As humans, we make sense of the world around us by observing relationships and making judgments.
We are spatial beings—it’s as simple as that.
Show me a long list of data with a lot of numbers and statistics, and I’ll eventually be able to make some sense of it, but show me a picture that relates to my 3D world and I’ll instantly be able to understand what you’re talking about.
IKEA has the right idea. Ever looked at one of their instruction booklets? (See right.)
Mapping influence is an important part of any company’s brand management. Finding out the most influential portals where people are talking about your brand is essential.
Beyond merely keeping track of the conversation, companies can engage with the most relevant communities and create advocates, loyalists, and evangelists.
A virtualization of the online conversation surrounding your brand draws on your spatial intuition. Instead of looking an endless, flat list of URLs linked up to a damaging customer complaint, for example, you can actually see all of those sites spatially gathered around the offending URL and intuitively understand the big picture.
Thinkmap’s Visual Thesaurus works the same way in mapping word relationships. (See right.)
For companies, there’s no more efficient tool for analyzing a campaign or customer service response. Let’s say an angry blogger started a chain of negative sentiment that spread throughout the Internet like a wildfire.
With a virtualization, your company can identify the URL as a top influencer and stop the negative sentiment in its tracks by making things right before it blows up to a crisis proportion.
This kind of chronological progression of a message is something that is hard to see in a flat list of sites. The virtualization is showing you more of your data in a more manageable way by wrapping it into 3D dimension that is immediately familiar.
One can even step outside the realm of social media and map offline databases to visualize connections in areas such as call center transcripts, point-of-sale data, unstructured market research, campaign metrics, and beyond.
In Spark, each sphere represents a single URL in your brand’s ecosystem and is color-coded to reflect the average sentiment of that web page. (Green, red, and gray represents positive, negative, and neutral sentiment.) Each connection is color-coded to reflect inbound (red), outbound (blue), and bi-directional (green) linkage.
Highly influential sites are pulled towards the center of the network, while less influential sites are pushed outward. High traffic communication channels are easy to pick out and tightly interlinked sites are clustered close together.
A virtualization takes this massive amount of data and maps it into a spatial model that makes sense. To see details, click on any sphere to see the title, URL, number of inbound/outbound connections, and influence ranking. You can delve into the virtualization further by adjusting the view any way you like.
Spark’s Virtualization
Click the image below to view the virtualization for local event Old Shawnee Days.
