Infographics and Social Media

Charles Arthur: Trying to analyse the amount of activity on Google+ in comparison to Facebook or Twitter yields little useful information - because it doesn't have the same purpose as them

Silicon Valley is full of dreamers. Crazy dreamers. Lazy dreamers. Brilliant dreamers.

 

Silicon Valley is also full of even bigger piles of money to hyperloop those dreams into tomorrow’s reality.

 

This past week, the Valley’s leading dreamers and their backers, and others from around the country who want to be just like them, trekked down to a small resort outside Los Angeles to dream big at D: All Things Digital.

 

The format is simple.

 

During the day, the ringmasters, Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, pepper CEOs with questions as their targets do their best to stick to talking points and avoid sweating out.

 

At night, dinners and drinks move to poker and pizza upstairs, where billionaires, founders, journalists – and even a few bankers – talk about the future of the internet, technology and the world.

 

This year’s interviews featured Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook), Dick Costolo (Twitter), Ben Silbermann (Pinterest), Barry Diller (IAC), Jeff Zucker (CNN), Tim Cook (Apple), John Chambers (Cisco), Jeffrey Immelt (GE) and Kazuo Hirai (Sony).

I’ve become a big fan of content curation in the last year or two. It’s one way that site or business owners can build a community around their brands as well as develop a reputation as a “thought leader” on a subject. Many people, however, aren’t familiar with it. When people ask, I tell them, with so much information on the web these days, people want to see content about a topic, but curated by someone whose opinion they respect. Content curation sites allow for this.

 

A large group of these sites has popped into existence in recent years. One way or another, they allow people or businesses to gather all their favorite blog posts, news stories, pictures or videos in one topic and store them in one place on an ongoing basis. I like to use one called Scoop.it for the majority of my content curation. I manage topics on startups, cities, the future and other subjects. 

I admit, as someone who loves popular news stories and content, I get a little jealous when I see a controversial post on a blog. These posts, with their heavy amount of comments and social shares, are a content marketer’s dream. They mean more people clicking around your site, noticing what you do and perhaps even helping your bottom line, whether it be through selling a product or loading ads.

Occurring in many a viral post is the “flame war.” Urban Dictionary defines it as “a heated argument between two individuals, that results in those involved posting personal attacks on each other during or instead of debating the topic at hand.” After having been in a few of these myself over the years, it has colored my perspective on commenting in general.

- See more at: http://www.ginzametrics.com/blog/why-flame-wars-are-relevant-to-content-marketing/#sthash.OIjRMJ46.dpuf

Building a branding strategy in the digital age can be a bit like trying to construct a house of cards while sitting on the rear seat of a motorcycle.  An ordinary person can’t do it without quickly gaining a sense of futility (and of course, personal peril).

 

Many experts have been writing advance obituaries for Internet search for several years now; in most cases these have also been advance obituaries for search-giantGoogle GOOG +1.24%.  Such experts often argue that the art of search-engine optimization (SEO) is dead or on life support, leaving online marketers to flail wildly in search of a new strategy that would allow them to reach the right consumers.

 

Yet just as Google is in far better shape than many skeptics would have imagined (with the Financial Times’ John Gapper terming it the General Electric GE -0.34% of the 21st century), SEO is far from dead.  In fact, a new wave of SEO-focused services is gaining attention for the ability to bring a more understandable and more intelligent approach to maximizing an organization’s “findability.”

A start-up has introduced analytics tools that it says will help businesses communicate more effectively in global markets and identify which countrie

GinzaMetrics, the Y Combinator graduate and 500 Startups-funded SEO management and content marketing platform, today announced a major update and redesign of its service. With this update, the company is introducing this new design to highlight features like its competitor comparisons, recommendations and a white label solution for its dashboard.

 

The company, which launched in 2010, also announced that it has named Sean McCullough as its new CTO. McCullough was the technical co-founder and CTO ofLaunchRock, the popular service for setting up “launching soon” sites and a co-founder of Ping.fm, which Seesmic acquired in 2010. Previous to joining GinzaMetrics, McCullough was also the CTO of Sodisco. As GinzaMetric’s COO Eric O’Brien told me, the team believes McCullough is the right fit for the team (“He is a hard-core engineer and entrepreneur with a penchant for death metal and good drinks,” she said). GinzaMetric’s staff has doubled in size over the last few months and now includes team members in six countries.

New research emerging from Curalate describes what types of images get the most pins, repins, and likes on Pinterest.

 

Analysis of more than 500,000 images looking at 30 different visual characteristics like textures, colors and more, uncovered a pattern in the popular pictures on Pinterest.

 

Let's have a look at some of the data, which suggests users have preferences for:

Vibrant images: The most repinned images have multiple colors, and those with multiple dominant colors have 3.25 times more repins per image than those with just a single dominant color.Certain colors: Red images get more repins than blue images. What's more, images that are red, orange and brown receive about twice as many repins than images that are blue.

Google announced at Google I/O this month that it’s introducing a number of changes to Google+, which mainly affect the site design as well as usability.

I love good infographics. And as the person who considers which third-party infographics we run, I appreciate a good pitch, one that demonstrates that someone is aware of what our site is about, what’s appropriate for us and doesn’t take a cookie cutter approach.

 

That’s a good pitch. Here’s a bad one that I received yesterday through the Marketing Land contact form:

 

"I came across your blog and I have been following for a little bit now. I have enjoyed your articles and think they are very informative. I would like to pass along an infographic describing the growth of social media marketing and how careers within the field are growing.

 

I know how you get several infographic submissions a week and they amount to a sales pitches, however, this is just not one of those. I think you will be able to use this on your website and have great feedback from your readers....."

I recently attended the New South Digital Marketing Conference in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina on behalf of the GinzaMetrics team. Here's some of the advice we picked up.

Become a data guru: Only about 20 percent of companies are actually making decisions based on data, and the rest are flying by the seat of their pants. Learn & document: Determine if your efforts are successful and understand why or why not.Become automatic: Once you’ve started testing and learning, you will know what metrics yield results. Master targeting: Targeting can help place the right experience before customers at the right time. 

Click through to read more!

A big part of what made Facebook reach IPO stage was the arrival of grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers and yes, parents. Passing the “grandma test,” which pushed Facebook to over a billion users, is probably the key to Tumblr’s future. So, will Grandma use it? I tend to think not. At least not as many as those who joined Facebook, or at least not right away. Why? There are some inherent barriers. The idea of “blogging,” even when it is as simplified and dare I say enjoyable as Tumblr can make it, can still be highly intimidating to people who are less “computer savvy.” With Facebook, you sign up, add your friends, and then see what they are doing. It’s simple. With Tumblr, there is still the impression that you are actually starting a blog, which of course comes with perceived technical hurdles such as setting up a template/design for your “site.” Sometimes those perceived technical hurdles can be as deadly as real ones.