You may have heard about the New York Times Lab’s latest creation, Cascade. More than just a drool-worthy data visualization, Cascade tells the story of how a news story is shared on Twitter. Individual events (like a tweet, the use of bit.ly to shorten a url, or a Twitter user appending her own perspective to the message as it is passed along) are all represented as individual colored nodes. Connecting these dots is where the key insights lie, showing how a story can rapidly get passed around to millions of people.

If you’re a data visualization nerd like me, you might be blown away by the technical achievements of this project or by the stunning visual representation of a complex social graph. But even if you’re not interested in dataviz, you should be interested in the very nature of the underlying concept: although it is extremely complex, social sharing can be mapped, visualized, and understood. What this means for the world of digital marketing and social media strategy is profound. Rather than simply seeing metrics like how many Tweets share a common hashtag, or how many people clicked the Facebook Like button for your brand, imagine being able to track individual decisions by individual users.



Last month one piece of news that rapidly saturated the Twitter world was the startup company Color receiving $40M in pre-launch funding. There were several source articles that printed stories about this news, but then there were thousands and thousands of tweets that reverberated through Twitter users’ feeds. Imagine if you could track the individual events leading up to a single user’s decision to click “retweet.” How many times did she have to see the same message before feeling like she was a part of something big and wanted to become a participant? Imagine if you could rank each re-tweeter based on how many additional tweets were created from his message. You could immediate identify the influencers within every social circle, gaining valuable information about how to start the next big trend.

The subtle intricacies of a complex social network are baffling and beautiful. Not dissimilar to the human brain or the complex network of fibers found in the nervous system, the web of interconnections found in a social network with millions of users is extremely challenging to comprehend or picture in one’s mind. But with the work of some brilliant researchers, the mystery is unraveling and we can expect a future in which social sharing can be fully understood and mastered as a science.