As more and more web 2.0 tools pop into being, the social graph grows. I have ‘connections’ on LinkedIn. Followers on Twitter. Friends on Facebook. Addresses in my mailbox. Subscribers on FriendFeed.
My list is long, but you get the point. There’s an inter-connectivity on the social web between tools and people that is graph-able. This is how Google sees it:
This is how google sees the social graph
The letters represent the tools I just mentioned. The pictures represent people. But they could just as well represent brands. Because people connect to brands. They take pictures of them and put them on Flickr. They shoot video using them and add it to YouTube. They blog about them. They twitter about them.
These are tools that would fit in the social graph.
If you followed the link to the Google page, you’ll note that it’s in the code section. Google is giving away the code to let developers (and brands) take advantage of the social graph. Wired.com has a feature called the Celebrity Meter that uses the Google code to determine Internet celebrity based on connectivity.
That’s one usage.
But certainly there’s some other things that smart marketers could do with this data. Again, this is what Google says:
“This index of connections enables developers to build many applications including the ability to help users connect to their public friends more easily.”
If the term ‘your best customers‘ could be substituted with ‘friends’, then the potential of helping users (ie brands) connect to their public ‘friends’ is immeasurable. It’s potentially a bot that monitors blogs and updates (saving people from doing it manually).
Or it’s potentially something even more interesting that connects brands to fans even better. I think I’ll talk to some of our programmers today.
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