An Infographic Is Worth a Million Words
One of the biggest challenges faced by both B2B journalist and PROs alike is making a story visually compelling. It’s relatively easy for consumer products, you often have a plethora of choices, ranging from lifestyle shots, to celebrity endorsements to something a little more artistic. However with B2B products, regardless how cool the technology or service is, you often only have access to pictures of either a big black box, a screen shot or of course your resident spokesperson.
If you take a minute right now and look through a traditional trade publication I am confident that you’ll see that in 99% of cases this is true. There might be some pictures that break this mould, perhaps someone sat at a computer or people huddled around a desk, but in most of the cases the image adds little ‘value’ to the article and was probably courtesy of Getty images rather than the company itself.
So what can we do? Do we start asking celebrities to lay across aforementioned black boxes to add some additional appeal?
Or do we start doing things differently and providing images that not only add value to the journalist but also to our clients?
Infographics are graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge. They allow “viewers” to quickly consume and understand complex information, and apart from that they are damn cool as well. They also have media appeal for both print and online publications, as well as being highly shareable via social media, and so they are quickly becoming an essential part of our PR tool kit.
However, one of the biggest challenges remains educating both PROs and their clients on how best to visually represent this information. So, here are top 5 tips from our experience:
- Think about the big picture. Just like any other PR activity, think about what you want to communicate and the action you want the “viewer” to take.
- Tell a story. Create a storyboard which outlines the story and messages you want to communicate and then start thinking about how you want to visualise this.
- Fit for Purpose. Just like lifestyle shots it’s important to consider how you want your Infographic to be used and how much branding you should allow. It’s better to be subtle and suitable for purpose, than overt and sat on the company’s website.
- Think like ‘Mad Men’. Pithy text that add value to the images and quickly communicate the point are essential to creating a good Infographic. Remember it’s a graphic visualisation and not a short story with pictures.
- Don’t just tag it on. Think about how your Infographic fits into the overall campaign and ties in with the story that the press release and other supporting materials communicate. The Infographic should support the story – not tell a completely different one.
The creation of an Infographic is obviously much easier when you have research to support it, but it can also be used to support product launches and thought leadership in my opinion. For instance, a new hardware product that is 100 times faster than the previous model could be graphically represented by a sports car vs. a rocket ship…..well you get the idea.
If you are interested in learning more about Infographics, I would definitely suggest checking out Mashable.com who are a great resource of innovative takes on the medium.
Multitasking UK: What will advertisers do next?
The UK has been named a nation of ‘multitaskers’ thanks to social networks and increasingly sophisticated mobile phones, according to new research from Ofcom.
The research reveals that a fifth of all media is consumed at the same time as another form of communication with people spending almost half of their waking hours glued to a screen, on the phone to friends or listening to the radio.
Although TV is as popular as ever, almost one-fifth of the time spent watching TV is now accompanied by laptop or mobile activity. A finding supported by YouGov this week which found that that more than half of UK respondents (58%) are regularly consuming at least one other type of media while watching television.
With television being seen as one of the staples of the advertising industry it will be interesting to see how they react and engage with their target markets moving forward. Brands could sponsor online elements of shows that incorporate your social network, for example real-time quizzes and voting amongst friends. Alternatively, e-commerce professionals as it could offer the unique opportunity to directly link products shown on TV to internet retailers.
Whatever the next generation of advertising will look like we know that the picture below will no longer represent the typical television viewers today.
Rainy Barcelona, but good spirits in MWC itself
So I’ve survived my 7th Mobile World Congress (my first rainy one, oh where was the lovely Barcelona sunshine when I needed it?) and it’s great to hear from many of the exhibitors that they had a much better Congress than last year and many talked of an emergence from the recession.
However, whilst there is some nostalgia over the heady days of the late 80s early 90s when glitz, glamour and entertainment on big ships and yachts were the order of the day, it’s good to know that those days will never come back (And by the way, how refreshing to see only a few stands resorting to scantily clad young girls for overweight middle aged business men old enough to be their fathers to drool over!) Poor girls.
What’s perhaps good about coming out of a boom and almost bust time is that everyone is humbler, less arrogant, more keen to be ‘open’ and work together than before. Ultimately, this has to be good for the customer. More than any other show perhaps, there were more partnerships announced, more talk of openness and the ability to work together.
Two of the biggest pieces of news were around Microsoft and Google. Undoubtedly there was a lot of buzz around Steve Ballmer’s press conference on Windows 7 to be released in time for the Christmas period. His appearance emphasises the importance in this market. Google unveiling its new mantra ‘Mobile First’ also captured the imagination of The Daily who gave it front page news. Companies such as Google are fundamentally changing the mobile business and the established operators and equipment vendors need to understand how to work and more importantly compete with these new players.
Many at the show talked about the fact that with the explosion of mobile broadband, cloud computing and smart-phones, the technology is now fast becoming a reality for consumers to engage with brands, multimedia, social networking sites and applications. Users can now check Facebook, watch YouTube, surf the web, download slide presentations and apps wherever they are, just by pressing a couple of buttons on their handset key pad or touchscreen.
It’s undoubtedly an exciting time in which we live and reminds me of the PC explosion of the early 80s and the internet boom of the early 90s.
SCG
AOL Goes Out with A Twitter
Woke up this morning to find my AOL connection was kapput. After some DIY kit testing I realised my WLAN, DSL and claptop were AOK but the Internet was dead. Discovering whether it was a big outage or just my personal bit of the Internet was something of a trial. When I got online in the office, no alerts on technical support page, found UK message boards have been culled and web chat was down for “improvements”. Other than a cryptic message on the technical support line, I found out the scale of the problem through a quick experiment in crowdsourcing via Twitter. On a day when some media are turning cold on Twitter’s value, I found that all that useless babble was invaluable and the best way to find out exactly what was going on. Thank you Twitter
Ofcom on message?
A recent study by Ofcom revealed that around 30% of people in the UK don’t have an internet connection at the moment. The same survey also highlights that 43% of these people would stay offline if they were offered a free computer and broadband. Main reasons for not having internet at home was a lack of interest or need. These results seem to indicate that a lot of work is still to be done to engage this group and highlight the benefits the internet can bring both to their lives and work.
According to the much awaited Digital Britain report which will be published today (lots of buzz around this on Twitter), everyone in Britain could be guaranteed broadband access by 2012 at speeds of 2Mb per second. Ofcom’s report reveals that average broadband speeds across the UK are currently around 3.6Mb. While these sorts of speeds are adequate for general browsing and online shopping, activities like downloading music, online gaming and streaming video, making the most of services like BBC iPlayer, will prove to be a challenge for most. Add to this, currently, rural connections are not good enough for even basic surfing most of the time, in some cases connection is even non-existent.
So what else needs to be done to make Britain truly digital? As with any service, maybe there is scope to target broadband offers more specifically to certain target groups, making the internet experience relevant to where you are, who you are and what you’re trying to do online.
For example with the iPhone fever taking over the globe, Nationwide Insurance recently launched a new advertising campaign promoting how customers could utilise their iPhone in the event of an accident, highlighting the various features such as GPS and camera.
Therefore a campaign showing how David Jones, 73, uses the internet to stay in touch with his family in Australia would surely be much more effective than terms such as fibre, 50Mbps and social networks.
