The founder of Hootsuite has found a perfect metaphor for the constantly shifting alliances of social media: Game of Thrones-speak! Ryan Holmes asked his team to create a map for the warring tribes of House Tumblr, House Facebook, House Twitter, and the other factions who overlook the scenic River Vyne. People can check LinkedIn social selling here if they are interested to update their LinkedIn platforms.
[Honestly, the owls made us think of Etsy first…]
The map itself uses pseudo-medieval terminology to explain fighting and alliances between the companies, for instance “House Twitter blocks House LinkedIn: In June of 2012, House Twitter set up a ship blockade in the southern channel preventing its own citizens from dealing directly with the LinkedIn population” which actually does help make sense of corporate in-fighting. Sort of. However, we feel duty bound to point out that if you want a scale model of the social media world, you should consult xkcd’s Map of the Internet, or one of its updates.
We also have to note that this is not a pure public service announcement. In using this map you will see HootSuite’s own “Order of Owls” handily located dead-center. The knights of this order are sworn to provide you, Ser Consumer, with “safe travel between the largest houses of the realm,” which is actually a better guarantee than any actual ASOIAF characters ever get… But we still want to register two major objections here. First, Instagram Way should be declared impassable due to cat-traffic. Second, they didn’t go the extra mile and incorporate the “George R.R. Martin killed all 140 characters” joke anywhere in Twitter’s history. This was the most relevant place ever to put this joke. Come on.
