Data & Stuff

This is a short braindump of ‘online influence’. It’s an interesting topic, and one that needs more research into, and more reflection on my part to clarify my thoughts.

Quite simply, numbers do not matter. The greater amount of people that want to listen to things you say, does not directly correlate into a great number of people respecting your thoughts and being influenced by them.

You could have the widest distribution network for your ideas, thoughts, concepts and such. This could target thousands of people. Yet, does it matter? How many people are going to read what you said, or more accurately how many people are going to read AND care about what you said?

So don’t get hung up on the numbers, surely a more tightly knitted group of people who DO care about what you say is more important.

Think of it like a mailshot, you can send your leaflet out to the whole of Birmingham, or you could spend some more time being careful and just send out your leaflet to those people in Birmingham who care about it’s content.

Look at the outcomes instead, what has happened. Have people read your article, commented on something, send you an email. People you care about. People who care about the topic.

In summary, if you’ve got 100,000 facebook fans (and no doubt a ton of those have ‘hidden your updates’) and 20,000 Twitter followers it doesn’t mean your message is more effective than someone with 1,000 facebook fans and 300 Twitter followers.

Instead, look at the metrics around engagement on the topic, and whether your message is targeting the right groups. Numbers ARE important, metrics are extremely important, but the size of them does not necessarily reflect your influence.

Data has been released (leaked) to Wikileaks, which contains information regarding engagements that have occured during the Afghan war. I’ve produced a visualisation, showing which of these engagements involved a friendly/civilian/enemy being killed in action [KIA]

These make up a smaller proportion of the data than one first might expect, but are still significant [other incidents may involve arrests, IED detection, engagements that didn't result in a KIA].

This is a map of Afghanistan, showing the regions the incidents occured (by colour), the size of the mark denotes the scale of the KIA count, whilst the shape of the mark shows who the attack was on.

Take a look at it ‘full screen’ for more ease of use, hovering over individual points will give you some details, as well as the fact you can filter by how many people were killed in the incident, and filter down to what type of incident.

Some other more detailed analysis was conducted by the Guardian (amongst others), who had pre-release access to the data. Further information on the data can be found on Wikileaks – Afgham War Diary. This visualisation was created using Tableau Desktop, and published to Tableau Public.

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