Good social media graphics
By Molly FlattIt’s Friday, the sun is blazing, and I don’t know about you but I’m only just about up to looking at some pretty pictures. Thankfully, some natty new social media visualisations are doing the rounds. First is the rather beautiful Twitterverse map, created by Brian Solis and Jesse Thomas, which ‘visually charts the important tools to help communications, service, marketing, and community professionals more effectively navigate, engage, analyze and measure participation on Twitter’ - see the supersized version here.
Then there’s the slick Virgin Eye, Virgin’s new tool for visualising mentions of their brands from more than 5,000 sources on the web. And Bytelevel’s URL world map, with each country represented by their scale-appropriate TLD (top level domain) code. Finally, in his characteristically lucid report for Forrester on the future of the social web (read more about it on his blog here), Jeremiah Owyang has produced a great diagram showing the five eras of the social web.
But you don’t need to get too technological or artistic about this. One very interesting exercise can be to create a simple map of your own social media presence, or that of your brand. When you can clearly visualise exactly how your content gets consumed and spread, and how you build your relationships, you start to get a sense of how your reputation and conversation germinates and escalates in the space. Get the crayons out.
