Page 64 - Social Media Marketing

chapter 2: THE NEW ROLE OF THE CUSTOMER ■ Figure 2.3 BuzzStream and the Social Graph

42 At the heart of tools like BuzzStream is the social graph, a map of who is con-
nected to whom. Social influence and Social CRM tools work by “crawling” the
personal and profile links in your online conversations to find information about the
source of the conversation in much the same way as a searchbot crawls page links to
find related or supporting content. Starting with a comment or a blog post, BuzzStream
looks for a reference to a website or email or Twitter handle that may be present in or
near that post. As it finds contact information, the social graph crawler will organize
and return potential or contact points.
As these contact points are discovered, a list of potential links and identities
are grouped together and presented through the dashboard. As a human (Yes, we are
still needed!) you can review this information and pick out the bits that actually seem
related. Then, click a button and create your influencer contact. A typical contact may
have a profile name, a Twitter handle, and perhaps an email address or phone number.
Over time you’ll add to it, as your actual relationships with these influencers develop.
Once created, any tweets, emails, or similar will be logged, just as with a traditional
CRM system. You can then build and manage your relationship with these influencers
just as you would any other contacts.

Google’s Social Graph API

Google publishes an API—a way to access existing functionality within Google’s open code-
base—that supports the development of applications that can crawl the public pages on social
sites and present the related links, providing the social graph of a specific person. Check it out:
Even if you’re not a programmer understanding what it is and how it works is useful.

http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/