It used to be that the only score you needed to really worry about post-college was your credit score. Today, with social media becoming such a large part of everyday life, is there an equivalent for your online life? Amy Jo Martin suggests how a social score — the level of credibility and influence in social media — is just as if not more important than credit.
Some of the biggest news events break first on Twitter, but how do we separate legitimate news from rumors? It’s not always easy to separate the signal from the noise. This online panel helps break down citizen journalism in the context of Hurricane Sandy and how social media spread both news and rumors. I’m highly curious to see how it helps and hurts the spread the truth.
While the rise of social media has taken the world by storm, one place that has seen growing pains is China. The youth has taken to Sina Weibo quickly, with now over 400M users add counting. The new Chinese government faces a delicate balancing act, having to temper wholesale censorship with the ability to speak freely and the ever constant drive to grow a market-driven economy. As I’ve mentioned before, social media is like a bar of wet soap. The harder you squeeze, the less control you have.
The world is generating data quicker than it can consume it. The world is generating far more data at a pace much higher than ever before. This is all great, except that data is meaningless without context. I’m a big fan of using data visualization to derive new insights. And when the insights can be be basis for a strategy that leads to something new and wonderful, that’s something special and ground-breaking.
Facebook has done a nice job showcasing the relationships between countries from a friendship level, something that you won’t find in government almanacs or reports. It’s a novel way to show relative depth of connections of people between two countries, even if the two are at odds with each other. There’s something about the power of connection that supercedes political agendas.
The 2012 London Olympics are officially over, the medal count tallied and athletes are returning home. While the U.S. topped the charts in overall and gold medals, and the U.K. scored more golds than ever before, the real story was how prominent a role social media played. In it’s nightly broadcast, NBC even had a segment that highlighted key activities that happened in the social sphere. It’s clear the “social olympics” were a success on many levels, so much so that increasingly, social measures are being applied to athlete and event popularity. Twitter now uses “tweets per minute” as an official benchmark for gauging consumer energy.
This NYTimes infographic is one of many superb data visualizations produced during the games. It shows the relative % gain in Twitter chatter of 140 Olympic athletes over the course of the games. It’s a small sampling, but the notable athletes are represented. The beauty is that because it’s relative gain over baseline, even lesser known athletes can stand out if they were able to generate conversation. Presumably, the conversation was about their performances in the games, but often it was the athletes themselves that stimulated conversation. From diving star Tom Daley outing a troll to athletes getting distracted on social media, it’s clear it played an important roll in their mindset.
For athletes that gained big new followings, it will be interesting to see how they use social media to interact with their new fans. Best to strike while the iron, er I mean gold is still hot.
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