Mapping online influence at #UUKCOMMS 2018

I spent yesterday at Universities UK’s Making an Impact: Marketing and Communications in Higher Education event. It was a great opportunity to catch up with colleagues in the sector and hear about some of the amazing work that’s been going on in HE communications, and the other delegates got to hear me talking about my favourite topic – online influence.

I like to look back at the online conversation around a conference to see what kind of discussions were taking place, so – as requested by a few people at the event – I’ve got a visualisation of the conference hashtag #UUKComms to share with you.

I’m not going to go into great detail about the people on the map – you can see that speakers such as Emma Gilmartin, Sian Griffiths, and Rebecca Longhurst are among the more influential bubbles.

As a quick explainer… the size of a dot shows how well connected an account is to other well-connected accounts. The better and more numerous its connections, the bigger it appears in the map. Accounts that are frequently connected with each other through interactions are likely to appear closer together on the map, and accounts that are likely to be discussing similar topics are coloured the same for ease of identification. The more interconnected the conversations are, the closer they come to the centre of the map.

Those who were at the conference will have heard me stress the power of personal accounts in influencing online conversations, and we can see this represented here – the accounts of institutions and brands are represented, but they are usually overshadowed by those of the people themselves.

The map is available as a PDF download if you want to examine it in more detail yourself (or if you want to see where you ended up on the map…)

Thanks to UUK for inviting me to speak, and I hope everyone learned at least a few things, even if not from my talk…