Customer network value

In marketing area, customer has a life time value. This value could measure one customer's potential consuming ability, which means the profit could obtained form this customer. Now, as social network developing, customer all have network value, which a new part of customer value.

Network value is a value to measure one customer influence on other customers. To obtain this value, the most common way is data mining.

In the figure below, it show the social network connect by iPhone  Different colors represent models of i Phones.  The meat of this figure is that more and more people have been connected into social network

So, using social network to sell product or do market survey could be a new and effective way of marketing. The First step is find the customer with highest network value, and the method is data mining.

To perform data mining  data collection is necessary. Usually, companies have their own social network pages. Such as, Fractal Design a computer case manufacturer has Facebook page and twitter account. Their customer could connect to their pages as fans or followers, and they the customer information is fetched by sellers. Then, they could find customers:
   Have many connections,
   Always talk about their products

Customer with these features are most like leaders of customers. Companies could focus on these kind of customer more. For instance, they find a customer always review their computer cases on his Facebook pages and use it to build systems, they could send some new and free products to him, then he could becomes a node of advertisement on the social network.


Ref: http://predictive-marketing.com/index.php/tag/social-network-analysis/