Enterprise social network analysis and modeling: A tale of two graphs

Like their public counterpart such as Facebook and Twitter, enterprise social networks are poised to revolutionize how people interact in the workplace. There is a pressing need to understand how people are using these social networks. Unlike the public social networks like Facebook or Twitter which are normally characterized using the social graph or the interaction graph, enterprise social networks are also governed by an organization graph. Based on a six month dataset collected from May through October 2011 of a large enterprise social network, we study the characteristics of activities of its enterprise social network. We observe that the user attributes in the organization graph such as geographic location (eg. country) and his/her rank in the company hierarchy have a significant impact on how the user uses the social network and how user interacts with each other. We then build formal statistical models of user interaction graphs in enterprise social network and quantify effects of user attributes from organization graphs on these interactions. Furthermore, as the enterprise social network medium bring users from diverse locations and social status forming ad-hoc communities, our statistical model can be further enhanced by including these ad-hoc communities.