As I am sitting in Marc Smith’s social media network analysis workshop, I had a few aha-moments. One of them was his Twitter network of the Gates Foundation’s network on Twitter (see figure from Marc’s Flickr account below).
This connects nicely with the GHAPP project I am working on to understand how successful different topic networks in the global public health community are. Gates plays a huge role – depending on their funding decisions, organizations decide what they focus their work.
What the network shows is that Gates serves as a broadcaster (see the star network on the left side around Gates Twitter account), but does not help to encourage the community to actively connect with each other. Ties are not reciprocated and there are very little interactions among the overall community.
Contrast with this map of the connections among Twitter users who tweeted “RWJF”:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/6671466153/
None of them seems to have made it as a brand network and both look like broadcasting networks.
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