Bank of America at WEF16

On first day of World Economic Forum in Davos 2016 we collected over 110 thousand Tweets with content relating to ‘wef’ of ‘davos’ including popular hashtags and phrases.

Here is a network ‘map’ visualising the traffic and conversation on that day.

Here is a table of the Top 20 Influencers overall on Day One.

Bank of America News is 16 in the list which at face value seems like an impressive achievement for a commercial Bank. The other members of the top 20 are the organisers, news, consulting organisations etc that you would expect to find performing well at the WEF.

Let’s take a deeper look at the Bank of America News performance.

Firstly the @BofA_News account has a very high Page Rank measure. This is indicated in the size of the node on the Map.

The lines on the map represent the connections between Users — ReTweets and Mentions.

Page Rank is a measure of the importance of a Node in relation to the importance of the Nodes to which it is connected and the Nodes to which they are connected and so on.

To illustrate that here are the connections that @BofA_News has made.

Compare that to another high profile organisation investing heavily in WEF — Accenture, here is the map of their connections

They look quite similar and indeed both have relatively high Page Ranks. However, here the difference is highlighted.

BofA_News on the left has more important connections than Accenture

Page Rank measures the importance of a Node ‘locally’ that is to say a User on Twitter could have a high Page Rank due to being important in a part of the conversation that is not really part of the main topic.

This can be illustrated by the UK’s Daily Telegraph:

The second thing to note is that the @BofA_News account is positioned centrally in the map. The fact that there is separation from the main body indicates that although generating interest in sub-community they are not generating many connections with the main body.

In order to factor that phenomenon into the measure of overall influence we use a second measure called Betweeness.

Betweenness measures how well connected the Node is overall or how near to all the other Nodes in the network in aggregate.

If the Nodes are sized by Betweeness you can see the effect.

You can see that:

1. BofA_News is still prominent and has a high Betweeness
2. Accenture is reduced in prominence by this measure
3. The Daily Telegraph has very low prominence as measured by Betweeness

So in order to create a ranking of Overall Influence in the Twitter Conversation about the WEF we combine these measures along with an adjustment to factor in the number of followers a User has. This reduces the effect of the Users with very large number of followers — if Obama or DiCaprio Tweet about anything it becomes influential. We want to measure the influence in relation to this conversation rather than just the influence of the User in the wider world.

Anne Finucane

Anne is the Vice Chairman, Global Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer at Bank of America and is Tweeting on WEF issues.

Lets look at her influence.

Firstly from the overall map you can see that Anne has a pretty good Page Rank.

Here are some other high profile women by way of comparison.

Here is the network that Anne created.

This is similar to the BofA_news network as you would expect. Anne does have a different and distinct message which is reflected in the connections.

Anne has direct links with two other influential women who share an interest in gender equality.

Anne’s Tribes

So we can see that the connections that Anne has made reflect shared interests and that it is by that mechanism that communities or Tribes of Users form on Social Networks like Twitter.

Let’s have a close look at the communities that Anne is influencing.

We have identified three influential people who are leading the conversation on Gender Issues on Twitter.

1. Beth_Brooke_EY — Global Vice Chair of Public Policy and sponsor of Diversity and Inclusiveness at EY. #WomenFastForward
2. Ellyn JShook1— CHRO Accenture, Wife, Mother, Daughter, Sister, Aunt, Friend
3. AnneFinnucane-I work for Bank of America as Vice Chairman, Global Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer

The first two in the list are specifically responsible for Gender and Equality Issues as part of their primary roles at large global organisations and Beth BrookeMarciniak in particular has been influential in the conversation at WEF on day one.

Here is an illustration of the Community that Beth has formed.

Anne has participated in the conversation with Beth and joined the community.

When Anne joins she adds her influence into this conversation and helps spread the message.

This is the role of a connector in a Social Network. In this case Anne is not a domain expert in the subject like Beth or Ellyn, however, she is engaging in a conversation about which she has a genuine passion and voice. She is one of the connectors that helps the community spread the message in a powerful way.

Next we will examine the wider application of this type of analysis over the duration of the four days of WEF16.