Last week I posted a little thought starter on my blog that's been gaining some interest and momentum, so I wanted to share it more broadly with the iMedia community. The image to the left represents my personal Social Spectrum. The size of the logos approximate use and the positioning of them relate to a primary use in the given quadrant. Every person and brand has its own Social Spectrum and this simple tool helps map them.
You can see in my Social Spectrum that the new "Verbs" in digital media that I'm actively working--blogging, bookmarking, feeding, sharing--are mostly public and professional. Some feedback I heard was a surprise that Flickr, the photosharing function I use--is in the personal/private quadrant. While I post some images of good digital and advertising work on Flickr, the lionshare of my use is for private and personal family albums which are not available to any but the closest friends and family.
This conscious editorial process is at work with all we do. We're finding that consumers and organization are using discrete tools and even channels within those tools as a "work around" to manage the balance of their Social Spectrum. It's telling that Dell has over 22-channels on Twitter, some in multiple languages, because not all messages are meant for mass audiences. In fact, fewer are these days.
The Social Spectrum takes into account different audiences and objectives. For me, the audience that I'm most actively engaging is my team at Real Branding. Thinking about the audience mapped to concentric circles, beyond my team would be our extended teams of freelancers, alumni, partners and clients. Beyond that would be a larger digital and traditional marketer such as the iMedia community as well as practitioners at agencies with which we integrate across businesses. And the final circle would be the business at large, and often our messages reach those in far flung industries and areas of the world we may not have anticipated. With that context, it's more important that we add value to the discussion and organization of thought in digital marketing in our Public and Professional spaces. The Social Spectrum drew into focus for us the tools we want to prioritize in order to contribute.
A final thought on reactions to this tool. It's telling that much of the feedback I've been getting on this exploration has come through private and personal channels like email or direct-twitter, rather than public and professional ones such as comments in my blog, facebook, friendfeed or twitter. I believe at the heart of what makes this personal and emotionally-charged is an ongoing struggle we all have with work/life boundaries in real life and it's expressed in our dynamic privacy spectrum.
I'm interested in your feedback, private or public, about the Social Spectrum as well as seeing what your Social Spectrum looks like. I think we'd learn a ton through comparison. If you're interested in sharing, download The Social Spectrum Powerpoint from Slideshare.net, move/add/resize/relink (the ppt links currently are active hotspots to my social media) the logos to map yours and post a link to it below in the comments section. Or ping me through iMedia People Finder to share.
Be Great. Cheers! Mark Silva
