Introducing The Conversation Prism


Last year, Robert Scoble and Darren Barefoot debuted the Social Media Starfish to visualize and document the rapidly evolving landscape for social tools, services, and networks.

If you work in marketing, public relations, advertising, customer service, product development, or any discipline that’s motivated, shaped, and directed by customers, peers, stakeholders and influencers, monitoring and in some cases, participating in online conversations is critical in competing for the future.

Over the last month, I worked with Jesse Thomas of JESS3, to create a new graphic that helps chart online conversations between the people that populate communities as well as the networks that connect the Social Web. The Conversation Prism is free to use and share. It’s our contribution to a new era of media education and literacy.

The Conversation Prism

The conversation map is a living, breathing representation of Social Media and will evolve as services and conversation channels emerge, fuse, and dissipate.

If a conversation takes place online and you’re not there to hear or see it, did it actually happen?

Indeed. Conversations are taking place with or without you and this map will help you visualize the potential extent and pervasiveness of the online conversations that can impact and influence your business and brand.

As a communications or service professional, you’ll find yourself at the center of the prism – whether you’re observing, listening or participating. This visual map is the ideal complement to The Essential Guide to Social Media and the Social Media Manifesto, which will help you better understand how to listen and in turn, participate transparently, sincerely, and effectively.

As conversations are increasingly distributed, everything begins with listening and observing. Doing so, will help you identify exactly where relevant discussions are taking place, as well as their scale and frequency. This dialog can be charted into a targeted social map that’s unique to your brand. In the example below, I created a Social Map using MindJet to represent the communities where I either need to or currently contribute based on my initial research.

Perhaps most importantly, the process of listening and observing will reveal the cultures of the very communities you may wish to engage.

Remember, participating in Social Media is more meaningful when you have a deeper understanding of anthropology and sociology and not just the social tools that facilitate interaction. This is about creating and cultivating relationships with people, online and in the real world, and these relationships are defined by mutual value and benefits.

In the social economy, relationships are the new currency.

Enjoy the Conversation Prism and please let me know how you’d like to see it evolve.

Please also see The Social Media Ecosystem by Deb Schultz, which debuted in November 2007.

For more on the subject, please also read:

- Comcast, Dell and The Socialization of Service
- New Communication Theory and the New Roles for the New World of Marketing
- The Social Revolution is Our Industrial Revolution
- The Art of Conversation – It’s About Listening Not Marketing
- Will The Real Social Media Expert Please Stand Up?
- Cultural Voyeurism and Social Media
- Free ebook: Customer Service, The Art of Listening and Engagement Through Social Media
- Distributed Conversations and Fragmented Attention

Connect with me on Twitter, Jaiku, LinkedIn
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>Tumblr, Pownce, Plaxo, FriendFeed, Plurk or Facebook.

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Discussion

May 6, 2009 by Bryan Fikes

Brian with I,
Hey I am Bryan with a Y.

Love the Conversation Prism. I will be using in my discussion with business owners in the Modesto – Stockton – Merced area.

Thank you for your contribution to this space.
Http://www.zenergyinternetmarketing.com

March 22, 2009 by 章麽麽

Hi brain, thanks for your sharing wisdom with us! I’m from China and working at a Chinese PR firm now. Your blog broadens my mind. It just likes a window which makes me know new thing about PR.

March 11, 2009 by gregalchin

Hi Brian,
I am seriously impressed by your work on this. You are to be congratulated. It is brilliant. I introduced it in a professional development session with teachers yesterday. It crystallized things for them and was the basis for some indepth discussion.

February 9, 2009 by Lee Klau

Great work. But, we will hit a bubble in the whole Social Media space. Off all of these companies, how many will survive? 20%? 5% Which ones? Which companies are really companies and which ones are simply features that will get swallowed by bigger social fish?

January 14, 2009 by Brian Solis

Timothy, contact me at brian [at] future-works [dot] com. V2 is on the way, but I have another project for you… :)

January 14, 2009 by Timothy

Brian, if you don’t mind, I would like to update your Conversation Prism with additional websites in each category. Particularly the ones that have already been suggested via Flickr. Would you be willing to send me the original artwork in EPS or AI format? I look forward to your reply.

January 4, 2009 by ms danielle

this is fantastic, just twittered it! may i suggest SoulCast.com which is an anonymous blog site. you’ll find some VERY interesting conversations going on there.

December 8, 2008 by Monica Surfaro Spigelman

Am I correct to want to see a petal for plain ‘ol face-to-face in the graphic? Shouldn’t that always be a component even if this is just a visualization of the technology tools? Well, we’ll certainly have alot to discuss in May.

December 4, 2008 by Sonal Jhuj

wow! thank you for creating this. it’s very useful and makes me feel like i’ll never be able to keep up with social media :)

November 4, 2008 by Johan

I would like create a mobile version inspired of this. If I make it, a post a comment here for sure!

November 2, 2008 by fuzzy

Interesting!

The broad-ranging visual representations are greatly appreciated. Very relevant to projects in which I’m currently involved.

With this list
http://www.diigo.com/list/grahamperrin/software-halloween-morass
it becomes easier for me to identify the technologies that are not only:

a) popular

but also, most importantly:

b) well-suited to interaction/integration — without proliferation!

Popularity as a criterion/measurement is thought-provoking. Focusing for a moment on two very popular technologies, in recent weeks:

* MediaWiki (which I use occasionally, but never wish to administer) is excellent in some respects, but its lack of ability to serve RSS that’s presentable within a content management system was a disappointment to me

* Skype (which I avoid using whenever possible) proved inferior to XMPP/Jabber in terms of integration with the same CMS.

(Neither discovery came as a surprise.)

Such things highlight, for me, the importance of not leaping carelessly on to bandwagons simply because the wagon is popular!

In closing, two words:

OpenID
OAuth

Best regards
Graham

October 31, 2008 by Speed Duchess

Brian, great breakdown of the Conversation. Amazing how much it’s grown in complexity and sheer amount since last year. How do you think this may look like in a year, given the rise of the Semantic Web?

-Marissa

October 1, 2008 by Yoo

amazing graphs and your analysis of the world we now live in is great.

“In the social economy, relationships are the new currency.” – awesome.

August 26, 2008 by S.M.Beebe

The “Microblogs” section listed in the 1st graphic needs two additional popular micro-blogging applications: Identi.ca and Plurk.

These graphics are terrific! I love reading your stuff Brian, excellent work, as always!!

Susan Beebe
@smbeebe

August 23, 2008 by Ms. Bemis-Schurtz

I really enjoyed your post! I looked for a few tools I use that didn’t make the prism…

perhaps to include:
vodpod?
lijit?
pbwiki?

August 20, 2008 by Almadeline

Such a great tool – esp for folks who try but don’t have the time to necessarily keep up with all of what’s out there! Posted about it here, thanks!

August 14, 2008 by Roberto

Thanks for sharing.
I posted something in my blog:
http://elmundosigueahi.blogspot.com/2008/08/el-prisma-de-la-conversacin-en-la-web.html
Best regards from Chile!

August 13, 2008 by Doug McIsaac

Thanks for sharing this, very interesting.

It will help me explain all of the pieces to some of my clients.

Doug

August 13, 2008 by Alex, aka SocialButterfly

I love the new conversation prism, very nice! It’s time a new one came out. All the other diagrams I’ve seen have left something out or have been over simplified or over complexed…this one is perfect! Is there a way to access an original jpg file that can be enlarged?

Thank you for your hard work!

Alex, aka SocialButterfly
socialbutterfly4change@gmail.com

August 12, 2008 by Zac Martin

This is really interesting, I’ll be sure to pass it onto a few friends.

August 10, 2008 by David Rawle

This is great, as is your emphasis on listening. The conversation IS going on. It’s changing minds and molding opinions and driving purchase decisions. Listening is the key, and it takes great discipline, detective work, and perseverance.

August 9, 2008 by jon gatrell

now I have to join more networks, I feel like I’m not where I need to be. Thanks for the prism.

August 8, 2008 by børge

I’m glad you added ideni.ca to the list of micro services!

One service that I miss on your prism, though, is the social photo sharing service ipernity. It’s much like Flickr, but better in many ways IMHO. Here’s a great “side by side” comparison between the two services.

August 7, 2008 by laurent

Brian
I don’t know if it’s me and I also scanned the comments so see if someone already told you but the word inside the starfish is ‘conversions’..shouldn’t it be conversations?

August 7, 2008 by Elaine

Brian:

This visual would work very well in a course I’m teaching this coming fall in computer mediated communication. May I use it?

Dr. Elaine Young
Assoc. Prof. Marketing and e-Business
Champlain College

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ABOUT ME

Brian Solis is Principal of FutureWorks, an award-winning PR and New Media agency in Silicon Valley. Solis blogs at PR2.0, bub.blicio.us, and regularly contributes marketing & tech insight to industry publications.

He's a published author and an avid speaker on the topic of new marketing and engagement. Solis is among the original thought leaders who paved the way for Social Media. He's a co-founder of the Social Media Club and a founding member of the Media 2.0 Workgroup.

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