Social Network Analysis in Telecommunications

CHAPTER 3

Theoretical Foundation

Chapter 2 presented a brief theoretical foundation about social network analysis, including concepts about nodes, relations, network structures, types and levels of analyses, scales of measurements, and finally a rough explanation of network analysis on a statistical basis.

The theoretical foundation is quite important in order to understand network structure and the measurements related to it. It is also important to visualize the entire network in terms of the business, such as marketing, sales, finance, and optimization. The concepts of social network analysis describe characteristics of nodes and links, which are important in business applications. Mr. Ken King wrote the foreword for this book, which describes the amazing story of Paul Revere. This story reveals how important some particular nodes inside the social network are. The type of links and the kind of nodes reveal much about the entire social network, how it behaves, and the implications of some events inside it.

William Dawes and Paul Revere performed basically the same kind of tasks, spreading some particular message. However, the outcomes of their actions were completely different. As an influential node inside the social network, Paul Revere broadcast his message more effectively than William Dawes. Also, the links used by Paul Revere were better chosen than the ones chosen by William Dawes. Revere selected the militia in order to start the diffusion of the message instead of knocking ...