In one of my previous posts, I introduced the idea of customer connectivity in the context of archetypical roles that Malcolm Gladwell describes in his book “The Tipping Point,” namely the connector, the maven and the salesman. And last time I introduced some concepts associated with the graph abstraction for representing relationships among a community of actors. Customer connectivity, as reflected in the many different types of actors and relationships, can be modeled as a social network graph.

Our conceptual roles map to critical positions within that social network capturing the different types of customer connections, and we can consider what the topology of the different types of connections in a customer connectivity graph would look like:

• The connector is an individual who knows many others and is willing to make introductions among that community. In the connectivity graph, this customer will have both incoming and outgoing connections to many others, and there will be connections between pairs of customers that he/she is connected to.
• The maven is an individual with special knowledge who is interested in sharing that information. This kind of person is approached by many for advice, and will have many incoming connections that demonstrate the desire for information.
• The salesman has skills of both persuasion and negotiation, and may be positioned in the connectivity graph in a pivotal point that separates, yet bridges two communities.

There are many other potential roles that can be represented in the connectivity graph, and we can characterize how each role is defined in relation to some basic properties, such as the distance between any two actors in a network, the degree (or the number of edges attached to each actor), “betweenness” (that measures how an actor lies on the critical path between other actors), as well as numerous other properties. Each contributes to a determination of how much influence any individual actor exerts within the environment, and each of the roles I described exerts different types of influence among the communities that surround them. In other words, each can be depended on to communicate messages in different ways across their sphere of influence, and we will explore that in my next blog post.