1. Digital Shoreditch
Tuesday 29th May 2012
Using Social Graphs to
Personalize User Experience
Alpesh Doshi, Fintricity

2. What is a Social Graph?
The definitions of these set the foundation of a network of social
objects a foundation for a new business approach
The social graph is a term coined by scientists
working in the social areas of graph theory. It has
been described as "the global mapping of everybody
and how they're related". The term was popularized
at the Facebook
You can also add more detail on how devices,
experiences and behaviours are relate to those
people

3. What is a Social Graph?
A Social graph can be extremely complex and models relationships
between – either inside or outside the enteprise – OR both!

4. What could you capture on a Social Graph?
Capturing more than just a relationship can make a graph more useful
Demographics Interests Actions
Age, Gender, Profile-Based, Contextual, Creating, Rating, Sending,
Geography, HHI, Demonstrated, Undeclared Sharing, Uploading,
Level of Education, Watching, and more
List of friends,
Friends of Friends
Recency and Frequency Interaction Sentiment and Exposure
How often and when How people interact with What people say, what
people express interests content and ads: Clicks, time they read, and when and
or actions spent, interactions, videos how they say and read it
completed

5. What is a Social Graph?
People, connected. Or further, ‘social objects’ connected.
• People are connected to each other directly and indirectly.
• The way they are connected varies. It could be through
work, friendship, common interests, etc.
• More importantly, there is something common between
the people that are connected. An implicity or explicity
connection
• Connections are spread across the social web – not only on
one site or application

6. Where can you use Graphs?
How can you apply social graphs, and social network analysis for business
benefit? Some examples
• Recommendation Engines
• Interest Graphs
• Influence Networks (think Klout)
• Sentiment Analysis (beyond Radian6 etc)

7. Where can you use Graphs? Recommendation.
Recommendation engines are a natural fit for graphs.
• Recommendation engines need a ‘boost’ –
and can apply to many different types of
recommendation
• Recommend to read articles/content
• Recommend collaborators
• Recommend sites to post content
• Recommend people with similar interests

8. Where can you use Graphs? Recommendation
Recommendation engines are a natural fit for graphs.
• Interest Graphs (with Linked Data)
• Represents your interests
• Represents your interest in relation to others(social graph)
• Graphs can weaken/strengthen your interests dependent on behaviours
• Recommend people with similar interests

9. Where can you use Graphs? Influence
Social Media is driving the use of influence – PR Agencies, enterprise have
to now can understand influence in detail
• First generation influence tools have shown that
there is a demand (e.g. peer index, klout)
• Useful only in content (e.g. Oil/Gas, Entertainment)
• A sub-set of a Social graph
• Influence drives
many things
recommendation,
opinion, purchasing

10. Questions?
Alpesh Doshi, Fintricity
e: alpesh.doshi@fintricity.com
o: +44 870 020 1656, m: +44 7973 822820
Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/alpeshdoshi
Twitter: @alpeshdoshi
Content from this presentation taken from Giorgos Cheliotis under Creative Commons