Has blogging really made a difference

It was a few years ago now that I picked up my copy of "The New Rules of Marketing & PR" by David Meerman Scott, which really enthused me to keep writing this blog and maintain it's focus on new company communication methods and the open & competitive digital landscape they faced.

I dreamed of a transparent and constant blogging corporation that embraced dialogue with it's customers and avoided the Dell Hell situation with a crowd sourced team of company advocates and social media evangelists.

I realised that this new communication method had created a hybrid from the once separated silos of: PR, CRM, marketing and 1-2-1 digital interaction. I also realised that our American chums were more likely to get buy-in from their senior execs because... Well we're British and we don't do this open stuff with our closest family members, let alone the general public, but I still had hope that we'd get there eventually.

And now, several years down the line (and hundreds of blog posts later) how have we fared???
Well not very well it seems as 18 of the FTSE 100 companies had a blog and only eight of these are apparently proper blogs in the truest sense (allowing comments).
(Via research from The Group)

Oh dear... Is that progress?

graphing online communities

I've mentioned several times that companies need to understand and even visual their Corporate Social Graph. However, how would you go-about visually reprsenting an online social network or community?

Those clever people over at Orgnet think they have the answer:
http://www.orgnet.com/community.html

This diagram, looking more like a scientific / physics experiment, depicts three different ringed regions of blue, green and red nodes. This work (termed the 'field of social network analysis') also offers some useful insight about the connectivity of users

Node counts are important in social networks, but it's the relationships -- and the patterns they create -- that are key

Insightful stuff! If you want to get further insight, you'd better read the blog of Valdis Krebs (the Founder and Chief Scientist at orgnet.com) at
http://www.thenetworkthinker.com/

Mapping the influence

In one of my previous postings, I pondered on how you would create an interface to represent information/control (influence) beyond the 'walled garden' yet within the sphere of your influence. So I've done some research on this in an attempt to understand it more.

There have been various recent projects that have attempted to show the 'Social Graph' - Felix Heinen's (a student who's Final Year project in Information Design) visualisations of a Social Network 'not unlike MySpace.com' begin to give an insight into how complex the 'Corporate Graph' could be:
http://www.felixheinen.de/020.html


Now, Graph Theory has been around for years and I'm not about to study Computational Geometry when I'm a web strategist.... however there is good work that has been done already that tries to model influence across the Internet. In fact the recent work by some students at Maryland Baltimore University has modelled influence within the Blogsphere
http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/_file_directory_/papers/262.pdf

However, what is perhaps needed is a more 'human' way to address the interface needs, by:
1. Providing the researcher with the tools to search and filter results
2. Providing them with a simpler interface that they are used to or at least recognise
3. Providing some 'visualisation on demand' service where the entire model only exisits as data and 'chunks' are rendered as required.

In fact, something like this does the job nicely:
http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html
(Correct Java version needed)