Social Networking Within The Organization

Broomfield Colorado based engineering firm MWH is profiled in The Wall Street Journal on its use of Social networking to map out the relationship between employees.

To boost productivity at engineering firm MWH, executive Victor Gulas asks employees which colleagues they talk to, and whom they turn to for help. Then he draws a "map" of the connections, which reveals dark patches around employees who work closely with others and lighter areas where there's little interaction.

Mr. Gulas says the map shows communication gaps, information bottlenecks and underutilized employees. "It's making the invisible visible," he says.

I wonder if the density of connections alone indicate the state of the social map and the informal network with the organization. The questions I have with these social maps are

1. Do these maps indicate direction of information flow?
2. Is the information flow even in both direction?
   
3. Are the links graded based on frequencies of interactions?

Targeting the Right Segment for Boulder Net

In one of my previous post I analyzed the membership information of Colorado related groups in LinkedIn. I defined the the total addressable market for Boulder Net group as professionals within LinkedIn who work within 50 mile radius of Boulder. The top ranked group has less than 1% of membership. One way to increase Boulder Net's membership could be to target these members of top ranked groups but the most the Boulder Net group can achieve is to be the same as those. Besides what is the unique value add from this group if the people in this group are already in another Colorado group.

The right approach I believe is to target the rest of the market, those who are not in any of the groups, which is about 94% of the market. That is the target segment. If this is the only group that has members who cannot be found in other groups, then that is an attractive value proposition for other members to join this group. In addition this group has a popular blog and significant web search engine presence. But I am looking for more ideas to improve the value add to the members. Please send your ideas to my email or post as comment.

The Next Milestone 400 Members

The Boulder Net LinkedIn group has now reached 400 members milestone. Join the group to collaborate with professionals who are local to you. If you are thinking of relocating to Boulder, network now with local professionals to ease your move.

Google Trends For Searches on Colorado

If you should do a Google search for either "Boulder Network" or "Boulder Networking", the links related to the Boulder Professionals Network group will show up in the first two pages of the search results. But does that really matter? How often do people search for these terms?
To do a comparitive analysis I used Google Trends to see the relative search volume of "Boulder Network" and compare it to other relevant searches.  To get some perspective I use "Denver Broncos" as the reference (as I expect this search to be more prevalent and more popular).  Here is the Google trend:

As you can see from the results, "Colorado Jobs" is the highest ranked search term after the most popular "Denver Broncos", with "Boulder Jobs" ranked distant third with one sixteenth of the search volume of "Denver Broncos".  Search volume for "Colorado Network" registered same volume as "Boulder Jobs".

I can safely state that search for Jobs is ranked higher than just "networking" or "social networking" specific to Colorado or Boulder. So coming up first in the Google search results mean very little if the search volume is negligible.  If I want to have a bigger impact with the pages, they should come up top for search phrase, "Colorado Jobs".

Interestingly, the search volume for "colorado relocating" is negligible, however, "Colorado Real estate" comes up comparable to "Colorado Jobs" and "Denver Broncos". If I were to use "Paris Hilton" as reference, the previously popular "Denver Broncos" is now just 1/13th of  Paris.