Social media’s ‘Game of Thrones’
How would the online landscape look in terms of the Starks, Lannisters, Durrandons and other Westeros families? This PR firm mapped it out.
In early 2007, SHIFT Communications’ CEO Todd Defren commissioned a map of the online world to better visualize the social media landscape. This was a simpler time, when MySpace ruled the social media sphere and people still blogged heavily on services like LiveJournal.
Today the social-media world is radically different, and it was time to revisit the social media world map. This time, we mapped out the social media landscape against the world of Westeros, the lands featured in Martin’s “Game of Thrones”:
How did we build the new map? We took published user base data for as many social networks as we could round up, loaded them into analytics software and turned the data into treemaps (visual representations of statistics and other data.)
We cut the treemaps into individual squares and gave them to our creative services team. Sarah Muscarella, also an avid Game of Thrones fan, aligned all of the squares with the maps of Westeros and Essos, creating the map you now see. We also added a couple dozen Easter eggs on the map, if you look closely.
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