The Free Marketing Ecosystem

This is a really useful infographic (found via Fast Company blog) mapping the social networking, free marketing ecosystem. Designed by Chris Watson at Visualization Magazine it shows 30 different web 2.0 services offering free sites, feeds or embeds.

It fits nicely into the networked architecture approach, the idea that your brand lives in many more places than simply the domain that you own. There’s now a whole wealth of free content management systems, social networks, bookmarking tools that you can use to promote a brand, product or service. This is something that I believe all companies should map as part of their distributed content strategy.

The map shows places that you can create content, along with icons as to how you can publish (RSS, Print) and the connecting lines show where you could potentially re-publish that content again.

The map also illustrates which of these services provides stats so that you can measure more than your own  on-site analytics.  Stats from the other 3rd party sites  can potentially give clearer insight into the ‘network value’ of your content. For instance; Youtube shows how many times your video has been embedded and shared else-where, other than just views of the video on-site.

People absorb content on the web in more ways than ever, there’s an opportunity for brands/people to produce ultra- shareable content  very cost effectively. The more ways the merrier I think, but keep in mind that its probably better to do fewer well than do lots badly. To simply use many of these platforms as a broadcast medium would not be wise, the true value lies in the engagement and feedback that you can potentially receive from each of the individual audiences around the network.

Image Credit: Flickr User visual think map (If, like me, your a fan of infographs there’s lots there! )