Curation Revolution

Haiku Deck Rocks Visual Marketing
If you haven't used http://www.haikudeck.com yet you should. Mark Traphagen turned me on to it and it is the best visual marketing tool out there. Here are 5 reasons we love Haiku Deck:

* SO EASY - the creators of Haiku Deck may have made the easiest to use tool on the plant.
* Free - Amazingly the tool is FREE (at the moment).
* Visual Marketing - we use the tool to find images from the Creative Commons. Content marketing is hampered without great images & Haiku Deck helps you find 'em.
* Their Community - great marketers creating awesome decks makes the Haiku Deck community one of our favorites (right up there with Scoop.it).
* Their team - the Haiku Deck team is responsive, social and they want to help.

If you aren't using this awesome content marketing tool yet, you should be.

Piktochart is an easy infographic design app that requires very little effort to produce simple and high quality graphics. Create free infographics here.

Marty (@Scenttrail) Review
I used Piktochart yesterday to create an infographic to support my 5 Easy Email Marketing Tips (http://sco.lt/7T6pTF ). I am NOT a graphic designer, but I found Piktochart helped me think like one.

Creation of my first "infographic", and I put infographic in quotes not to offend any true infographic pro, took about two hours. Piktochart's User Interface is excellent, intuitive and drag and drop friendly.

At first I tried to do everything IN Piktochart. Then I noticed they have a robust import tool so I created a draft in the tool, took a screen shot, sized the screen shot up to their 600 x 400 and worked on it in photoshop.

Piktochart, if you are reading this, you may want to make an export tool that is as easy to use as your import tool. If I could export a block at a time it would be ideal. Even when I was finished and published I manipulated some spacing of the infographic by selecting and moving blocks in Photoshop.

The tool comes complete with icons like the bulls eye and pad. I couldn't understand how to color my fonts (their styling options seem to not come up the way they are supposed too) so I added the text color in Photoshop and important the resulting block overlaying what was there.

My process made the graphic HEAVY since I had 2 copies of everything, so it would be great to export, work on a block in Photoshop, import it back in and then overlay on a blank canvas. The only way I can see to do that now is start over.

Creating visual support for our blog posts is so important Piktochart is a great new tool for any content marketer / blogger. Interesting to note my infographic of 5 Easy Email Tips got 3x the views and shares of my written Scoop. We know the visual marketing revolution is upon us, so getting as good as someone like Mark Smiciklas (http://www.intersectionconsulting.com/ ).

Piktochart is a great and timely tool! Highly recommended. Marty

Haiku Decks Create Shares & Community
If we told you there was a tool that would generate 3,200 views of your content on average and produce almost 60,000 views and over 700 shares for 34 uses (of the tool) you would USE IT right? This Curagami post shares why Haiku Deck is a powerful Internet marketing tool you should start using NOW.