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Insights 2.0
Social web: social media and web 2.0
The web has become social. At first, it was a knowledge space, a network of documents, and an open and global encyclopedia. Now, there is an extra layer where exchanges, interactions, and conversations take place and are made easy: a social space.
The wide-scale adoption from 2004 onwards of web 2.0 technologies made this shift possible. These make creating, changing, and organizing content collaboratively easy (wikis, blog comments, and social bookmarking sites such as delicious). They also help syndicate and broadcast content or update parts of pages without having to reload the entire page (making possible, for example, on-line chats).
Social media, using web 2.0 technologies, have driven the social web’s evolution. These on-line publication spaces, which are easy to roll-out and to use, have enabled each person to create their own agora to express themselves on the web and to open that space to contributions from their community, peers, and occasional readers. A decentralized and horizontal model has supplanted media’s traditional top-down model (broadcast monologue). In this new model, sender and receiver coincide (social media dialog), changing us progressively into a society open to everyone’s opinion.
One of this opinion society’s most well-known artifacts today is “the buzz”, term that describes these brief moments when public opinion focuses its attention on a specific event. With the web 2.0’s ease and speed of communications, that event becomes widely known, a visibility only traditional media could trigger before.
The social web’s different spaces
Social media, today, are fragmented into different spaces that are more or less open to one another: blogs, forums, microconversations (Twitter), social media (Facebook, LinkedIn), or content sites (Flickr, Dailymotion, YouTube). You can consult Wikipedia to know the history and have a description of each of these spaces. But, for us, each one has distinct features and characteristics we leverage in our approach:
Blogs
Blogs are ideal spaces to rebuild connected communities on the web. Their formats simplify publishing content and making connections thanks to hyperlinks. Thus, we value blogrolls (even if their use is dropping) because they allow gauging a blogger’s thematic environment, the topics he is interested in regularly, regardless of present-day news and events. Blogrolls also include links to friends, family members, and those whose posts we read faithfully because we like the author regardless of the subject discussed.Forums
Before web 2.0, they were spaces of expression and prolific exchanges that remained rather confidential. The technology powering them could not index properly (also the case for our own tools, which is why this poses a technical challenge). Unlike blogs, everyone on a forum is on equal footing (no differentiation between author/commentator). It is safe to speak up as content is not broadcast widely, which encourages those profiles less present on blogs to express themselves.We pay careful attention to these entrenched spaces far removed from web 2.0 communication modes because it is there we find Internet users who are not necessarily opinion leaders and who don’t express themselves elsewhere.
Microconversations
These services, starting with Twitter, at first called for a 140-character response to a navel-oriented question: “What are you doing?” Users quickly shifted gears, looking for answers to a more important question: “What’s going on?” With millions of messages indexed in real time and links traveling from one end of the planet to the other in a few minutes, we can take the pulse of public opinion country by country. This new dimension in the web allows for a flow of information that can synchronize consciences with unprecedented speed. For linkfluence, microconversations provide rich fodder for investigation and research.
Social network sites
After blogs, social networks boosted the growth of the social web. Facebook is, today, the largest social network in the world. But Facebook is not a media promotion social network aimed at reaching the largest audience. It is an interpersonal communication tool in which the first step is to choose your friends and thus your audience.On Facebook, linkfluence only observes public groups and pages whose success or number allow us to read current trends, the zeitgeist, as on Twitter.
Content sites
YouTube is, today, the second most important search engine in the world. Each day, over 3 years’ worth of videos are uploaded. At the end of 2009, Flickr hosted over 4 billion photographs. For linkfluence, video and photosharing sites are a space to analyze images, calling for new modes of expression and staging; new meanings in messages and broadcast patterns; and differences in tracking technologies and modes of analysis.It is easier to track how a video spreads than how a text circulates because it will keep its technical identity. But it will be harder to spot because, save for a few up-and-coming projects, its content will not yet have been indexed.
The social web’s segments
The web is a large-scale, diverse, and open space that evolves constantly. It comprises hundreds of billions of pages. Anyone can publish what he wants, where he wants. The means with which to interact with others are plethoric and increasingly varied (on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube), and yet, it is not chaotic. As a network of documents, pages, and sites, the web offers observable and measurable characteristics that it shares with other types of natural or human networks.
On the social web, content producers and participants in conversations constantly create hypertext links. Offering hyperlinks from one document to another invites Internet users to navigate using different paths. Ultimately, this creates communities of interest or kinship, as these conversations among the same individuals continue and intensify.
These communities split up first along national and/or linguistic lines, language being the first barrier that separates individuals. Then, you can observe communities as varied as fashion addicts, football fans, believers in economic decline, or dog and cat lovers. Even if their longevity can vary, their number remains constant overall because communities are renewed, much like magazines available on news-stand shelves. Finally, hierarchies of influence and visibility develop within each of these communities, each with a clear center and a periphery (see influence).
Livepanel: an unexploited terrain for research
Linkfluence has mapped, by country, all the communities of interest that segment the social web. These social web samplings comprise the most visible and influential sites, per communities of shared interests, chosen with the help of our exploratory robots according to their visibility (inbound links, audience) and central position within the discussion (exchange of links).
They make up the linkfluence livepanel, focusing on influential web spaces likely to have an impact on a brand or an institution’s image and able to broadcast a message beyond their own boundaries.
Most actions on this livepanel leave traces that nourish the huge volume of conversations and interactions stocked on the network. We discover topics of shared interests, the type and form of interactions among individuals, and the terms used in these exchanges by exploring and analyzing this constantly changing memory bank.
This unprecedentedly large sociological terrain enables us to observe social phenomena such as imitation, behavior adoption, broadcast, and ownership of information. The livepanel “listens to” these public and permanent conversations, exchanges, and spontaneous expressions in real time, without having to provoke them, as is the case with surveys and focus groups. Increasingly, this is referred to as netnography (or “mass anthropology”).
Influence
Measure influence! This is one of the biggest challenges for those who want to understand, model, and control the web’s immense space. Before the success of word-of-mouth marketing as a key variable in communications, measuring influence was already at the core of search engines’ algorithms (for example, Google’s PageRank). But when a search engine has to return only the most meaningful response to a given request, the influence specialist must identify, for each topic, those individuals whose words are listened to, discussed, and carried by their target audience.
To gauge the influence web content producers have (blog posts, forum posts, YouTube videos, Flickr images, Facebook groups, Twitter messages), we rely on all quotes, responses, repeats, and recommendations (backlinks, tweets, votes, bookmarks) of each content nugget. An individual’s influence will stem from the number of people who will have reacted to these contents and the influence these individuals have. An author whose blog has few links – but from influential bloggers – will have a higher influence rate than a blog that has many links, but from less visible bloggers.
Once this influence is calculated, its reach must be measured. Indeed, what one calls influence, or the power to prescribe, isn’t universal. An influencer who has built his legitimacy by speaking about politics will not have the same authority when he speaks of sports, for example. It is important to link an individual’s influence to his pet subjects and to measure precisely the scope and the limits of his power to recommend. The social web’s segmentation by communities of shared interests linkfluence offers through its livepanel fulfills the need to qualify influence.
Mapping
The web – our research terrain – is vast, interconnected, and in constant evolution. It is possible to map the web’s technical infrastructures, show where the servers are, and how information flows between countries. But there is no representation of the territories on which Internet users browse daily by moving from page to page and link to link.
That is the challenge of mapping the web: to make visible these navigation spaces and to identify the sites and links that bring them together. Creating this cartography is key to understanding all the social phenomena we described in the preceding paragraphs: constructions of communities of interest, the different types of influence, the spreading and viral propagation of contents.
Linkfluence has specialized in mapping information and expressing it visually. Our maps can show complex interaction networks within the social web. They make visible lines of force, break points, and boundaries – paths that all who contribute to the web define and alter each day.
Note, though, that even if our maps use many of geographical maps’ conventions, they do not represent the same thing. Their grammar differs in two key ways:
Cardinal points:
Web topographic maps do not have cardinal points; there is no north, south, east, or west. Making them rotate will not change their interpretation. Only relative positions matter; in other words notions of proximity or distance, which leads us to the second factor.
Distance:
The distance between two points is not a physical distance, but a social distance. On a linkfluence map, two sites that are close to each other will share many connections to the same sites, but will not necessarily be in connection with each other. These distances let us measure the relational closeness between two sites with all the short paths that link them.
To see what this all looks like, navigate to our atlas.
Netnography
Since the start of the 20th Century, marketing and audience research studies have relied in large part on interrogation. Whether they be quantitative (polls and surveys) or qualitative (in-depth interviews or discussion groups), studies must ask individuals what they do, what they think, what they plan to do.
While these information-gathering methods are essential, they do have their limits and their methodological flaws. Chance factors, biases, and post-rationalization of responses pollute the responses’ spontaneity and sometimes validity. Ethnographic approaches that rest on observation and listing also help to understand how individuals organize themselves, interact, listen to, and influence one another. Ethnography can be leveraged to understand opinion phenomena or to detect the needs and expectations of different categories of consumers. Cost and difficulty make this method rarely used.
With the emergence of the social web, ethnographic studies can be undertaken in this vast space where individuals gather, create communities, express themselves, and act of their own will. All the traces left on the web make gathering these data technically complex, but possible with automated processes. This is where netnography – the contraction of Net and ethnography – comes into play. Linkfluence is taking part in building this discipline to ensure it responds to these marketing and opinion analysis challenges.
Linkfluence is at the forefront of conceptual research, methodological developments, and experimental projects to define reliable, valid, and representative research approaches. We have developed a comprehensive model of the web to report trends and opinions the social web carries. This model leverages sociological1, anthropological2, as well as marketing and communications concepts3, and develops well thought-out sampling techniques adapted to the web4.
Linkfluence has defined approaches within this new discipline called netnography that take advantage of web spaces’ ability to reveal trends emerging from categories of trendsetters and opinion leaders chosen for their position and influence in social dynamics.
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