smartRealm, the start-up CEO’d by MapQuest co-founder Barry Glick, expects soon to have a new release of its social network analysis API that considers sentiment expressed in blogs and tweets.

The company, which we first discussed here, unveiled the initial version of the API this spring. The API gives developers web service access to smartRealm SNAP (Social Network Authority and Prestige) scores, which summarize a person’s position and influence within his or her social networks. smartRealm says this allows for a standardized ranking and segmentation of individuals across a variety of networks, so that organizations can target those most likely to be receptive to outreach and most likely to influence others, and then build applications in the cloud that help them better leverage their social media marketing efforts. So it makes sense that the upcoming sentiment-infused API release will consider not only what is being said but also who says it, according to relationships in the network.

The SNAP score delivered via the existing API, says co-founder and executive vp Dr. Yasr Bishr, is a compendium of eight different components, including authority, footprint and information diffusion speed. Bishr points out that it’s important not only to build the graphs of connections but to monitor them – it isn’t enough simply to know, for example, that someone has 500 connections in a social space. “If that person doesn’t really communicate with his network in the last month, he isn’t an influencer,” Bishr says. “But that guy with one connection may have huge traffic and impact, and he is the real influencer.”

The SNAP client uses SocialML, the vendor’s ontology for providing a standard way to represent social networks using RDF. It relies heavily on XML, XML Namespaces, RDF, and OWL, including a SocialML Core module for classes and properties that allow descriptions of social network structures, and a Social ML Metrics module that contains classes and properties to describe social network metrics used for Social Network Analysis. smartRealm says the specification, under the Creative Commons license, contributes an ontology to the Semantic Web, though it hasn’t put it in front of the W3C yet.

The Semantic Web is needed in a world where users are fragmented everywhere, and so are companies that are following their customers. “The only way to efficiently gain actionable information from these fragmented social networks is by adopting the Semantic Web,” Bishr says. “How can you reconcile all this without having a web framework of data, and only the Semantic Web can provide this right now.”

The company launched an early adopter program shortly after its API first debuted, in conjunction with businesses that have good presences on social networks, Bishr says. One of the things that has been intriguing for them, Bishr says, is understanding the second degrees of influence around their own tweets or Facebook proclamations of efforts, such as new marketing initiatives or sales campaigns. In smartRealm’s work with some of them, it’s been able to point to how targeting just a couple of individuals or friends or fans of their own social networks can actually extend their message reach to thousands more through those second degree connections – the friends and followers of their own friends and followers.

That raises one interesting question: How to respond to the greater insight companies can gain into their most influential followers, and those followers’ feelings about them. Everyone recalls the recent Mommy blogger hoopla, where criticism heaped up around these bloggers for accepting giveaways in exchange for word of mouth on their sites, usually without disclosing the benefits received. Higher SNAP scorers could find themselves the recipients of various perks from companies that consider them to be valuable influencers, Bishr acknowledges – but how to walk that line without compromising integrity will be a critical issue. “There is exploration now even in marketng companies to devise solutions that would approach this in a clever way,” he says. “It’s a new world, uncharted water in my opinion and it’s a big issue. But if you think about it in terms of just setting up a program for people with high influence levels on a network to give them more perks, it’s not very different from being a Gold member at Hilton.”

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