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A whiteboard sketch about an integrated online feedback strategy including online channels, web site, analytics, crm, customer feedback and recommendations. This Map is made for printshops, the basic structure could be used for any other business with some changes.

The key element of the strategy is the “Electronic Line Of Visibility (eLOV)”. The “Line Of Visibility” is a strategy to describe the areas of contact with customers. eLOV does the same for online communication. The idea of the map is to close feedback loops between customers and employees as well as employees only.

Inspired by the Contact 2.0 Strategy by Marc Keating, Chris Brogans Trust Agents and Thomas Scheuer’s Marketing für Dienstleister.

“In Rainbows” by oljmpya

Communities and networks have existed before Web 2.0 and Social Media. People have always connected and collaborated, by sharing ideas, concepts, points of view. The historic context of communities remains visible, it is the reason why a lot of Web 2.0 services and social networks use names borrowed from real-life precursors — Facebook, for example. Students have been connected before, by virtue of their alumni status. A facebook documents one’s participation in a group. Metaphorically, it’s a hub that unites and keep the members connected after they graduate. Web 2.0 reinvents this interconnectedness of community members. Facebook, for example, allows them to connect easy and effectively across geographical barriers, 24/7/365. Web 2.0 and Social Media lowers physical and social barriers to maintaining a connection with people, to sharing of interests, ideas, information. But it is important to remember that a community has existed before as a real-world entity.

Bandwith indicators are unsuitable for measurement of social media ROI. Bandwith is the indicator of the generation push. Social medias nature is pull. People only listen to thinks they care about. Your bandwith maybe high, your marketing KPI may be great – but your company crashed because nobody cares about your products.

Back to start. The bandwith indicator was made by a few guys. Thier effort was to measure the bandwith of marketing and advertising. They used bandwith as a benchmark and while more and more people used it, bandwith itself became a rule. But that’s a long time ago. It’s time to create new indicators. Free your mind and use a different term. I’ll call them “proxies” or “a proxy”. Proxies because it’s a known word from webtech and it describes what it is: A placeholder.

It’s time to develop social media proxies. These proxies measure “weak values”. This values are not direct bound to your work, the work of your deparment, the work of your company. But used wisely a “weak value” tells a story about the customers conception outside of the circle of control. And it’s nothing else than a placeholder, like bandwith is too. A proxy.

Here’s a wikimap showing social media proxies. Measurement placeholders capturing the social media circles of culture, conversation and commerce. Feel free to edit and update this map. May the bandwith rest in peace!

First of all a big shout to the viewers and participants of my first sketch! Thank you very much for your help to improve the small things and for the discussions. Extra hug goes to 802.11, for her creation of the Social Media Landscape chart. Great work!

The first sketch was a test, both of my own experiences and public interest. Someone commented my first work with “what a beautiful mind!”, which was a praise with a big smile. I’ve watched the movie, and I feel lucky to tell you that I’m just a guy who wants to digg deeper into social media. And I thought only a few people would be interested at all. So I just painted together what was important for me, uploaded the picture on flickr and posted the link. The chart was and will be incomplete, its only a selection of the things I (or: we) know. But in some points I’ve missed my goals.  The first sketch was full of clutter and noise.

With the Easter Edition I’ve tried to avoid clutter and noise. First of all I’ve added some structure and headings to the sketch. The sketch is divided into six areas The Clouds; Tribes And Crowds; The Real World; Business Landscape; Spreadable Media; Collaboration Content; Extend Yourself Now; plus additional content The Geeks And The Newbies; Visual Leader; Jump Over The Fence; Mainstream Media. The main idea is still the same, but I’ve improved the division of the areas. The plus of structure is payed with smaller spaces for each area. I had to collect important things. That’s why a lot of weak parts are gone, especially some additional phrases.

Others, like the Groundswell Model and the implementation plan are replaced by more general and systematic content. Groundswell only tells you what to do, not what happens in social media. Implementation plans are no information from inside the social media cloud, too. The Spreadable Media Concept and Collaborate Content Concept are more accurate methods to describe social media. Spreadable Media is a great concept about the main question of what makes content spread in media and culture. If you have not heard or read about it you should do it now! Collaborate Content Concept is a homebrew by myself with  additions from the Spreadable Media Concept and really old stuff I’ve found. I think it fits perfectly, including the shift of authority from mainstream media. The Business Modell Evolution is updated and there is more information here.

The creators of Social Collider describe that they build the service “With the Internet’s promise of instant and absolute connectedness, two things appear to be curiously underrepresented: both temporal and lateral perspective of our data-trails. Yet, the amount of data we are constantly producing provides a whole world of contexts, many of which can reveal astonishing relationships if only looked at through time.”

It’s easy to use the service: Enter a keyword, choose search from “user”, “phrase” or “trends”, select the length of the history from one day to one month and hit the “collide!”-button. A blank grid opens, like shown in the picture above. Then, slowly, the chart gets dotted while the service is processing the data. The dots represent post, they are seperated horizontal with a column for each user. On the left side is the selected timeline, starting with the actual date on top. It’s fun to watch the number of dots growing over the chart. The Posts are connected with line so the flow of the conversation is visible and these connections organically grew from one post to another.

That’s really nice. But I would like to see some functions to digg deeper and easier into the data. Sorry for this, but the processed information is not very useful. The first thing I would invent is a button do “deactivate” the growing connections between posts. A simple static view does the same and is faster. I would like to see the reply posts between users with a dropdown to define “friends” from two to ten replies as a minimum criteria. The visualisation of this data should show the numbers of relevant posts between users (or what we’ve defined as “friends”). The last function is a dropdown to select the actual number of followers in steps of thousands. This criteria is important in correlation to the number of replies a user sends a “friend”. With this options this tool would compute the real social collusion!

Social Collider is a great example of state-of-the-art infodesign using real time web technology. The layout is perfect, the colors are well chosen, tooltips with message include a change of the grid in the background. Really good work from the design point of view. Kudos!

Flickr user 802.11 created this visual from the quintessence of my sketch http://www.flickr.com/photos/7372907@N07/3212348947/sizes/l/ Thank you very much 802.11! Great visualization! Please visit her Flickr page an leave a comment for her great work! The visual shows the flow of information between users and the influence of each other. Informations are displayed as water. When users aggregate informations, they steam up and collect as internet-clouds. Growing clouds create energy, the discharging power is displayed as lightning which bleed off on users/socities surface. Examples for energy discharge are Wikipedia or the change of the music industry. Other influences could be discovered with this visual, for example the future of data mining on database layers.

Thank you for every comment, participation and enhancement on this project. We are searching for partners who support the develoment of an interactive visual for touchscreen or iPhone. A skilled 3D-interactive-desigern is already supporting us.

Rgds,
Birger