Infographics, Engagement Strategies and… Dogs in the Workplace?

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A look back at some of our most popular posts for the month of May – it’s all about infographics and data visualization, engagement strategies and… dogs in the workplace? Check out the posts below!

Best Practices for Infographics

A recent panel hosted by the Publicity Club of NY discussed how infographics can and should be used for communications and what you should consider before adding them to the mix. Infographics have quickly become a buzz word and part of our PR arsenal, but like any digital tool (or really, any PR tool), there are some ideas to consider when deciding if it’s something that will add value to your announcement or campaign. So what makes a great infographic? Here are a few key points to keep in mind.

What Rhinestone Pumps Can Teach You About Social Media Engagement

It seems appropriate here to begin with a short story. It begins with a company that sells designer shoes to women with large feet. It ends with a series of failed communication attempts and the eventual (and ingenious) realization that the company’s shoes were actually being bought by men – men who interestingly, ordered the shoes in unmarked packages and lived well above the median income level. Conventional wisdom would conclude that these men were buying gifts for their wives, but in this case, conventional wisdom would be wrong. In fact, what the company ultimately realized was that their shoes were being purchased by a niche market of men who wore three button suits by day and gold sequined dresses by night. Through careful research and customer feedback, the company finally discovered that their product sold to fabulous male cross-dressers.

Ten Tips for Creating Dialogue in Your LinkedIn Group

There is no doubt that LinkedIn has taken the position as one of the leading social platforms for B2B communications. LinkedIn currently has around 150 million users and the platform is used almost exclusively for business contacts and business communication, which makes it a very powerful tool for B2B communications. Further evidence of this is the report presented by HubSpot recently, which says that LinkedIn is almost 300 percent more effective when it comes to generating leads, compared with Facebook and Twitter. One of the most powerful tools to create and drive a community within LinkedIn isLinkedIn Groups, where any LinkedIn user can create a group to discuss an issue, a product or company.

Wake Up, Sydney! Tim Tams are growing on trees…

Over the past few days there’s been much discussion around the (now public) ‘Wake Up’ campaign, launched by Research In Motion (RIM). After many people speculated Samsung was behind the campaign, RIM opened up and admitted that it was the mobile maker responsible for the series of experiential activities taking place across Sydney and Melbourne. This makes me question the risk of organizing such teaser-based campaigns, for fear that the PR message or indeed, the company behind the campaign, will be exposed all too early and negatively lose control of the message.

The Emotional Side of Social Media

My friends and family are often shocked when I tell them that, as part of my job, I am routinely on Facebook, Twitter and a host of other social platforms. As many of you can likely relate to, this only furthers their confusion on what exactly it is that I do every day. However, they might be interested to know that it’s because of my job, that I am able to connect better with them. Last month I attended the #140cuse conference at Syracuse University. In advance of the event, I looked forward to learning about new tools, metrics and how gurus from a variety of industries are using social to succeed on the job. While I certainly did learn that, what I also saw – a look at the emotional benefits of social – surprised me, but was definitely a memorable takeaway.

No say in the workplace? It’s a dog’s life

(In this guest post, Text 100 Sydney’s resident fox terrier/Maltese/shi-tzu Wilson Costello discusses the importance of extending key leadership roles to office dogs.) My human Anne recently wrote about the need for Chief Communications Officers in the modern-day boardroom. All well and good, but I think we’re missing the point here. No matter how much we pontificate over issues of balance, expertise and transparency, one fact remains: the members of the C-suite are always human. Yet as man’s best friends, we office dogs play a critical role in the making of business decisions at every level.

Three Ways Community Management is Evolving

Community management is not a new concept by any means – it’s a function that essentially began in the “old days” of online communication, when people connected primarily through forums and chat rooms. But the rise of social business has given life to the role in a whole new way. What used to be looked at as a role primarily for moderation of niche community forums, is now seen as a necessary function within any company that cares about evolving their business to meet the needs of the social customer.

Does Timeline affect engagement on brands’ Facebook pages?

Social media measurement and analytics company Simply Measured recently released findings indicating that most brands experience increased engagement with Timeline (disclosure: they only looked at 15 brand pages). The data reflected in this chart from eMarketer shows that average engagement with brand pages (defined by comments and likes) rose from an average of 672 points of engagement per post to 2,441 or 46 percent over the course of the three weeks following the move to Timeline. That said, Simply Measured also reported that when looking at individual brands such as Old Spice, Target, AT&T and Ford, it saw a decline in engagement with brand posts. Despite the increase in people liking pages, however, Simply Measured found that interaction with specific content is declining.

New insights on Sina Weibo for the Enterprise

Following the popularity of its Weibo, or microblog (Chinese twitter), Sina introduced an enterprise version of Weibo last April, which was designed for corporations to better utilize it as a marketing tool with extra features such as a bulletin board, corporate videos and related linkages on display on the home page, detailed information on followers’ topic interests, and more. As the anniversary of the launch of enterprise Weibo approaches, Sina and CIC released a white paper to summarize the current situation and recent developments on how corporate entities are leveraging this platform. Below are some of the major takeaways from this white paper. (Note: the original white paper is only available in Chinese and can be found here.)

Data Journalism: It’s About Sharing Stories That Matter

The amount of visual elements in the media is progressively increasing in order to communicate news in a more appealing way. Both print and online media often include infographics, videos, or other images to explain number-heavy events and information in a simpler way. The news world is cluttered. Only the most appealing and relevant presentations will succeed in catching the reader’s attention. Any news article, feature story or blog post must coexist with other visuals that are attractive and understandable  to the readers, specially when communicating complex and extensive data – it should tell a story.