Visually Mapping Your Social Self

Visually Mapping Your Social Self

by | Jun 12, 2014 | "How To" Tech, Musings: Humans + Connected Tech, Personal Innovation

In older days, I would Google myself to see how I surfaced.  That’s not just an ego thing — I found many strange things attributed to me.  I research myself, or at least my professional reach.

In current days, there are tools that help me “research myself” using visualization tools.

I’m sharing two here:

InMaps from LinkedIn Labs

I have a lot of LinkedIn connections.  LinkedIn says 500+; it is a lot more than that.

LinkedIn Labs provides Inmaps, an intriguing tool to visually map the inter-connectivity of your Connections.  It gives you a color coded interconnected visual that you need to figure the connections out for yourself.

Here is mine, updated to today:

LinkedIn InMaps

 

The labels on the bottom left are provided by color code, and you can roll over each of the dots to see who each person is.  You then can extrapolate for yourself the nature of the connections that are influencing the color codes.  The Green on the bottom left, for example, are many of my friends from Fielding Graduate University in educational research, who are some distance away from my Blue friends on the bottom right, who mostly are digital media professional acquaintances from the past decade plus.   LinkedIn has a good video from 2011 on how to use this tool on YouTube here.

SocialBro

There are many tools to look at Twitter.  I have (at least) two Twitter “handles”: @maremel and @gigijohnson.  I try to use @maremel for industry trend information and new Maremel programs and projects.  @gigijohnson, on the other hand, is for more perspective comments.  I have faded with both into retweeting articles I enjoy, and I can see that in my own casual observation.

SocialBro lets me take this a little further.  I can break my Twitter followers into a wide variety of categories, including how often they Tweet and how stale their Tweets are or how many influencers follow them.  Here’s a partial visualization of Twitter followers with larger followings who follow @maremel, as well as below that a tag cloud of what types of words Followers use in their bios:

Influential Followe

 

 

 

 

 

tag cloud biosI pay for the service about $7/month; price is related to the volume of followers you are analyzing.  It also can track the overlap between your followers and other third-party accounts.  I use the tool to analyze similar companies to various clients and partners to see who are combined influencers and who might be intriguing to start to follow or converse with in the Twittersphere.

What other visualization tools do you use to spy on your social self?

Recorded Webinar: Drinking from the Digital Data Fire Hose

Recorded Webinar: Drinking from the Digital Data Fire Hose

by | Apr 14, 2014 | "How To" Tech, Events and Projects, Musings: Humans + Connected Tech, News and Updates, Personal Innovation

Fire Hose[Edited April 27, 2014]

We happily shared some of our work at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) OCIO Learning Session on April 17, 2014 both at their Auditorium in Washington DC and via a live Webinar, which you can as a recording below.  It was hosted by Dr. Melanie Cohen (@DrMELonMGMT) from HUD.

Overview

Dr. Gigi Johnson shared five (5) steps to both grow and simplify how we can use abundant data to make better daily and strategic decisions.   She addressed questions such as:  How can I use the data that I can get now at a reasonable price with reasonable use of time to help my work thrive? How can I find ways to SAVE time and energy around data? How can I have the right data when I need it for decisions? and Can I create systems and structures to make this daunting task a little simpler?  

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You can find prior sessions by clicking on:  http://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD?src=/press/multimedia/videos

Slides

The slides can be seen at SlideShare and below:

Social Listening: Cool Tools

by | Mar 29, 2012 | "How To" Tech, Innovation Shifts, Tech+Change

We’re building new short-form classes here at the Maremel Institute (and join our email list to find out more about the upcoming schedule).  One that so far is in high demand is on Social Listening, the arts of using social media for business intelligence not just on big trends, but also on where unique conversations are going on that align with your work and message.

We are looking at current resources to share in these courses, and ran into a great SlideShare deck from December by Rosie Siman (@rosiesiman) on Social Listening tools.  We wanted to share this great visual representation of tools while we are putting our own work together.

1) Enjoy!

2) Let us know which ones you like or have been missed.

3) Let us know what you’d like to make sure that we cover in these new short-form classes.  You can contact us at synthesis [dot] maremel.com for more information and recommendations.

Social Listening Tools

View more presentations from rosie siman

 

How to Start with Google Docs

How to Start with Google Docs

by | Jan 16, 2012 | "How To" Tech, Innovation Shifts, Personal Innovation, Work Everywhere

We tend to start at the middle when sometimes we need to start at the beginning.

Some of us at Maremel have been setting a non-profit organization up for cloud-based collaboration.  To get them all on the same page,  we helped them move their shared work documents to Google Docs.

Movement screeched to a halt.  Quite a few group members needed a tutorial-style boost into Google Docs — just the basics to get started — though did not raise their hand directly that they didn’t understand the basics.

This need prompted us to return to the web for inspiration.  We took a look at the currently available tools online to understand Google Docs from scratch.  We hope this might be helpful for some folks who might not be comfortable otherwise getting started by trial and error.

Comprehensive Text
Videos

We found three YouTube videos that provided a good launching point for Google Docs:

There are a host of other YouTube videos with instructions.  Just search in YouTube on your specific question, which can be anything from how to use Forms (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzgaUOW6GIs&feature=relmfu), details on how to use spreadsheets and documents, and how to use Google Docs in more specific situations.  You can find a host of videos also within the Expert Village YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/expertvillage/search?query=google+docs .

We’ll be adding some digital basics to our blog in the future, just to brush us up on what is available, as well as what the current state of easy learning resources is online.