Infographics and Social Media

Have you had infographics on your mind, but no budget to hire a graphic designer?

Brands have been witnessing a shift in how their customers locate their businesses. Where organic search was king, visual product discovery is now highly popular with Pinterest leading the way.  

Wouldn’t it be perfect if your brand could develop high levels of advocacy and positive sentiment with little or no investment in a marketing strategy? It appears this is precisely what is happening on Pinterest. The latest research would suggest that users posting brand collateral on their scrapbooks drive a massive 70% of brand engagement. 

- See more at: http://beta.usefulsocialmedia.com/customer-insight/pinterest-art-visual-marketing#sthash.41B1Ua5W.dpuf

With some PR disasters happening in social media, most companies are quite hesitant to jump in at all. However, the following infographic show some good examples on how social media can be used during crisis or calamities.

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).

Back in 2010, Google debuted Google Instant, a set of functionality updates designed to speed up the search process by providing suggestions and results in

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: