’s entrances would be all closed at once. If children were not found within ten minutes, the police would intervene immediately. Besides, according to Abou Alert’s official website in 2013, about 97% information could send to the residents whose children lost.

Nevertheless, China did not have a complete relevant law system. Besides, social assistance service mechanism has not been established, resulting in only police try to crackdown human trafficking. At the same time, lack of help for street children and weak population and DNA databases also hinder the rescued children to find their families.

III. What data do I need?

1.Name. Name could narrow down our searching scope for the first selection.

2.Ages. Ages could narrow down the scope fatherly and analyze through the trend and make some relative protection for this range of ages children. Up to 90% of abducted population are under six years old.

3.Gender. It is very important when comparing with ages. Usually, under 14 years old, males have a higher portion in the human trafficking. While, 14-18 years old, female take up the main portion.

4.Where are they abducted and where did they go (more specific, better). By analyzing these data, we could find which states are the most popular area and could put more effort on.

5.Current situation of these children and teenagers. We have to know the purpose of human traffickers and the demand of their customers. Thus, we could pay more attention to the places and the occupations.

6.The rescued route. We know that most of rescued route and efforts are from police. Very few are from other executive departments and community or volunteer. Through this data, we could find out the trend and any improvement we could make.

7.Human traffickers’ relationship with the abducted children. In China, around half of human traffickers have blood relationship with abducted children. They build up complete mutual benefit chains and become some organizations. Therefore, they would have powerful network chains with the providers, brokers, and customers. If we have some key people in the organizations, through social network analysis, we could dig out the whole chain and secure the abducted children effectively.

8.The placement of rescued children. We have to get this data in order to know where and how do we deal with the rescued children. Even if we built a complete rescued method to find every lost child, the final goal is to help them to find their families or secure their rest of life.

V. How could we use SNA to solve the problem or improve the current situation?

Just because these data are hard to find now, the amount of abducted children are increasing in recent years. In order to get these data, we have to build a complete law to regulate the market. Besides, the most effective way would be social network methods. Through social network methods, everybody could participate into the process and everyone could come up ideas or use their own efforts to help. I suggest three social network methods.

We need to find the above data as much as can and then upload it into UCINET. Because human trafficking is mainly go through organizations, using different attributes help us find subgroups. We have to use in-degree, out-degree to find who are the traffickers and who are the customers. Besides, we need to use Girvan-Newman to find out subgroups in an organization, to find who are the center or broker among different subgroups. If we could find these person, we could find all the subgroups. Furthermore, we have to find the people who have most connections with most key people because crack down the leaders would collapse the organization completely.

Besides, I believe social media's power is getting stronger. Through Facebook, Twitter, Wechat, Sina Weibo, and so many different tools, we could post and transfer information in different subgroups. Not only to find abducted children, but also to show the public the traffickers' result and the placement of rescued children. Furthermore, we could raise people's awareness of protection and safety. 

In conclusion, this problem is hard to solve without social network. We have to make full use of social network analysis and tools to crack down criminal organizations and find abducted children and teenagers to avoid tragedy and build a harmonies society.


Qiqi Diao
MIB 2016
Hult International Business School
#HultSNO2016

Social Networks in Non-Profit Organizations

A non-profit organization is one that serves public interest. The main vision of a non-profit must be related to education, charity, science or research. A non-profit can have donors, offer services to the public, make its own products. To be known in the public sector, they must market itself so that they attract more of donors and make them satisfied to be a long term part of the team. Universities, hospitals, schools and few other charities come under one roof called the "non-profit". The success or failure depends on how well it is run, like how a normal business functions.

The Non-Profit Organizations face some common issues which are

1. Becoming a part of the community

2. Getting new donors

3. Retaining the existing donors

4. Creating a thought for leadership

Currently, I am doing my internship with a non-profit organization based in Boston which is the world leader in providing mid-day meals for the underprivileged kids in India. To make them reach the goal of 5 million kids who are being helped by them, they can use Social Network Analysis to achieve their goal with lesser time.

Social Networks can be used in gaining new donors. The primary key is to network by which people do more of interaction with each other so that more number of donors can be started for the organization. The development part (which involves obtaining donors) is successfully covered here. Also, when people network, they share their experiences, ideas and knowledge which will help the building blocks of the non-profit sector grow even more. SNA would also help us understand better how to reach a donor and keep a track on the communication cycle so that he/she is aware of the current activities and can be a part of the contributions on a regular basis. By the basis of communication, we can figure out who is a suitable person who can be a leader for the entire organization.

The centrality measures that need to be focused are the number of connections a donor or volunteer within the organization has (Degree). How a person can be a path (or mutual connection) between two people or connections (Betweenness). The closest method by which a person can reach anyone within an organization (closeness) and (the Eigenvector) the possibility of a donor to be connected really well to another person in the organization.

As a result of this analysis, we can conclude that SNA can help make the process of acquiring donors more simple and it can also effectively measure how well the organization is going on track. Additionally, the connections grow and we can also decide how well the business is going and also where it is headed to.

References:

http://www.nonprofit.pro/nonprofit_organization.htm

http://sproutsocial.com/insights/nonprofit-social-media-guide/

http://www.nten.org/article/2013-enonprofit-benchmarks-study/

Patric Babu

Masters of International Business

HULT International Business School

#HultSNO2016

SNA to tackle churn rate in Information Technology Industry

Problem:

The companies in technology industry face a very high attrition rate among their employees for various reasons. we can use SNA to analyze the employee loyalty towards the company and also helps us to predict their career motives and expectations, which helps us to build a strong loyal community or the organizations can have a head start to replace/withheld the employees who chose to resign their jobs.

The attrition rate in technology industries can become a serious challenge to companies since the industry is flooded with constant change and innovation, since the employees in the tech industry passively look for constant new career opportunities and also would like to explore the new technologies in the market. Few Other reasons for higher attrition rate would be, higher pay and benefits, imbalance work life balance at the current employer, ruptured relationships with the team members, less challenging work with regards to employee’s skills etc.

The consequences of High churn rate in technology companies:

1. The cost of hiring a new employee
2. Redistribution of work load
3. Damage to brand image of organization
4. Loss of clients (in few instances)
5. Issues with the quality and productivity of the projects
6. Delay in the project deliverable.

To avoid all the consequences or at least to reduce the damage of the churn rates in the organizations, we can use social network analysis to predict the employee behavior and satisfaction levels in organizations.

With the help of SNA, we can try to find and analyze by using the following Questionnaire:

1. Please indicate how often you have turned to this person for information or advice on work-related topics in the past three months.      
2. How satisfied are you with the company’s work culture and work life balance?
3. How would you rate the organization helps to achieve your career goals?
4. How satisfied with the technology you are working on?
5. Given a chance how much likely you are willing to change the technology or teams you are working with?
6. How satisfied with the compensation and benefits provided by the organization?
7. How much likely would you prefer going for higher studies?
8. How likely would you recommend the company to work to their friends and family?

Additional questions for team leader’s/Project managers:

1. How satisfied are you with the team they are working with?
2. Given a chance how much likely are you willing to change a team member or team?

Adding to the above questionnaire we also include, gender, age, Marital status, Location, Travel Time to Work place.

Post having all the data with respect to social network and the attribute values, we can dichotomize the data with often and very often frequency levels and calculate the centrality measures using the social Network analysis tools and we can come up with hypothesis that helps the company to reduce the churn rate or predict the employees who are more likely to leave the company for any of the various reasons stated above.

Few key measures to look at are:

Degree: Since this measure tells us the people who are most reached by the employees or the ones who reaches to other employees in the organization. This measure can help us to identify the most active employees in the network with substantial knowledge on the projects they work on.

InEigenvector: This measure gives us the information with respect to the best-connected employees in the network, which helps us to focus on the employee to understand the behavior or opinions of the network.

Betweenness: This centrality measure provides us the important nodes in the network that gives the shortest path to reach all other nodes in the network.

Additionally, we can also use subgroups and cliques to further analyze the network, which helps us to form a hypothesis, since social network analysis tools are diagnostic tools.

Dharmaraj Aravind Raj,

MIB, Hult International Business School.

Identification of unexpected influencers in the company.

Social Network Analysis [SNA] is the mapping and measuring of relationships and flows between people, groups, organizations, computers or other information/knowledge processing entities. Conducting a social network analysis can help companies to reveal their unexpected influencers.

Problem:

When a company wants to break down its geographical barriers and become a more global organization, it is suggested that the leaders should informally enlist influential employees to assist with change management. But first company needs to identify which employees are most connected with others and which one’s did the most to forge relationships across different departments in two distinct locations.

According to Cigna’s chief learning officer if you ask a company’s leader the names of the influencers of their company, 75% of the names would be incorrect. He further says that, "There are hidden gems in every organization, at every level. That’s why you need to use scientific survey methodology to identify them."

For example in an organization the CEO would identify employee X as an influential person, not knowing the people working under employee X, if he is given a proper Social Network Analysis, He would identify that his assumption on employee X would be incorrect. Under this analysis, employee Y would be identified as a great networker. Hence, if this analysis is done effectively, the right employee would be considered for any organizational tasks in future.

Today’s computer networks, including the internet and wireless networks, create human-connection grids that are larger than ever. This may the reason why social network analysis, which has existed for decades, is becoming a more popular be way to understand a change in the organization.

Discovering who does the most to connect, communicate and collaborate with fellow employees is a semi outcome of any analysis. Also known as UCINET, it is a data-driven methodology supported by software to quantify and illustrate the number and strengths of personal connections. Most analysis are based on a survey of employees or managers, but they can also be based on e-mail traffic, an employee who has conversed a lot via email could be considered as a great social networker under this analysis.

Organizational hierarchies are likely to exist as long as organizations do. But companies also have informal networks, which flatten hierarchical structures and diminish the relevance of an official pecking order. The majority of work is so complex that no one person has all the knowledge, experience or skills to handle it. Formally or informally, people collaborate to get work done.

In order to recognize the employee with the best network and connections, a survey amongst the employees would be helpful to analyze and reward the employee for any networking events overseas.

Data that the company would need in order to have efficient survey results are:

·         Age

·         Annual income

·         Department

·         Whether he/she works with the global centers

·         Sex

·         Number of mails sending each day

·         No. of friends on LinkedIn

·         Who do you go to for information

·         Who do you go to solve problems

·         Who do you go to get career advice, etc.

The most important network measures are as follows:

Degree - How many people can this person reach directly?

Betweenness - How likely is this person to be the most direct route between two people in the network?

Closeness - How fast can this person reach everyone in his network?

Eigenvector - How well is this person connected to other well connected people?

How will SNA help?

After conducting a good SNA it will help the company to know who is the most efficient employee in the company who is helping to keep the global networks strong among the same company but in different countries. Also it will help to know which employee has major connections apart from their own departments.

Social Network Analysis is also being applied in the company in different areas other than talent management, Examples are as follows:

Mergers and acquisitions - A Social Network Analysis can be used to understand the acquired companies’ informal networks and identify their go-to people.

Workspace configuration - A research and development division in a large company analyzed its organizational network to determine the interdependencies among employees, to identify informal leaders and to discover where connections should be happening but were not. Employees within the division worked in the same building but on different floors. As a result of the analysis, the division’s workspace was reconfigured so that people who needed to work together closely were on the same floor. Follow-up analyses have shown that person-to-person connectivity has greatly improved.

Onboarding - In some of the cases clients assign mentors to new hires, based on the mentor’s network. And if a new hire is replacing someone, clients give the newcomer a map of the departing employee’s informal network and make introductions.

Staffing decisions - If a company wants to open offices around the country, one fast-growing company can’t hire employees quickly. By periodically conducting a social network analysis, the organization can identify hires made within the previous 12 months who had built the most extensive informal networks and were thereby deemed candidates for promotion to assistant manager positions.

Brain drain concerns - Companies can use SNA to identify which soon-to-retire Baby Boomers have the most network connections, then set priorities for knowledge retention and succession planning. In succession planning, for example, if two employees have similar resumes but one has a more robust network, that employee might be the better replacement.

In conclusion, Social Network Analysis is an important tool that measures the effectiveness of a great employee. Managers in today’s world will be able to use this tool to reward deserving employees who will benefit both the company’s and personal growth. Using this tool, employees will feel the fairness in decision taken place by the management with respect to growth in the organization, thus also effecting the efficiency and effectiveness of the employee. 

Reference:

- http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/tse-portal/analysis/social-network-analysis/

- https://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.casro.org/resource/collection/E0F10496-BE87-48E8-8746-521D403EE4A2/Paper_-_Michael_Lieberman_-_Multivariate_Solutions.pdf

Kamini Dhruv

MIB

Hult International Business School

The Next Precision Marketing: Social Network Analysis

Nowadays marketers and advertisers try so hard to capture their target audience’s behaviors and then place the marketing campaigns or advertisements in the path of the behaviors. There are already thousands of attempts that have been done by those most successful companies in the world. For example, Google key words helps marketers understand what their consumers real needs are, while Facebook ads are highly user-relative as the company collects and classifies its fans’ information and provides the automation match system to advertisers. Everything seems perfect, but what is the next upgrade for the whole system of precision marketing?

Based on what I have learned from this course, I would dare to say that the next big thing for precision marketing is social network analysis. The reason is simple: human beings cannot live without each other in the society, which means the social network is always existed and reflected individuals’ communication paths. That is to say, social network gives a shortcut for marketers to promote their products to not only the right person, but the right group. This advantage is special essential because in most cases, people tend to take a shot for what their close friends recommended, even though they have different interests. If marketers are able to identify what the group is, brands would reach out more potential consumers in every single buck, and we all know that it is much costlier to get a new consumer than to maintain an old one.

Before the analysis, marketers need to map out the social network of the target audience, which acquires to obtain a set of connection data. Fortunately, it is easy to get as most of the consumers have their own social media accounts, which leave a bunch of useful information for marketers to understand users’ behaviors. However, since social media platforms differentiate from each other, marketers should think about what the focus of the platforms are before they collaborate with the platforms. For instance, good friends tend to communicate via platforms like Whatsapp and WeChat, while business partners are more likely to use some other professional communication tools like Slack. So that may probably make an app like Yelp place its ads on WeChat but make Dropbox promote on Slack.

Obviously, there are dozens of merits of social network analysis. Are there any downsides? As we all known, privacy is one of the most serious issues for collecting user data. Would social network analysis face the same awkwardness? It could, but I am optimistic about that. Generally, big data is up for improving human’s quality of life. Now lots of people are willing to provide their personal information to make that happen. Looking at the trend of the rapidly increasing usage of social media, we know that individuals need social network indeed. Moreover, cookies have been already used for marketing and advertising for a couple years. Privacy issues have been recognized important but not fatal to settle out by the public. More importantly, marketers do not have to look through every consumer to ensure that their strategies work, which means only if they got above average amount of data sets that have been approved to use by the users, marketing campaigns would still succeed via social network analysis. Meanwhile, there is something tricky that should be noticed here: it is the social media platforms who often sell the user data but not the product providers, so that the marketers from provider’s companies do have less risks at terms of offending consumers’ privacy.

Overall, the upsides of what social network analysis brings are vital enough for marketers to boost their business, while the downsides are not killing its prospect. As technology booming out these years, marketing will go more and more customized and accurate for individuals, which is saying that social network analysis will become much more important than ever and, the next big thing!

SNA to boost ecommerce

Constant development and modernization in technologies synced with the growing globalization has given birth to the E-commerce industry which is constantly following the upward trend. Online shopping has made available the consumers to have a vast number of choices making competition stiff among the businesses. Social media and data have also played a crucial role in assisting businesses garner more attention in order to maximize their profits and build their online presence.

However, one can say there is a lot of untapped potential that can help a business gain a competitive advantage over others and even utilize it as a breakthrough innovation that could take this entire ecommerce industry to a different level. Privacy and security issues usually prevent companies from using this data that could lead to this hidden potential being unleashed.

The biggest challenge that does lie causing the prohibiting of the use of data is that its misuse could lead to larger issues especially instances where personal information of people is made available to everyone. Considering the scenario if all of this data was actually made available without these restrictions, it would definitely benefit the ecommerce industry largely and would lead path to more advancements in the industry.

For instance, Social Network Analysis could prove to be beneficial especially for ecommerce companies assisting them in increasing their sales. Assuming that all of the data was available to the companies, one could track the the time spent by a customer on a certain page, the items he/ she clicked that displays his interest and finally in the end what was his final purchase. This would help the company know their customers better by studying their behavior patterns so that the next time they visit the website they could automatically recommend the items they would be interested in. However, one could argue, this data alone can’t be verified with because many a times, people could use names of different people i.e. a father could be buying something for his son and hence in such instances relying on this data alone would be inappropriate. This problem could be tackled by tapping in the data available from the various social media websites where one could find the information of the customers which shop from these businesses. The data from these two sources could then be combined and verified together in order to gain more customers, improve customer retention, customer loyalty. Adding to this, the use of social media could also help tap into the data of the connections the customer would have and hence assisting the companies to study their behavior as well in an attempt of making them impulse purchasers as well.

Concluding, one could definitely see the benefits the businesses could have if the data made available to them was used appropriately and SNA will play a crucial role in helping these companies achieve success.

Yatish Shrimali 

MOD-D - SNO Student, Hult