Often both us and our clients have a need to represent large amounts of data. Traditionally not a great deal of thought has gone into the representation of data. I’ve seen Powerpoint presentations with huge tables of numbers, the same old pie charts and line graphs, and I can honestly say I don’t remember what was in any of them. Showing data in this way is unengaging; it lacks any visual context and makes it difficult to remember.
Something which has started to become very popular in recent times is the use of infographics – both static and animated – to display lots of data, but make it fun, engaging and memorable. You may remember my entry a while back on Pinterest – that referenced an infographic which showed how it had grown.
Infographics, being representations of data, are treated as hard fact (and indeed the content is more often than not well researched and the author cites their sources) and so they can be very influential. The visual aspect of them also makes them highly viral, and the popular ones do the rounds on sites such as Mashable and dedicated sites such as visual.ly. Indeed some media outlets now have specialist teams creating them – see the Guardian Data Blog and some of the fantastic infographics created by The New York Times. These graphics get spread via blogs, email and social media and so are a fantastic way to build awareness around your company and its specialities.
Here are some of our favourite infographics:
Let us know via comments below or Twitter if you’ve got any more favourites!
LinkedIn, the business-focused social network, has again edged slightly outside of its own high-walled box with the introduction of a new ‘Follow‘ feature for businesses.
The new button can be placed on websites and, if clicked (and if the user is logged in) will let the user start ‘following’ the business and its updates on LinkedIn.
In other social media news, Facebook has started rolling out its mandatory change to bring the ‘timeline‘ feature to its fan pages. This will change the look of pages dramatically, allowing for better use of video and imagery and allow pages to post ‘milestones’ at any point in history – early adopters Ford using it to post an update about the launch of their Model T in 1908! More excellent examples were recently posted on Mashable here.
Lewis Lane February 16, 2012
Pinteresting
The new kid on the block in social media is a website called Pinterest – a social bookmarking/image sharing website which has experienced unheard of growth recently – to quote lemon.ly, creators of the fantastic infographic below:
Pinterest is the hottest new social networking site. The virtual bookmarking site allows users, or “pinners,” to collect photos and videos that link back to the products they love. Pinners create boards to share all of the things they find funny, delicious, beautiful, inspirational or otherwise interesting.
There’s been a great deal of buzz about Pinterest, especially from the likes of social media commentators Mashable. Clearly Pinterest is one to watch:
While all of those statistics are pretty impressive, the last is simply mind blowing – that “Pinterest is generating more referral traffic to websites than YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIncombined“; Pinterest has essentially with that statistic established itself as a must-use tool for search engine optimisation, and invariably the next big thing for retail brands and others alike.
Lewis Lane December 20, 2011
Have a Cool Yule!
We’ve all been very busy this year creating wonderful things for wonderful clients, and we end this year ready for another busy year with an exciting line-up. We sincerely hope that 2011 has been a good year for you, and that you’ll join us in welcoming 2012 and what it will bring. Season’s greetings and all the very best from everyone at Cool Blue for 2011.
Lewis Lane November 11, 2011
Just playing?
All my life, as far back as I can remember, my biggest passion has been computer games. I possess a frightening repertoire of knowledge on the subject, and I’ve seen how the industry has grown significantly over the last 20 years. I’ve seen it go from developers in their bedrooms getting their games distributed by publishers not much more advanced than themselves, through to the likes of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, with its estimated marketing budget alone of $2 million, and hundreds of developers, artists, musicians, animators, voiceover artists – including Tobey Maguire (Spider-Man) – and so on. It’s clear that production of a major modern game isn’t far removed from that of a movie.
As with big marketing campaigns for movies, MW3 (to give it its pet name) came armed with a slew of cross-promotions from the likes of PepsiCo-owned Mountain Dew (a brand already well-associated with the gaming scene) and, perhaps more surprisingly, Jeep – who have made a special edition vehicle based on a vehicle featured in the game. Product placement in games? Yes indeed!
Of course, most stores selling the game did a ‘midnight launch’, with queues of people waiting to get their hands on the first copies – social media sites subsequently erupting with photographs of game boxes held proudly in their new owners’ hands.
It’s perhaps hard to say what the mass appeal of the game itself is, or what makes it fundamentally different from many other games of the same ilk that have come before it, but it’s certainly easy to see how the massive marketing push has helped generate the hype that surrounds it.
There is however another way, and one that’s rapidly growing in popularity.
‘Indie’ games are games done the old fashioned way – typically by a bloke with a beard in his spare time, in his bedroom. They seem a little out of place, and it’s hard to see how something like this could raise its head above the water, never mind compete with the huge marketing juggernauts that currently exist. But compete they do.
The start of one of an unlimited number of adventures possible in Minecraft
Minecraft is one such indie game which is currently enjoying huge success and popularity. Swedish developer Markus ‘Notch’ Persson started working on his Lego-like game early in 2009, and thanks to nothing more than word of mouth and a bit of free promotion at gigs from high-profile fans such as the Canadian electronic musician ‘deadmau5’, the game has now sold 4 million copies – without the aid of a publisher. Persson has been able to quit his day job and start his own company with the proceeds. Currently the game sells for €14.95, and in April 2011, Persson estimated that Minecraft had made €23 million!
Notch has become a celebrity in his own right, with nearly 500,000 followers on Twitter, and has set an astounding example to other indie developers, showing them that they can compete with the industry successfully. Indeed, Minecraft currently sits at number 15 in the top selling PC games on Wikipedia.
What’s to be learned from these two drastically different methods of promotion? Personally, I think it shows that promoting your product successfully can be simply a matter of being humble, engaging with your community and, of course, having a great product. Marketing is about identifying what it is that your target audience wants – but promotion, especially through the channel of social media, can be all about transparency and the relationship with your audience. With indie games, the audience wants to see an underdog developer doing his or her best, and if the product is right, the audience will carry it far and wide.
