Mapping the Great Beyond: Identifying Meaningful Networks in

58 MAPPING THE GREAT BEYOND
There have been many anecdotal references to individual
engagements and occasionally reference has been made to numbers
of followers—for the record, Dipnote had 6,624 followers and
America.gov had 2,260 when I first wrote about this in July. Although
as Dipnote was following 4,186 people I wonder if they have time
to read all those tweets with any degree of engagement, never mind
keep track of all the direct messages, replies and mentions. 77 If they
cannot deal with this level of interest then the idea of engagement
may already be under pressure, or at least the level of resources
required to run the initiative may be disproportionate to the return.
However, does looking at these numbers thus indicate success? At
time of writing, Lance Armstrong had 1,551,850 followers, but is a
numbers competition really what a PD organization should consider
success when using Twitter?
While numbers of followers can be interesting and Armstrong
is undoubtedly vastly outstripping Dipnote and America.gov with
pictures of his pasta, this really does not get to the heart of engaging
with individuals.
A closer analysis of the geographic location stated by those
following America.gov, demonstrates the largest cluster of followers
are actually in the USA, Figure 28. 78 The remaining clusters represent
data broken down by geographic regions including the Middle East,
Europe and Latin America, along with an additional category for
those who stated “earth,” “the world”, “www” or similar.
Visualized through a word cloud, Figure 29, the data for Dipnote
show a tendency toward followers in the U.K., and particularly
Washington, D.C. 79