"seeing political memes" goes public

Having received a good number of e-mails and comments asking us if the maps revealing the way McCain's celebrity ad and Paris Hilton's video response had spread throughout the U.S. political web territory in August were available on the web, we have decided to upload those on PW08. For a reminder of the story that underpins this technology and these examples, see our previous post - or what Techpresident has to say about it. To see for yourself, just follow the links:

-  McCain's video "linkspread"©

- Hilton's video "linkspread"©

anham

seeing memes

“How cool is it to see a meme?”: that’s the question Philip Sheldrake asked in this must-read post (Can you see it? Making influence visible) to summarize a key concept for the future of Social Web Analytics: gathering the data is no longer the issue. “The next biggest challenge”, to paraphrase him, is about making the data –exponentially growing amounts of data- easily understandable and actionable to marcom professionals. That’s where information visualization kicks in.

“How cool is it to see a meme” then? Well, probably very cool, provided you can actually pin it down and make it show it up on a screen. But memes are, to say the least, elusive and hardly predictable (but that could change…) in the way they spread like wildfire above and below the surface of the “visible” web. It’s a bit like stormchasing, although a lot safer.

We have actually been working on this very issue, to provide our clients with the ability to not only monitor the viral spread of a blog post, or viral video, but to actually see it propagate from one site to the next, from within one community to the web at large. When you’r e in the agency business, it’s one cool thing to be able to get the buzz going about a product, it’s an even cooler one to be able to show your client (and your client’s client) where, when and how it went viral.

Having built the most comprehensive map of the US political web for the 2008 Personal Democracy Forum, we had an ideal dataset to overlay the spread of two of the most blogged-about videos of this electoral cycle: John McCain’s “Celebrity” attack ad, and Paris Hilton’s blockbuster response.

Naturally, the Hilton video propagated well beyond the limits of the “political web” (a dataset of the 4,000+ leading sites and blogs covering US politics). With over 2700 direct links to the video (according to Google Blogsearch) and more than 3 000 000 views at the end of August, the Hilton response video dwarfs the stats of the initial McCain (as shown in the graph below).

Aside from these raw numbers, the animated visualization below provides us with a glimpse of the dynamics of propagation over time on the political web: who’s blogged about it first, who picked up on it among progressive or conservative communities (with direct links to the post and authority ranks for each one of them). It is clear, from this viral propagation map, that Paris Hilton's video -unsurprisingly- elicited more "buzz", within the U.S. political web, than the original McCain ad.

But this is not just about creating cool animations. This type of data visualization has, time and again, provided us (and our clients) with the ability to answer three (out of six) open questions asked by Philip Sheldrake in his post:

- “Who's most likely to have started this rumour?” [all content is indexed and time-stamped, making it easy to spot the “fire-starter” blog at the onset of the animation* and track propagation henceforth]
- "Who or what is exerting most influence?" [everyone’s got their own ‘secret sauce’ to determine influence on the web. Ours is called the "lnkfluence score" which is essentially based on one's site relative position of authority within its community (see this primer for more details)]
- “Who should we add to our list of key contacts / influencers?” [here again, visualization comes in handy: key influencers don’t exist in a vacuum, they are positioned at the center of their own community of readers and peers. They are first and foremost, hubs of information absorption and dissemination, showing up as large ‘nodes’ (larger dots) in the social graph.]

As to Sheldrake’s conclusion about the beauty of some visualization, well, we do our best, but no one could fault you if your preference went to watching the meme itself, especially one that’s wearing a skimpy swimsuit and shiny high heels ;-)

*In the case of the Celebrity and Paris Hilton videos, there is no single “fire-starter” website, as both videos received considerable paid and earned media exposure, both off-line and online. Although it should be noted that the Progressive community, acting as an aggregate trigger of online discussions, moved faster and displayed more interest in the end than the Conservative community online.

linkfluence @esomar

Esomar, the world association for market and opinion research, is holding its annual congress in Montréal between September, 22nd and 24th.

The 2008 Congress is all about Frontiers, in social sciences, in marketing and communication, in research. I will be pleased to take the stage during the "frontiers in technology" session to speak about "social graph theories as an alternative to traditional sampling methods" - although, to be fair, social graph approaches to market and opinion research rather constitute valuable additions to the traditional methodological landscape, especially when it comes to the social web.

The abstract is as follows: "Has the monopoly of traditional population segmentation criteria and sampling methods come to an end? Can demographics (employment, age, sex, ethnicity, etc) or behavioural (consumption and cultural habits) criteria be replaced by new "community membership" criteria? Has the "one voice - one vote" principle long lived for market and opinion research? Guilhem Fouetillou and Anthony Hamelle of linkfluence, a social web research institute, will offer creative and sometimes iconoclast perspectives on these issues. Basing themselves on social graph theories, they will share their insight on the importance of links, how they reveal the existence of true opinion communities, how they help single out opinion leaders and what this all means for the research industry."

anham

linkfluence on social web politics at the Personal Democracy Forum

As announced in a previous post, we were pleased to share the stage of this year's Personal Democracy Forum with a set of distinguished speakers.

For those of you who could not make it to New York, the videos of the presentations have been published on Blip.tv.

The video of our onstage presentation can be accessed directly here.

And for those of you interested in these topics, don't forget to follow our coverage of this year's US presidential elections on Presidential Watch 08.

Update: you may have a glimpse of the great amount and quality of comments received from online political pundits on Digg or on Twitter

anham

Mapping the future of public media

For those of you who were not able to attend this year's Beyond Broadcast Conference in Washington, DC, its organizer, American University's Center for Social Media, has published a complete overview of the day's debates and discussions.

Within a framework of discussions around the future and the independence of public media in an always evolving mediascape, notably because of new uses made possible by the Internet, three main topics were addressed:

- maps and dataviz solutions as ways to share information at a time when information comes in abundance;

- maps as a way of revealing the future of public media (where linkfluence was kindly asked to share its view)

- mapping the money (commercial media ventures vs. non-commercial media ventures)

"“it will be much harder for any single actor to set the agenda, because they would have to be present in every community.” Instead, “media actors will have to work with local outposts in terms of providing information and setting agendas.”

I shared with the distinguished audience the idea that the mediascape was becoming more and more clusterised, with communities of interest becoming more and more prominent. Any venture, either commercial or not, wanting to push and promote information these days will have to work community by community, and not just broadcast to the masses. Read (and watch) more here.

anham

linkfluence @BeyondBroadcast & @PersonalDemocracyForum

Guilhem Fouetillou and Anthony Hamelle will tour on the U.S. East Coast in June 2008 to take part in conferences on the future of public media and on netpolitics.

Each year, the Beyond Broadcast conference, held by American University's Center for Social Media, observes the evolution of social, or participatory, media. This year, the main discussion topic will be "mapping public media". Several angles will be dealt with: How are media makers using online mapping and visualization tools to tell stories and engage communities? What can those same tools tell us about changes in the public media landscape? linkfluence's intervention will notably focus on the latter.

Prestigious netpolitics and Internet experts gather at the Personal Democracy Forum: Ariana Huffington, Vint Cerf, Joe Trippi, Esther Dyson, Lawrence Lessig, etc. This year, the PDF's organisers hope to reboot the (political and democratic) system. The impact of new technologies and new social uses on political life and democracy will be analysed under numerous angles. linkfluence shall present the updated version of its Presidential Watch 08 map as well as several case studies on the presence of important campaign issues within communities of the social web.

Come see us in Washington D.C. on June, 17th or in New York City on June, 23rd & 24th!