There are a few really great social media visualization tools around, that really bring the experience of social media to life.
Instead of banging on about them all, I will talk about two of my favorites.
The first is TrendsMap.com, which imports “trending topics” via geographic location. We’re in Jacksonville, so this is what Jacksonville is talking about on Twitter:
What we see are the topics that are mentioned most frequently by Twitter users who are in Jacksonville, Florida. You will notice that there are not a lot of topics. It’s not because there aren’t enough users; it’s because not everyone is talking about the same thing.
This service is most useful when a large event is happening, such as a sporting event or award show. When that is happening, the map lights up and you get a real sense for what the sentiment is among Twitter users nationwide.
My other favorite is a new one, called WeePlaces.com. This services collects your FourSquare check-in statistics and displays them on a map. Click “play” and you are shown a a time-lapse of your checkins over time. Here are my checkins in Jacksonville:
As social media services evolve, there will be more sites like this cropping up, scraping the raw data created by using the web sites and turning it into something that is easy to understand and actually see.
The implications for marketing and business are hazy right now. One application that I can think of is similar to what The Hard Rock Cafe currently does. When you visit some HRC locations, there’s a video feed piped into the building showing visitors at HRC locations all over the world.
Retailers could use this to show who is checking in at their locations all over, as a way to show customers that they are popular and well-liked nationally. Just a thought.
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