The Information Specialist's Scoop

"What can a librarian or information professional by any other name do for your business? Besides the tradtional research, print and electronic collection management, knowledge management, and so on? 

[...] 

- publish articles in industry venues that advance recognition of your business and/or issues of importance to you,
- provide data management, data curation, and project management in support of helping you and your business to build on its own knowledge base and/or meet federal agency expectations for research management , if you receive federal funding for said research,
- offer GIS mapping of data and other information visualization skills,
- educate your staff by offering brown bag seminars, webinars, and other events on various timely topics,
- deliver regular industry-related news in various easy-to-digest formats for busy staff and managers,
- add great value to your technology committees or other IT-committees (think of the experience your librarian/info pro has with online research tools, electronic subscriptions, software tools, and the information-seeking needs of your staff),
and so much more!"

The following infographic depicts findings from a recent survey showcasing the most common benefits of using social media.

Maybe you want create your own infographic, here 10 tools to support you to do it. [note mg]

Information graphics, visual representations of data known as infographics, keep the web going these days. Web users, with their diminishing attention spans, are inexorably drawn to these shiny, brightly coloured messages with small, relevant, clearly-displayed nuggets of information. They’re straight to the point, usually factually interesting and often give you a wake-up call as to what those statistics really mean.

Who can resist a colourful, thoughtful venn diagram anyway? In terms of blogging success, infographics are far more likely to be shared than your average blog post. This means more eyeballs on your important information, more people rallying for your cause, more backlinks and more visits to your blog. In short, a quality infographic done well could be what your blog needs right now.

Read more: http://bit.ly/K0s4LL

RT @UsefulSocial: Social Media: The Rules of Engagement - how to set up a corporate social media policy for your employees.

I like this tool, it's free, easy to use and without advertiser banner. Even if you're not a computer genius, you can use it. Try it, you'll be glad you did, for sure! [note Martin Gysler]

Facebook is changing how we can express ourselves on our facebook page. With their new Timeline Profile you are now free to express yourself with a big banner behind your profile picture.

Timelinecoverbanner.com provides you with the power to create a creative and customized Facebook cover easily and free even for commercial use.

Some of our cover editor features are: No visible watermark or branding on final image, very fast and responsive, you can blend profile picture seamlessly with timeline cover background or in other words you can make your profile photo and cover look integrated as one image, you draw or add text, and many more. We also have tons of cool graphic clipart from our partner sites which exclusively available only for our cover editor. You just need to browse them and copy paste the GRAPHIC ID of your desired image to our editor, and,.. presto!.. your chosen graphic is added and ready to combine with your photo.

Read more: http://timelinecoverbanner.com/

Learn how to create a company culture that encourages the use of social media among its employees.

The workplace as we once knew it -- post-it notes, memos, fax machines -- that's all gone. Today, it's all digital, baby.

Gone are the days when it was innovative to have a website. And creating a Facebook page for your business is no longer an advanced social media strategy. In fact, now that social media has picked up steam in its conquest of the digital realm, the companies coming out on top are not just those that send out some pre-scheduled tweets; the successful companies actually adapt their entire corporate culture to our social media-oriented world.

Some companies have found the transition to a social media culture easy, especially those which have already integrated social media into their marketing strategy. 

Read more: http://bit.ly/LHRAo7

An all in one. It's really an extraordinary item for doing the right things to improve your ranking. If you have a blog with great articles, but not many visitors, apply the ideas in this article, it'll help you for sure. [note mg]

Think about semantic keyword research to help you focus your content and and improve your rankings.

From Google’s Panda, Search Plus Your World and Venice updates, in the last year alone the SEO landscape has changed. And while that means your SEO strategy will change, too, there is one thing that remains the same…keywords.

Keywords remain important to your content and link strategies.

But there is one change coming down the Google pipeline that will change keywords…semantic search technology and the human element.

What is semantic search?

Basically, semantic search is technology that tries to determine what users mean when they type in a certain keyword.

They explore the semantics of those words…or the meaning behind them.

For example, if someone typed in “laptop” do they mean:

In the real world most people don’t search with one keyword…additional keywords give additional clues.

Read more: http://mz.cm/J9nABP