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New maps of influence - 10 visualisations of the social graph

[Prologue: After a colourful intermezzo moving my family from New York to Germany [in German only, sorry!], I’m back in the game with a long post!]

Driven by waves of change in society, technology and business, new publics are emerging and forming new spheres of influence in the world of online relationships. Corporate communicators have to map this space out, so as to identify potential issues and influencers. Since the traditional means of media resonance analysis doesn’t reach into this world of direct communications, new maps of influence have to be created.

Social cartographers are now trying to visualise the relationships between people as they manifest themselves online. They are writing a new chapter in the analysis of social networks. While this discipline has been around since the 1930ies, I think there are three aspects that make today’s social network analysis unique:

  1. Wealth of data: There is more data available than ever, since hundreds of millions of people are organising their social networks online.
  2. Networks analysing themselves: Social networks are evolving as self-referential systems with participants indicating what they are interested in, so that peers can connect with them. A growing number of easy-to-use technologies also makes it easier for participants to become their own network analysts. The Rolodex is evolving into a cockpit of network intelligence.
  3. Mashups: People and content can be mashed up in myriads of ways offering a multitude of insights into people’s social life.

Let’s take a look at a couple of examples of how relationships in social networks are being analysed and visualised today. I believe that these social graphs ultimately will change the way we work, organise our knowledge and measure influence, simply because they are an effective way to navigate through the exploding amounts of content we produce and because they help us to connect with the people we share an interest with.

Flickr tags - June 2008 An easy way to visualise social data that has become pretty popular among social media users is the tag cloud. Tags are keywords users assign to content on web sites. Usually they are listed alphabetically with the font size representing the frequency of their use. E.g. on the left you can see the “tag cloud” of Flickr, the photo sharing and community site. It gives an idea of the most popular targets millions of people had when shooting photos, but it also connects to the people who took them. Each tag is a hyperlink that leads to the content tagged and the people who used the tags and created the content.

Gustavo G, a power user of Flickr, created the “Flickrverse”, a depiction of the relationships between the photostreams and the photographers on Flickr. It illustrates that there are clusters of influence in this community. Some users not only create large amounts of content, they also influence others by stimulating discussion groups, blogging, linking and commenting. Imagine you had this kind of atlas for your global communications team! With this knowledge on content people produce and the network they have, it should be much easier for them to to collaborate. That’s what IBM had in mind when they created their Atlas application. It enables employees to map out their professionel network within their organisation (story via Technology Review). E.g. there is a component shown in the screenshot on the left that visualises how closely someone works with others, both in terms of content and geography. The closer you are to the person at the centre of the circle, the more you communicate with her. Atlas will help to find colleagues and content relevant to your work. It seems like a great tool to collaborate within a business, but it does have the limitation that it only works with data from IBM’s own social software platform Lotus Connections. While social networks within a business will always need some degree of exclusivity, most public networks thrive on openness between separate layers of data that users can combine freely to create something new. Google Maps is one of the most prolific applications users mash up with other data sources in creative ways. For instance, I played with a tool called Wohnungskarte when moving to Düsseldorf, one of the many applications you can find combining geography and housing information. One of the most intriguing Google mashups I’m aware of is outside.in, a site tracking news, views and conversations in your neighbourhood. It allows you to zoom into the social life around you. Local news and interactions on social media are being bundled into one stream of social information that users can filter from a city level downwards. E.g. you can look at the river of news for New York City in total and then break it down by the five Burroughs Manhattan, Bronx, Brooklyn, Staten Island and Queens. Finally, you can look into specific neighbourhoods within the Burroughs, say the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Of course, the information will only be as good as the participation in the particular neighbourhood, but in many cases it provides an interesting micro-map of the social life in a particular area. The information is cut in different ways, so that you can follow your interest. You can check on categories such as arts and culture, education, real estate, public spaces or shopping, complete with links to pictures on Flickr. Or you can look up specific places and see how often they have been mentioned in recent stories or conversations. Consider the value of this information for new residents, local politicians or businesses trying to track the interests of residents.

Another example for the power of mashups is Facebook. Since this social network opened its Application Programming Interface (API) to external software developers, the number of free applications for Facebook literally exploded, some of them empowering its users to do their own network analysis. For instance, the image on the left shows my social graph on Facebook. I created it with an application called Nexus. It not only illustrates the connections between the friends I have on this network, it also provides information on the interests they share. When clicking on one of the nodes of my network, I can see the name of the respective person, her photo, the names of her friends in my network and commonalities she has with these people, e.g. membership in groups or common interests as stated in their personal profiles.

While it is manageable to analyse a small network like mine on Facebook, stronger tools are needed to crunch a huge network like the blogosphere in its entirety which also doesn’t live on only one platform like Facebook. Matthew Hurst, a scientist at Microsoft’s Life Labs and co-creator of the blog search engine Blogpulse, used data from Blogpulse to visualise hyperlinks between blogs (story via Technology Review). His images show that there are a few thousand blogs clustered at the centre of the blogosphere linking to each other and to many other sites at the edge. Further analysing this central cluster he found two sub-clusters, one focused on politics, the other focused on technology. They can be seen on the image here, with political blogs sitting on its left half, technology blogs on its right. The colour pink around influential political blogs indicates that they are connected to their surroundings by links going both ways, a habit that is obviously not as common in the sphere of technology blogs. Counting links as Matthew Hurst did for blogs is certainly a good way to create a helicopter view of influence clusters in the blogosphere. Linking to someone else’s blog is an act of interest saying “I want to be in the loop whenever this person has new content”. However, that doesn’t say much about the quality of the relationship when the number of links is very high. Some blogs have thousands of inbound links, some people have even hundreds of thousands of “friends” on social networks. To further qualify the relationships in a social network, MIT Media Lab researchers Dietmar Offenhuber and Judith Donath started to monitor the flow of comments between members of a social network (story via Technology Review). Rather than simply depicting links between sites, they visualise where people leave comments and how often, i.e. activity in the network that goes beyond reading updates. I believe this kind of analysis is very valuable. It reveals another layer of influence in social media: While social media is more democratic than traditional media, since potentially everyone with Internet access can raise her voice, the share of those who not only watch but actually create content is lower than you might expect. E.g. only about 1 % of Wikipedia users are writing articles. Given the huge popularity of Wikipedia this number is still in the tens of thousands, many more contributors than any traditional encyclopaedia ever had, but many less than the millions of Wikipedia readers. Similarly, stories are making careers on rating portals like Digg. Web developer Brian Shaler has created a graph that sheds some light on this. There are people who are much more active on Digg than others. The bright orange spots on Brian’s “heat map” represent those Diggers who have a lot of fans or friends. So, whenever they are rating a story it’s likely many other will, too. The oldest Digg accounts are located in the centre of the map, the youngest at the edge. Interestingly, many of the hottest spots are sitting in the centre, too, so it took some time for them to build their community. The interactive map also allows to search for specific Digg users and displays their spot on the map.

Visualising the social graph is based on data mining, i.e. filtering out relevant information by putting data points into a context that creates relevance. In the examples above we have seen how relevance is created by clustering and matching content and people. However, all of these approaches rely on pretty simple and isolated data points such as keywords and links. As we have seen, these data can create a lot of insight, but what you don’t get is the opinion of participants. You might know that they are interested in a particular topic, but not how they think about it. In other words, statements like “I love company A” and “I hate company A” were being picked up the same way. If you wanted to find out about participants’ opinion you needed to read their content. As a result, the next frontier of mapping influence within the social graph is opinion mining rather than data mining. Interone has made a big leap in this direction (full disclosure: Interone is a BBDO company, as is my employer Pleon). While their opinion mining tool still involves a degree of human analytics, their software can crunch through vast amounts of data, mining opinions in a far more sophisticated way than the “positive - neutral - negative” ratings we know from media monitoring. They can map people’s opinions against dozens of attributes and compare brands within that context. They even can do this in different languages! It’s a big tool that is made for big tasks, so you might not use it to analyse smaller networks, but it is powerful stuff for sure.

Finally, a software framework called Commetrix is also worth mentioning. It is being developed by a group of German researchers lead by Matthias Trier in Berlin. Other than all the other network analysis tools I know Commetrix allows for “dynamic network mapping” which means that you can observe network changes over time. Commetrix visualises the career of issues and influencers within a network by animated social graphs which is pretty impressive to watch. I believe the potential applications for a tool like this are mind-blowing. It could become a new way to write history. In fact, they kind of do that already. As you will see in the video below, they analysed e-mails of Enron, so that you can see how people within this organisation picked up specific topics and spread them around. It’s like an archaeology of influence in the Internet age! Imagine you could do something like this with the social networks relevant to your organisation. You could visualise and measure influence in real time. It certainly all depends on the accessibility and quality of data, though.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

I’m well aware that this post is neither scientific nor exhaustive, but I hope it has at least provided an educated anecdotal view on the new maps of influence we need to be aware of as communicators. While all of this is pretty exciting, some of the pragmatists amongst you will rightfully ask: what can we do with it now? Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. In some cases free tools will be sufficient to shed some light on an area that is of particular interest to your business. In other cases you might have to use commercial software, or the ideal tool for your challenge simply doesn’t exist. In any case strong analytics and judgment will be needed to create an approach that makes business sense. But I do believe that we have to watch this space and experiment in it, so as to allow for informed decisions on a rapidly growing new sphere of influence for corporate communications.

Since I am still a German, I will end on a note of caution ;-) . Social network analysis is based on tracking human behaviour. As a result, it often includes privacy issues. While people are exposing themselves publicly like never before, they certainly still want their personal information only being used in a manner they agree with. Some power users have already crafted a bill of rights for users of the social web. It’s an early sign for big discussions lying ahead of us. Just think of the controversy on Facebook’s Beacon. But that’s an issue for another post. This one has been long enough.

Some useful links:

Georg Kolb

Posted 22 June 2008 † Georg Kolb § Maps § Research ‡ Comments (4) ° Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Social media as a global phenomenon - recent discoveries

Two years ago, media agency Universal McCann started the most extensive global survey on social media I am aware of. Since then they went through three waves, each time significantly broadening their data base:

Wave 1 - September 2006 - 7,500 Internet users - 15 countries
Wave 2 - June 2007 - 10,000 Internet users - 21 countries
Wave 3 - March 2008 - 17,000 Internet users - 29 countries
Wave 4 - scheduled for late 2008

The 80 page report on wave 3 is downloadable for free.

Here are the highlights of the study as summarised by the authors:

  • Social media is a global phenomenon happening in all markets regardless of wider economic, social and cultural development. If you are online you are using social media
  • Asian markets are leading in terms of participation, creating more content than any other region.
  • All social media platforms have grown significantly over the three Waves
    • Video clips are the quickest growing platform, up from 31 % penetration in Wave 1 to 83 % in Wave 3
  • 57 % have joined a Social Network, making it the number one platform for creating and sharing content
    • 55 % of users have uploaded photos
    • 22 % of users have uploaded videos
  • The widget economy is real
    • 23 % of social network users have installed an application
    • 18 % of bloggers have installed applications in their blog templates
  • Blogs are a mainstream media world-wide and as a collective rival any traditional media
    • 73 % have read a blog
  • The blogosphere is becoming increasingly participatory, now 184 m bloggers world-wide
    • The number one thing to blog about is personal life and family
  • China has the largest blogging community in the world with 42 m bloggers, more than the US and Western Europe combined
  • Social media impacts your brand’s reputation
    • 34 % post opinions about products and brands on their blog
    • 36 % think more positively about companies that have blogs

These findings are truly impressive. However, it’s important to put them into the right context. With 17,000 people surveyed the sample is huge, but it only represents “active Internet users” as defined by Universal McCann: people aged 16-54 who are using the Internet every day or every other day. As a result, when looking at the findings more specifically, two parameters should be considered: 1.) the Internet penetration of the respective markets, 2.) the share of the sample in the overall population aged 16-54. Thankfully both sets of numbers are provided in the report.

Also, while the usage of social media tools went up across the board, it’s interesting to see how the pace of adoption varied between the tools. Watching video clips has passed reading blogs as the most often used tool, even if the speed of it’s growth went down a bit. The latter doesn’t really come as a surprise, since the reach of video clips is now at the high level of 83 %. By contrast, downloading podcasts, creating social network profiles and subscribing to RSS feeds have all significantly accelerated their pace since the last wave, albeit on a much lower level than watching video clips (see graph “Reach over time”).

There are also interesting shifts in the development of some markets. I felt encouraged when looking at the country-by-country results, because the findings confirmed the analysis I presented in the first post on this blog: if we want to understand the development of the new publics in the world of social media, we not only need to consider the underlying technologies, but their interdependency with the economic framework and the socio-political environment. Here are just some anecdotal observations.

For instance, South Korea commands the largest broadband network on the globe, their Internet penetration (70.2 %) is among the highest. There is no doubt that this formidable technology infrastructure helped to make South Koreans the world leading blog readers (92.1 %), blog writers (71.7 %) and keen social networkers (70.3 %). However, technolgy alone doesn’t explain the level of participation in Asian markets. E.g. China’s internet infrastructure is not as developed, with 12.3 % the penetration is among the lowest on the planet, and users are being observed and censored. And yet the Chinese are on rank 3 as blog readers (88.1 %) and writers (70.3 %) and significantly above the global average (58.8 %) as social networkers (64 %). By comparison, the Dutch enjoy the highest internet penetration of all markets surveyed by Universal McCann, but they are below average (70.2 %) as blog readers (67.7 %) and way off as blog writers (27.1 %), then again their participation in social networks (61.4 %) is above the global average (58.8 %). So, there certainly is a correlation between the socio-political environment and the adoption of specific social media patterns. You can’t explain this with technology only.

Another layer of complexity is added by changes of country patterns over time. Just check out my fellow countrymen, the Germans! They used to be notorious blogging laggards, but finally they seem to take the Autobahn. Within less than a year, the share of active Internet users in Germany reading blogs more than tripled (see red circles), the share of German blog writers more than quadrupled (purple circles). No such development can be found in France which used to be the by far leading blogging nation in Europe. As a matter of fact, in terms of blog readership France is now matched by both Italy and Spain, and in terms of blog writers, Spain has taken a 10 % lead over France. Given all these differences and the rapid pace of the development, we need to map things out again and again as we go. It is a new Age of Discovery indeed.

There are many more insights to be found in Universal McCann’s global social media tracker, but I will close with one final observation. People are looking for places where they can unite all the things they are doing on the Internet and share it with their friends. For many users this place is currently their social network. However, social networks will only be able to keep this privileged position, if they become open enough for users to share whatever they created and whereever they created it. Otherwise people will find other places for their social ecosystem. Early adopters are already exploring social aggregators like FriendFeed that allow to present all their own and their friends’ content in one view. More discoveries to be expected!

Georg Kolb

Posted 29 May 2008 † Georg Kolb § New Publics § Research ‡ Comments (1) ° Tagged: , , , ,

A new Age of Discovery (navigation series, post #2)

Today’s new publics create a whole new world of influence pushing corporate communicators into a new Age of Discovery where our traditional instruments of navigation are of limited value. Let’s see why.

Traditionally, corporate communications worked mostly from the inside out. We started with introspection: we thought hard about our brand, what it stood for, what its promises were, and which messages we wanted to convey. Then we pushed the message out to the media, since the media was the best amplifier we could use to reach our target audiences. Working with journalists we tested our message, they challenged us on the news value or credibility of our pitch. But if it resonated with them, we got our message out to our audiences who read, viewed or listened to the media we worked with. Accordingly, measurement was focused on “coverage” reports analysing reach, quantity and message alignment.

While this approach still is important, it just doesn’t work as well with today’s new publics, since mainstream media has lost its monopoly on public information. The new publics are empowered to use many other sources. If our story smells like spin or marketing talk, or if it doesn’t fit exactly what they want, they don’t have to just sit there, listen and be our “target audience”. They have options. They can raise their own voice and connect with others who share their specific interest and who are credible to them, people like themselves.

As a result, the experience of our brand will be less shaped by “key messages” we put in front of anonymous “eye balls”, but by many little conversations between people who share an interest in something that relates to our brand. For instance, they could get involved with a Facebook group of disgruntled employees who give insider reasons for glitches in our product quality. They could read a profile of our brand on Wikipedia that might not be “on message” because we couldn’t control it. They might have an exchange with a blogger who wrote about a bad customer service experience. They might find videos on YouTube showing one of our executives talking off guard while being recorded by a mobile phone. There might be kids on MySpace who laugh about our brand being so totally not cool while we think it’s youthful and fresh. Or there might even be avatars in a virtual world like Second Life redesigning virtual copies of our products for their own purpose. Of course, we might also find that all these people are raving about our brand, because their experiences are consistently thrilling at all touch points. We would want to know that too, wouldn’t we? Whatever they are saying or doing, they are influencing the reputation of our brand. We can’t afford to not know what’s going on there. We need to switch on the light in this black box of new influence, in particular if the brand experiences expressed by people there are not aligned with the “official” messaging.

The fact that the new publics can tap into many sources of information on our brand beyond mainstream media creates a huge pressure for authenticity. If there is a gap between the company speak and the way people experience the brand, they will talk about it and the brand reputation will suffer. In other words, the consistency has to come from the consistency of the brand experience, consistency of our messaging is not enough.

In summary, there is a world of influence emerging at a rapid pace that presents us with a new Age of Discovery where explorers are needed to map it all out. Nobody can have all the answers, since this world is evolving, but those who command map and compass will certainly be better off than those who don’t. By the way, the map I used as background of the chart on the left was created one year ago by the geekily funny physicist and cartoonist Randall Munroe. It is pretty outdated already, though. E.g. it doesn’t incorporate new social networks in microformats like Twitter or new social aggregators like FriendFeed. And today Facebook would have to take a much bigger share on this map. So, how would a compass look like that could help us navigate through this world populated by the new publics? I will try to provide a first answer to this question in my next post.

Georg Kolb

Posted 16 May 2008 † Georg Kolb § Maps § Navigation Series § New Publics ‡ Comments (3) ° Tagged: , ,

Today’s new publics (navigation series, post #1)

Welcome to my Corporate Communications Compass (CCC)!

This first post is not only to inaugurate CCC but also the first article in a little series on how to navigate today’s marketing milieu. The series is mainly based on a presentation I held at Bulldog Reporter’s Media Relations Summit 2008 in San Francisco. Following the presentation I got a lot of great feedback and requests to share more of my approach and continue the discussion. So, here you go!

Today’s marketing and communications environment can look confusing. While the traditional approach with mainstream media is still dominating the daily routines of most marketers and communicators, a myriad of new online media is emerging: blogs, RSS, wikis, social networks, social bookmarking, sharing and rating sites, virtual worlds, you name it! How can we detect and leverage new opportunities for our business, but also avoid wasting resources on dead ends? How can we navigate through this rapidly evolving space?

I tried a couple of navigation systems to see what they can do for our situation.

The first one is a subway map.

It was created by an organization called the Future Exploration Network and is meant to illustrate how trends blend and impact each other. Each subway line represents a major force of change in our lives: yellow is society, purple is politics, pink is demographics, green is economy and red is the technology line. The points where they cross are major interchanges. While I don’t necessarily agree with all the stops they put on these lines, I think they have a strong point here, which is: today’s marketing environment is more connected than ever. Some people think that it is mostly technology that changes communications or even our lives. I disagree. I believe we need to understand all the forces in this milieu, so as to understand the change and make our work successful. Don’t be afraid, I won’t even try to talk through ALL of this now. But what I will do is to address those forces that make the most difference to us. How does this kind of milieu impact what we as communicators should worry about most? How does it affect the people we want to communicate with?

Let’s start with the societal perspective. We are living more individualized lives that are not as regulated by public institutions as they were by previous generations. As a result, people are building trust in new ways. They have less trust in established institutions like governments or brands. Even personal advisers like doctors or lawyers are less trusted. Instead they build increasingly trust with people who share an interest with them: their peers. In summary, we have more confidence in each other than in institutions. Most of us will be able to confirm this anecdotally, but there are also studies from Forrester Research, Yankelovich Partners or Edelman’s annual trust survey that prove this is happening. Let’s look at an example. While our grandparents would have typically followed the advice of their doctor without asking any questions, we not only call for a second opinion, but we also seek someone else who suffers from that same disease before we undergo that surgery.

Aiding this social dynamic are new technologies that actually empower us to connect with our peers in peer-to-peer (p2p) networks. We can use search engines to locate someone else with that same rare disease who lives on the other side of the planet. The same dynamic is true for all aspects of our lives, as well as the products we use. Any group of people who share an interest in what a company does or stands for can easily connect through the internet and share their views by electronic word of mouth. They can do this on a growing number of new media platforms like blogs, wikis, social networks or even in a virtual world like Second Life. These communities of interest can include customers, employees, media, analysts, partners or members of any other traditional audience, each of them a potential source of trust or distrust between the other.

In economic terms, networks of individualized peers create niche markets. However special someone’s interest might be, the probability that this person will find peers who share this interest was never higher than today. And commmunities of interest create demand. Let’s again look at an example. My 11-year-old son is a penguin enthusiast with a lot of specific questions. You wouldn’t believe how quickly he found online buddies who could help with things like: Where is the best zoo for penguins? Where is a toy store carrying cool plush penguins? What are the best penguin movies? Where can you watch, rent or buy them? Where is the best place to meet these guys in their natural environment? Is there a travel agency that will take you there? And, of course, how do you pitch a penguin budget to your dad? (By the way, there is a virtual world called “Club Penguin” where children play games and interact with penguin avatars. Last year, Club Penguin was acquired by Disney for $ 700 m US-Dollars.) In the grand scheme of things, the penguin “industry” might still be a niche market, but you can see how market fragments can shape up today fueled by social networks of peers.

Based on this triple dynamic in society, technology and economy, I believe it’s fair to say that we have to deal with new publics. What makes them new? Since this space is evolving rapidly, any definition claiming to be exhaustive will fail, but here are a couple of characteristics. Firstly, new publics are constituted by people who couldn’t connect as an interest group before, because they were limited by all sorts of borders: geographical, cultural, hierarchical, etc. Think of the examples with the disease and the penguins above. It also makes them new that they are or can be interactive. Rather than one talking to many, as in traditional media, everyone can talk to everyone else. In other words, traditional publics favor large audiences of listeners whereas the new publics facilitate smaller communities of networkers. And it is new that an interest group can shape up ad hoc in response to an event. For instance, an audience that doesn’t like what they see on stage, can get organized and react badly, as we have seen when Business Week’s Sarah Lacy interviewed Mark Zuckerberg. As I am writing this, I realize, that the definition of new publics warrants further exploration. In the meantime, what do you think of the idea and what other characteristics would you add?

Georg Kolb

Posted 06 May 2008 † Georg Kolb § Navigation Series § New Publics ‡ Comments (6) ° Tagged: , , , , ,