Social networks and value networks

Networks can be incredibly “positive structures”, but understanding them requires thinking about both social networks and value networks. These two similar but distinct concepts are rarely brought together (an exception is Verna Allee’s work) but they should be. And after they have been brought together conceptually, tools can be implemented in social networks to improve the performance of those networks as value networks.

Social networks are graphs that document relationships between people. Here’s an example.

Social network analysts can mathematically describe the structure of a social network. Researchers have discovered fascinating elements of social networks, such as the “weak ties” made famous in Mark Granoveter’s “The Strength of Weak Ties; he found that for some purposes (like finding a new job) the important links are the ones where your ties exist but are weak – because those are people who move in a different crowd than you do. Or Ron Burt has talked about structural holes – the places where someone can intervene to bring two separate parts of a social network together, such as someone connecting two departments in a company. While social networks can map any kind of relationship between people they are often used to just map the relationship “X knows Y.”

Value networks describe the relationships between people (and/or organizations) in terms of the tangible or intangible value they provide to each other. So here’s the same social network, with arrows indicating the flow of tangible or intangible value. Tangible value might be an order or a payment, and intangible value might include things like information, reputation enhancement, or social support. In most value network drawings, the magnitude of the flow is not specified and the sign is presumed to be positive. However, the magnitudes could certainly vary and the sign could be negative, e.g., when I provide feedback on your reputation it could be negative. 

 

For a value network to be sustainable, each node must be happy enough with their position in the network. Informally, this means, at a minimum, that they would have to get more from the network than they give. Here’s our network above with some indicators of who is happy and who isn’t.

 

In many online communities, there’s one more source of value. And that is the “community as a whole”. For example, if a Q&A board exists, then Sue gets value from Rafael if Sue posts a question and Rafael answers. But if the answers are accessible to everyone, then everyone else gets value too as a byproduct of their bilateral action.. So we can illustrate this by adding the red arrows on the chart.

 
In my next post I’ll look at how we might track the values of what’s happening in a value network and intervene to help keep the network going.

Comments

[Verna Allee]

Hi David, Thoughtful posting - I look forward to the next. Just as a note, we do combine SNA and VNA very effectively and our application, Value Network Insights works very well for both. An example is here http://valuenetworks.com/public/item/252635 where we model the same activity first with the role-based value network and then as a collaborative value network, showing the people who are actually executing the roles. This provides a way to understand exactly who in the value network is participating and receiving value (or not). The perceived value feature where people indicate the level of value received is also a very popular feature.

Regards,
Verna Allee

[David Friedman]

Verna -
You've definitely done a lot of work on measuring the value in networks, and have a lot of interesting metrics. I'm wondering if you've ever applied (or seen anyone apply) your measurement approaches to someone's social network. Most of the value would be intangible I suspect -- but maybe not all.

David

[Timberland Store]

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