The Conversation Prism by Brian Solis and JESS3

What is The Conversation Prism?

Developed in 2008 by Brian Solis, The Conversation Prism is a visual map of the social media landscape. It’s an ongoing study in digital ethnography that tracks dominant and promising social networks and organizes them by how they’re used in everyday life.

You can use the Conversation Prism poster in a number of ways…

1. Show your executive team that social media is not a fad and that it’s bigger than Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Pinterest
2. Share with your team to motivate them on new ways to think about social media
3. Celebrate that you’re on the map!
4. Study the landscape as you plan your next social media strategy
5. Show the world that you appreciate art
6. Give as gifts to everyone you know who loves social media or who needs to learn to love it

What’s New?

What’s different from 3.0? Well, version 4.0 brings about some of the most significant changes since the beginning. In this round, we moved away from the flower-like motif to simplify and focus the landscape. With all of the changes in social media, it would have been easier to expand the lens. Instead, we narrowed the view to focus on those that are on a path to mainstream understanding or acceptance. The result was the removal of 122 services while only adding 111. This introduces an opportunity for a series of industry or vertical-specific Prisms to be introduced so stay tuned.

Overview of Categories Added:

1. Social Marketplace
2. Enterprise Social Networks (shortened to “Enterprise” for formatting, companies included here were previously grouped under “Nicheworking”, which we redefined.)
3. Influence
4. Quantified Self
5. Service Networking

Categories Review:

1. Virtual Worlds
2. Blogs/Conversations
3. sCRM (Candidate for new Prism)
4. Attention/Communication Dashboards (Candidate for new Prism)
5. DIY + Custom Social Networks (Candidate for new Prism)
6. Collaboration (Candidate for new Prism)