Beth's Blog: Nonprofits and Social Media

From Social Media StarFish To Conversation Prism

Illustration by Brian Solis and Jess 3
(Click through to see the larger image)

Darren Barefoot created a visual called "social media starfish" in his book "Getting to First Base." It was a remix of  Scoble's white board.  Brian Solis has created the next reiteration - the conversation prism.  (Perhaps it  inspired this visualization of the Digg Community activity)
 

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

I'm seeing a remix of the Social Media Game cards.  However, the existing "tool cards" have about 3/4 of the tools listed above - but people get so overwhelmed with choices.   The holy grail would be a grid that shows prism category, lists the tools, and column that describes possible applications or uses.   

Another thing I learned about from Horizon Project and Vicky Davis

I'm on a panel of journalists and bloggers invited to follow the Horizon Project, an educational technology project looking at how emerging technologies like virtual worlds will have an impact in classrooms in the future.  The participants are coming from around the globe. 

That means we hit the timezone trade off problem.   That means finding a single best meeting time for everyone is impossible.  It means trade offs like some people logging on at midnight.  It also means time zone confusion.   Luckily, Vicky Davis, one of the project organizers has found a creative solution -- AirSet.

Now, I'm looking at AirSet to possibly solve some of other time management problems - the big one - like juggling work schedules with Little League schedules.