One key insight for me is that when analyzing networks we need to describe the connections in detail. It’s not just mapping the nodes, but understanding how they are connected.

If you're doing (almost) anything other than just talking about networks, the above is critical. There are individual people or small groups of people at the nodes, and they each have purpose, objectives, their cognitive styles, sources and destinations for flows of info, etc.

It's critical. Anything else is pretty much guesswork or intuition / past experience using patterns and rules. (from case studies ?).