I spoke at the eComm 2010 conference on April 20, 2010, talking about:

Mapping mobile social networks with NodeXL: finding key users, groups, and locations

The video is now available:

The video reviews the creation of maps like this:

That illustrate the connections among people who tweet the term “#ecomm2010”, scaled by the number of followers.

Abstract: Social network analysis (SNA) is a powerful method for gaining insight into the massive collections of connections created when many people connect to one another through mobile devices. SNA has been widely applied to desktop social media and is moving into the mobile world. Prominent studies of the “call graph” have been produced at national scales.

Mobile providers are applying SNA to identify key subscribers who can reduce churn and help gain adoption of new services and products. Network analysis has historically had a steep learning curve, but now new tools are making SNA easier for less technical users. This talk will describe social network concepts and their application to mobile data sets. A free and open add-in for the popular Excel 2007 spreadsheet called NodeXL (http://www.codeplex.com/nodexl) can perform many complex SNA tasks like data import, scrubbing, metrics calculation, clustering, and visualization. Applying this tool to call graph and subscriber data sets can reveal key positions in the network that can attract and hold other subscribers in the system.

Examples of network analysis of social media and mobile data sets can be found on the Connected Action blog (http://www.connectedaction.net).