Fuzzy Social Network Modeling for Influencing Consumer Behavior

Social networks have become an important component in most companies' bag of tools for managing and influencing consumer behavior. It is imperative for modern organizations to fully understand these social networks and have at their disposal an armada of tools to intelligently model and manipulate these complex structures in order to accomplish their goals. In order to most effectively and intelligently use social networks, decision makers and planners must be able to bring to bear their expertise, experience, and professional intuition on issues involving these networks. This requires an understanding, comprehension, and view of social networks that is compatible with their human cognition and perception. They must be able to understand the structure and dynamics of social networks in terms of human-focused concepts. In this chapter, the authors investigate and describe the use of the FISNA technology to help in the modeling of consumer behavior-related concepts in social networks.