Our Top Five June Posts

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We’re coming to the close of another busy month! In case you missed them, here are this month’s most popular posts. What other content would you like to see here? Share in the comments!

As PR Continues to Become More Digital, Enter the Infographic!

We’ve covered infographics on Hypertext before, and we’re seeing graphical representations of information and data increasingly being used by journalists. I’m not only talking about infographics along the lines of the Royal Wedding Social Media Snapshot posted by Mashable or one of my favorites, salaries of professional athletes. Rest assured there’s a myriad of opportunities for B2B and B2C brands as well. Publications are looking to charts, graphs and other images that provide readers with an at-a-glance visual view of data that makes it much more digestible and easy to interpret, including Fast Company’s Infographic of the Day and USA Today’s Snapshot. And there’s value that goes even beyond generating the attention of the news media as we see readers and influencers sharing infographics via social platforms. Read more…

Go Back to Where You Came From – Using Digital to Build Bridges

Last night SBS aired, what it has been spruiking as a global television first, the reality doco Go Back To Where You Came From. A program that attempts to portray how the average Australian feels about refugees and ‘boat people’ and what the average Australian would experience if they were faced with a similar situation of having to escape their own country to seek asylum.

Unsurprisingly, the show was incredibly popular on social media channels, especially Twitter where at one stage it was the number one worldwide trending conversation. For me, the #GoBackSBS hashtag was updating too quickly to follow so I had to settle for conversing with those in my Twitter stream watching the show. Read more…

Text 100 Labs: Optimizing Your Twitter Account with Crowdbooster

Here at Text 100 we’ve been doing some experiments to find the best tools for enhancing our digital presence and that of our clients. Today, we exploreCrowdbooster, a Twitter analytics tool that provides insights which make optimizing your account much easier.

Without further ado, let’s hear from Dr. Pierre, head of Text 100 Labs in Paris. Watch video…

Creativity at Work: Part Three

If you go to the Fast Company list of the world’s 50 most innovative companies, or judge by the number of patents filed, it becomes obvious that creativity and economic success often go hand-in-hand. The world’s most creative companies seem to be doing something right. But the question as to what it is and how they get there is as crucial as it is difficult to answer. On one hand, innovation management is its own discipline implemented by blue chip companies to make sure they make the best out of their employees’ ideas. On the other hand, like book author Jens-Uwe Meyer explains, many innovation management processes seem to have the opposite effect, stifling creative thinking and innovation. Most often, this happens because the processes have been developed out of fear of failure, not applying Edward de Bono’s quote as a principle: “In general it is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.” Read more…

Social Media Crises – Verticals Go Horizontal

The other week I was moderating a conference on social media crises, and from my seat at the front of the room, I noticed one trend the many case studies all had in common – the key tipping point for all of them was that they broke out of their narrow, vertical space into a wider horizontal one. As the issues became larger than their typical subgroups, they then brought people from outside the fold into the discussion (BKA, the horizontal crowd). And that’s where the trouble really started.

Now, normally the 70s optimist or the 80s anarchist in me finds this openness/deconstruction to be a good thing, but with social media, this increased attention to other, “new” areas often means serious issues for organizations. I mean, how many of us knew who Dave Carroll was before we saw United Breaks Guitars. Even though I’m a guitarist myself, I only heard about him after he created a viral crisis for the airline. On the branding side, I bet few of us thought about the Gap’s logo before their attempt to change it blew up online? And similarly, while vegemite is not a common part of my diet (like, never), I sure did hear a lot about it after its rebranding went awry. Read more…