Social Graphs and their implications from a personal branding perspective…

Although the concept of social graphs is nothing new, I recently became quite intrigued by an application for Facebook called Nexus , which creates a visual representation of your contacts and their relative relationships to one another. You can see mine below or click here to access it.

What I find especially interesting is that there is actually no new information shown, but rather the information is presented in such a manner that it creates an entirely new application with a specific purpose (mash-up). You can instantly decipher who the odd balls are in your network (relative to yourself) by looking at how far off from the centre they are. You can also visually group people by interests and look for 3-d visual linear patterns on the social graph. Naturally, this presents a huge opportunity for marketing research firms that can create effective behavioural models out of all of this.

So how is this different from traditional behavioural marketing research?

How about the fact that 70% of Canadians are on Facebook and spend an average of 20 minutes a day on it. How’s that for participation rate and sample integrity?

This really got me thinking about the whole evolving field of personal branding (or digital presence reputation management as I like to call it). This simple application can instantly paint a picture of an individual from both a personal and professional perspective (assuming of course, that they filled out their Facebook profile accurately).

Now imagine the possibilities if there was a tool like the quickly growing FriendFeed that would amalgamate your online social media behaviour in a visual multi-dimensional way as opposed to simply linear. What I mean is a virtual representation of a single individual formed from their digital presence (scattered throughout the web over years of usage). Anything you create online, no matter how private and secure you think it is, could one day be used to feed into this “assumed model of yourself”.

The big question is “Who will own it?” -especially seeing as how people sign off their rights each time they check the “I agree” check box on social networks, cloud applications, content uploads, etc…

Perhaps it’s time for a “social marketing” campaign to make modern internet users seriously modify their behaviours. Based on reactions I see at my workshops, there is little indication that people are aware of the potential future implications of their online actions. Especially considering the fact that my workshop audience is usually made up of communications or marketing people (the ones you would think would be aware of all of this).

Even just looking at it from the perspective of employment , the one-way fluffy, drum-beating resume is no match for an unbiased social representation of an individual accumulated over many years. And what about the employers themselves? Would they not have to be monitoring their own personal brands even more so than their potential employees/shareholders to avoid embarrassment? Lots to ponder about for a Friday! I’ll leave you all with that and eagerly await your comments…

Cheers,

MK