#Social

Wow, this is pretty impressive. An intern at facebook decided to do some major data crunching to visualize and answer questions about how people connect to each other and how local they are. Super interesting (if not surprising) visualization of how we connect to each other through the ubiquitous fb.

It’s kind of amazing (anyone else struck by how facebook is still a very “first world” problem. This would be a cool thing to release for individuals to check out their map of the world as well I think (I know how obsessed I am with collecting pins on my world map in iPhoto since they introduced the feature. So sad.

Most popular social networks worldwide for Dec 2010 by Vincenzo Cosenza (FB is the leader in 115 out of 132 countries analyzed).

OK, a bit dry, but a very interesting presentation (from a super geeky perspective) on using the open source package R and some nice libraries for doing social network analysis of data sets.

Can definitely see how I can use this for community segmentation in an interesting way.

Doing a bit of work on community actor identification for the new gig (or at least looking at how we can get some tools together to automate analysis).

Seth’s most recent post perfectly outlines one current predicament I’ve seen a lot lately: Pretty tactics; absolutely no strategy.

New media creates a blizzard of tactical opportunities for marketers, and many of them cost nothing but time, which means you don’t need as much approval and support to launch them.

As a result, marketers are like kids at Rita’s candy shoppe, gazing at all the pretty opportunities.

Most of us are afraid of strategy, because we don’t feel confident outlining one unless we’re sure it’s going to work. And the ‘work’ part is all tactical, so we focus on that. (Tactics are easy to outline, because we say, ‘I’m going to post this.’ If we post it, we succeed. Strategy is scary to outline, because we describe results, not actions, and that means opportunity for failure.)