Mapping the Question: what does it mean if the demographic of two-thirds of your audience is not your target demographic?

Matt Armstrong posed this question on Mountainrunner. The coding of the data he had gathered was crowdsourced via twitter. This has allowed him to run an analysis of the global audience of a government initiative run on a social media application.

The result of his analysis demonstrates that 67% – 70% of the audience is a demographic the organisation is not supposed to target. In numbers terms, 982 of the nearly 2000 individuals for which there was data, self-identified their location as in the United States. Further data available on Mountainrunner.

This data provides a number of further points to consider, two of which are;

a)      Location and nationality is not the same thing; though with no evidence either way an assumption on random distribution of citizens and visitors would indicate many individuals are likely to be US citizens.

b)      What does the distribution of users look like, what are the common nodes within the network, both within the US and outside?

To start the process of visualising the network of individuals engaged in this initiative I’ve mapped the network using the coded data provided my Matt and his helpers.

This map & a higher resolution version of the map are available in png format, (may display better in Safari).

The lines on the map demonstrate how the individuals connect to particular locations and which continent that location belongs to. The dots identify the individuals their location as they defined it, and the relevant geographic area or continent. This allows clusters to identified around locations and comparison to be drawn between the audience in each geographic region.

As a number of individuals chose not to register a location, preferring ‘the blue planet’, ‘Earth’, or ‘the world’ these have all been grouped together.

This map is a fairly basic version of what these techniques can achieve; commentary on the map and how this can also be used to demonstrate or evaluate  a Public Diplomacy organisation’s engagement with different themes within social media will follow shortly.