About a year ago, we comparatively visualized conversations between two competitive brands of major sport apparel companies.  The network of communications of Brand A showed better potential characteristics for healthy and robust interaction.

One year later, and more than 1,000,000 people talking about each brand, what do we see?

Several million conversations later, we still see a deeply interconnected pattern of communication in Brand A.  The large number of clusters are still visible, but the interconnections are less clearly visible.  Let’s compare with Brand B:

Brand B began with fewer, more centralized, clusters of conversation, and less “cross talk” between them.

Again, several million conversations later, it has evolved to a larger version of what we saw before.  While there are more distinct clusters one year later in Brand B than Brand A, each of those clusters receives less input from others.  Visually, we see this distinction by the are of fewer “clear” clusters toward center of the later graph of Brand A. In other words, should something great happen, the network of communications in Brand A would foster faster and more reinforcing communication.  If you’re a marketer, that’s what you want.

So, what’s the difference in stock performance over the past year?  Brand A outperformed B by about 30%.