Data visualization: sometimes one picture IS worth a thousand words

Now, I’ve done my share of Internet/social media marketing: written blog posts, created AdWords, done a bit of SEO, worked on social media strategies. And, of course, I blog (therefore I am…) on my own, here and with Pink Slip.  But, in general, social media is not the end of the marketing pool that I generally swim in. Me, I’m market research, positioning, requirements, win-loss, white papers, sales tools.

But you just can’t be a marketer these days without developing at least some fluency with the changes to marketing practice that are happening with breathtaking - gasp! - frequency.

I’m also someone who loves, loves, love, the written word.  For the most part, I’m one of those who generally gets more out of reading a thousand words than looking at a picture.

So, given my interest in social media and my life-long preference for the word, I was completely fascinated by last week’s post on data visualization by Scott Berinato, over on the Harvard Business Review blog.

Scott described the work of Jeff Clark, who has developed a visualization engine that pulls together Twitter data, in near real time.  You should absolutely read the full post, but I’ll extract some here - including one of the diagrams - so you can see for yourself just how potent a tool data visualization can be. (This section follow one in which Scott used a Twitter Venn diagram to look at the number of tweets mentioning Apple, Google, and Microsoft, and a word map of commonly tweeted terms.

So then I went to Twitter Spectrum, a similar tool that compares two search terms and shows which words are most commonly associated with each term and which words are most commonly used in tweets with both terms. Here’s the “google, microsoft” Twitter Spectrum: 

I love that the word “ugh” is dead center between Google and Microsoft. But the prominence of social media terms on the blue side versus search terms on the red side is fascinating. It looks like two armies marching at each other ready to fight different wars.

With Scott, I am fascinated by the difference between the terms associated with Google (twitter, mashable, buzz) and those associated with Microsoft (dept, partnership, execution). The good news for Microsoft: they’re more enterprise-y. The bad news, they ain’t so hip and happening.

Tools like this hold enormous promise for tapping into the overwhelming, continuous, amorphous stream of data that’s gushing out there. I wouldn’t want to rely on tweets alone to establish market requirements or set strategic direction. But what a great way to help figure out what’s on the minds and in the hearts of your audience when they’re not providing formal feedback in a structured setting. And being able to tap into the thoughts of those in your audience who aren’t even known to you to begin with. (Wish we’d had this and a million tweeters back in the day when I worked for a company with a flagship product running on OS/2. Bet we wouldn’t have had to wait to see the Info Week cover with a casket labeled OS/2, with a lily on it, to figure out we’d better move to NT…)

Anyway, go read Scott’s post. It’s a good one.

(True confession: I probably like these pictures better because they have words in them…)

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