thx notational for the heads up on this thread. this is something we have to do quite a bit at everybodyatonce and for now, it’s a bit of a kludge.
Most of the really good useful graph visualization tools will give you reach and “influencer” highlights without showing you how content actually spreads on a platform.
Mapping the spread of a piece of content across multiple platforms is tough unless you have the absolute original post to work from and even then, many efforts tend to miss other instances of the content (manual retweets, manual regrams, reuploads, etc.)
If you happen to have access to most of the data with all of the parent-child relationships, and all of the timestamps on all of the platforms and don’t mind trying a few potentially messy merges, you can grow your own visualizations using Gephi. Here’s a nice tutorial on how to get started.
In the meantime, what we tend to do is use analytics to measure spread where we can while reporting other instances of our content (Google Image Search, tracking YouTube content id matches) anecdotally.
The best implementation of social content mapping right now (imo) is Union Metrics’ for Tumblr Reblog Network. UM lets you see who has reblogged from who as well as how many notes those downstream posts are responsible for.
Here’s a nice gif of a post’s spread from unwrapping:
Where Does My Tweet Go is gorgeous but costly (and understandably so.) I’ll probably spend more time in WDMTG in the coming months. It’s complexity is not as useful as UM’s tree structure.
Google did an awesome thing with Ripples but, you know, Google+.
Once you have this information, you have to tread lightly. While these trees may look like math, knowing how to make use of them is more of an art.
If you’re managing a blog, perhaps you want to find ways to make the larger nodes more reliable. Maybe you want to see what they added in their reblog to give it a lift. Maybe you want to try to move them closer to source, maybe not. Done right, you can play a key role in building diverse, resilient fan communities. Done wrong, you can poison the entire root system. The trick is to approach every person with the full respect they deserve beyond the graph.
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