Personal Research
MIS2502 Bonus Assignment: Social Network Analysis
Social network analysis is the relationship between the incoming traffic of people, organizations, groups, and etc. It looks at what the incoming flow of traffic of people share with each other and how they are related. Social network analysis/analytics tries to analyze big chunks of data from a source and looks for what the similarities and differences are within the traffic and what they work looking for. This is very important to online businesses or platforms, because by analyzing their flow of traffic the business or company can optimize themselves to better suit their flow of traffic. How do they optimize their business to be better suited to their customers? By analyzing their traffic data, they can see what people were searching for on their site/business and the keywords they used. And, by using those keywords they can see if their customers were successful on getting they wanted; however, if they didn’t, then they can add ads to suggest certain products or change their product tags to better suit those keywords.
It is clear that social network analysis is very useful, because it can find the relationship between the flow of traffic. This relationship is very useful for various companies and platforms, because by knowing the relationship they can find out why they are looking for certain products and can help the customer find their product more efficiently. But, to analyze any sources of large data, we need the right tools to organize and compile the data into meaningful data for it to be useful. That is why MIS2502 is very important and closely related to social network analysis, because MIS2502 is all about data analytics. This entire course is about organizing large amounts of data into useful data with a meaning. Then we can use this useful data for many purposes, whether that may be to suggest certain products for specific traffic or optimize a platform to better help their flow of traffic.
One example may be how Walmart organizes their store shelves to optimize product assortment to help customers get what they want quicker. According to Walmart, “Through analysis of customer preferences and shopping patterns, Walmart can accelerate decision-making on how to stock store shelves” (Walmart Today). As shown, this is just one example of a big corporate, but by analyzing large data through data analytics/social network analytics, we can turn these meaningless data into useful data for many purposes.
Work Cited:
“5 Ways Walmart Uses Big Data to Help Customers.” Walmart Today, Walmart Inc., 7 Aug. 2017, blog.walmart.com/innovation/20170807/5-ways-walmart-uses-big-data-to-help-customers.
“Social Network Analysis: An Introduction.” Social Network Analysis: An Introduction by Orgnet,LLC, www.orgnet.com/sna.html.