“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.

Today @bahne tweeted a message, shouting a big ‘thank you’ for sharing the detailed LeWeb’09 participant list. The list includes names, countries, companies for most of the participants. Looking at this long table with 1550 (updated Dec 04, 2009: 2055) entries I was thrilled by the large number of companies and countries. But hey, this is just a table without emotion. That’s why I’ve created a visual each of the participants companies and countries. My incentive was to create the visuals using only free software tools.

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Within the last twelve months I did a lot of research about social media, online communication and conversation measurement. To collect useful bits of information I wrote small paper notes, an approach I borrowed from the GTD method. The notes took thier place on the notice-board, reminding me on the relevant topics while I was surfing through the web of infite distraction. The close of the 2009 is near and it’s time for a wrap up. Yesterday I took the notes down and created a mindmap. Feel free to watch and comment the mindmap. Meanwhile I am sitting before an empty board, thinking about 2010 topics.

Yesterday I’ve been reading Samir Balwani’s great blog post about social media measurement. Reading the post and the comments, I’ve been directed to Jeff Hammonds blog post about social media metrics. And the combination of both posts opened my eyes.

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!

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About three month ago I’ve posted my first Social Media Sketch. Meanwhile a lot of things happend and so I thought it would be the nice to update my sketch. And if you think you know this one, you are wrong! I’ve improved the colors and the structure but most of all I’ve updated the content. Some weak parts are replaced by more general and systematic information.

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Thanks to my buddy Digitalmind, he send me the link of the Social Colliders website. The service analyzes Twitter and shows a chart based on a keyword and corresponding posts. Here is an image of the output:

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“Welcome to the psychiatric hotline.”
If you are obsessive compulsive, please press one repeatedly.
If you are co-dependant, please ask someone to press 2.
If you have multiple personalities, please press 3, 4, 5, and 6.
If you are paranoid/delusional, we know who you are, what you want, just stay on the line so that we can trace your call.
If you are a schizophrenic, listen carefully, and a little voice will tell you which number to press.
If you are manic depressive, it doesn’t matter which number you press…no one will answer anyways.

Here the first result from my social media network. On december 29. I’ve published my social media sketch at Flickr.com – today this image has more than 67.000 views http://www.flickr.com/photos/birgerking/3145391821/

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

Interesting Twitter URLs, collected 01.18.09

@Jimconnolly
Love tech? http://thetechnewsblog.com

@DaivRawks
Reading: Things to do when Twitter is down. http://bit.ly/FEpN

@DaivRawks
Reading: 7 Tips For Using Twitter to Grow Your Business  http://is.gd/gkia

@upicks
10 Really Cool Google Chrome Hacks – Anyone use Chrome? You might find some of these tips useful – http://bit.ly/WHVs

@upicks
Amazing 3D Sidewalk Art – Creative and cool, seen this before? Well here’s some new additions from the same artist – http://bit.ly/MHHs

@Bloggeries
11 Reasons You Ca’t Ignore SM in 09 – http://tinyurl.com/7ductd

@chrisbrogan
Imagine these two teaching you about the Internet? – http://is.gd/glbD

@upicks
Multiple Shots of Plane Landing in Hudson River: Some live video footage you might not have seen yet of the crash http://bit.ly/p1F0

@upicks
8 Sites for Free Presets for Adobe Lighroom’s Presets: I have yet to try them myself, download for later use – http://bit.ly/sePA

@upicks
21 Must Have Web Apps for Designers and Developers – Very helpful resource esp. if you are traveling and designing – http://bit.ly/ugti

@gina713
Seen Magpie yet? You can run your own ads in other people’s timelines. Now, that’s a neat idea! http://be-a-magpie.com/7lyjte

@upicks
My Top 10 Social Action Platforms of 2008: I think about covers it. What do you think? http://tinyurl.com/6ulqba

@podpimp
Belkin faked positive Amazon reviews http://is.gd/gfpa

@stejules
7 Ways to Be Worth Following on Twitter http://bit.ly/3E3M Be Interesting, Be Informative, Be Interactive,  Be Promotional,  Be Personal…

Google announced the shutdown of many experimental products that weren’t really generating any revenue: Notebook, Dodgeball, Catalog Search and Jaiku. Google Reader survived the “bloodbath”, like Mashable.com called it. The Question is: How to make money with Google Reader? Here is what I suggest:

A feed reader assistant

When you are following hundreds of feeds, there are a lot of informations you probably never want to read, because you are only interested in some of them. The oportunity of Google Reader: Provide a service, which automatically sets posts to read and only leave the relevant posts marked as unread.

How does it work?

Fist I have to point out, that an opt-in solution (like a spam-filter) won’t work for me. The reason is: Newsfeeds are about information I want to see. Usually I don’t know which information is relevant until I read the caption and the first lines. With opt-in any corresponding information will be bannend as soon as I checked it as unwanted, without really knowing whats going on. Thats not what I need, I want intelligent filters. An opt-out solution with user request would be much better, because it does only what I had determinded and known. I would interact with the system and control the flow of information manually.

Tweak the assistant

Now Google Reader has to know, which information is important for me. There is the classic RSS reader view. Each post has a button to set all similar posts as read. When I click on this button, a small window pops up and shows me the similar posts, each with caption and some lines of content. While this sounds to be something like a spam filter, it’s different: It’s not only about the words, its about the root of information too. With root of information I mean the original post and therefrom aggregated information. If I’m not interested in particular information, I’m not interested in informations gathering around it. That’s imporant when you are reading multiple feeds of one branch.

Intelligent sets

The advanced link from website content to feeds. The usability is similar to bookmarking services like delicious. Open a website, select important parts of the content with the mouse. Start the Google Reader plugin which automatically puts URL, page title and selected content into the form. Now there are some field for tags and categories plus a date picker to select a specific date or a period of time. Saving this file adds a ‘intelligent set’ into my Goodle Reader. The assistant now knows, which information is important for me. If posts match this criteria, the reader shows them as important.

The opportunities

A Google Reader with information assistant would be great! The real power comes from the intelligent sets: Imagine Google Reader showing information about other feeds and websites matching the criteria. Imagine Google Reader reminding me about specific information at a date I had selected, showing me todays feeds and websites matching the criteria. Think about automatic information updates after a period ot time. I would pay for this and I’m shure that a lot of people will do.