The Rise of Social Graphs for Businesses
hbr.org/2015/02/the-rise-of-social-graphs-for-businesses
From the page
Saved with the link. Notes from 2007 to 2016 are mostly the page's own words, so this is probably an excerpt.
Thus we see the various software providers that already provide the tools to manage business interactions (like procurement and invoicing) moving rapidly to capitalize on this opportunity. Companies like TradeShift, Procurify and SPS Commerce already capture interaction data through their workflow management tools. Much like Facebook, they are recognizing that the software is not the end product, and instead seeing it as a means for acquiring the data to produce valuable commercial graphs.