Social Media

Tumblr Numbrs: The Rapid Rise of Social Blogging [infographic]

Here we have a fairly funky infographic based on the massive growth of social media blog platform Tumblr. I’m a fan of both Tumblr and WordPress for social blogging, both sites for me offer something slightly different:

Tumblr
I find Tumblr to be very creative and extremely popular with photographers and designers. Although I’ve not really used it for articles yet I do follow some blogs who publish articles regularly. I guess it depends what theme you use and your search and share style. You’ll notice my tumblr is a little random and includes lots of images without any real structure.

WordPress
WordPress for me is much more tailored to a journalistic magazine style approach. I find the platform easy for article based posts, although the CMS is perhaps not as user friendly as Tumblr. Again this depends on your theme and various add-ons and widgets.

The problem I have with Tumblr is that a lot of content is copied or reblogged. This may be the sites that I follow, but with WordPress sites I feel I gain a little more insight into topics but perhaps without the creative cool factor.

Anyway, here’s the infographic:

Minimalist Music Posters

Love this collection of minimalist music genre posters I found on Jlaven.com. My favourite has to be FOLK.

*It looks like Jlaven.com has been taken down but check ot the posters at Visualnews.com.

Movember – ‘Tis the Season to Mo! [Infographic]

There is a cool/ strange trend for November this month, loads of males (and perhaps some females) have been attempting to groom the most epic of epic moustaches. Affectionately known as Movember, the Mo’s aim is to raise awareness of men’s health in particular prostate cancer. Donations can be made at www.movember.com and there are a number of companies blogging about their progress (or as the case may be lack of).

Anyway, ’tis the season to Mo so here’s a nifty infographic that I saw on Sortable.com.

SEO is Marketing isn’t it?

The search engine optimisation (SEO) industry has been growing for some time now. I myself have been an avid marketer for around 6 years and have been involved in SEO for the last 12 months. A constantly recurring theme throughout the last year has been that SEO is an industry all of its own.

Last week saw Search Engine Land announce that they would be launching a sister site Marketing Land, suggesting that in fact the two are a separate entity.

This is something that I find hard to agree with, as marketing in its truest form is about understanding consumer behaviour, predicting it and then meeting the consumers needs. With this in mind surely online marketing is therefore these three steps but translated for the internet.

SEO can be defined as a the practice of increasing the traffic that a site receives via a search engine. The process itself has developed from the understanding that consumers behaviour when using a search engine means that the higher the rank of the site the more users will visit that site.

As more and more marketers become aware of the Google Panda update, what does appear open to debate is how important SEO is to your marketing strategy and equally how long using SEO in your marketing strategy will last. There is no greater lesson to be learned than those sites which have all their eggs in one basket and have been punished by the Panda update.

It is this unpredictability on search engine updates that provides the sole reason why it isn’t recommended to build a business based upon search traffic, and illustrates why SEO should be carried out as part of an overall marketing strategy.

Beware of Google Image Search for Competitions

For those of you using search engines on a daily basis you will be familiar with Google Image Search. Paste in your image URL or upload a picture and Google find visually similar images for you. A great tool particularly if you’re looking to measure coverage or ‘take up’ on any campaigns your brand may have run such as an infographic.

Whilst this tool is undoubtedly useful for marketers, it may also poke a serious hole in some online marketing campaigns.

Take Vouchercloud for example, who are currently running their Christmas comp (we all LOVE a Xmas viral) where you have to “spot the snowball” from a picture which has been airbrushed – to remove the snowball.

Unfortunately for them, using the google image search tool, you can are able to find the original picture – COMPLETE with snowballs, on Shutterstock.

So the real question here is, intentional move by the marketing department to embrace the image search functionality or not? We’ve all seen the TV competition questions which are so easy, it guarantees entrants. Is this the case? As a marketer I’d like to think so, but then again……

…..Hope I win!

Update: Apparently the original picture is not what counts here – according to Voucher Cloud, the winner will be the one closest to where the judges think the snowball(s) is(are). Sounds a little strange to me, but check out item 15 on the terms and see what you think!

Brought to you by the epic combination of Matthew Jackson and Liam Stilgoe.

Stop Motion Video

As quite rightly pointed out by Brandflakes for Breakfast this video is stop motion awesomeness! It must have taken ages!

Hudson – Against The Grain from Dropbear on Vimeo.

Life Cycle of a Webpage [Infographic]

I stumbled upon this (drum roll, thank you) on Cool Infographics. Really interesting stats on here and definitely surprising from my point of view. Personally I’m not a big user of Stumble Upon – perhaps I should be….

Getting Noticed Online

Image by smemon87 via Flickr CC

I recently posted about infographics- and those of you who have seen the About page may have noticed a rather basic infographic CV that I uploaded last week. The whole idea of an infographic and displaying data about ourselves is a topic that really interests me. I’m big on using online tools, and hopefully my quick effort at an infographic will be trounced once Vizualize.me is finally launched.

I graduated in the height of the recession and found it pretty difficult to get the sorts of role I was looking for within the marketing industry. It’s really important to make yourself stand out – and for the right reasons, and I think to some extent I was missing an opportunity. There has never been a better chance to build an online profile and reap the rewards – particularly bearing in mind the current approach from ‘cold call’ recruiters.Online tools like ‘Viz.me’ and LinkedIn are now really useful resources in order to make companies find you rather than you trying to find the company. Equally the growth of Facebook and other social platforms have bought with them increased access and communication potential with a brand.

With this in mind, I thought I would share a few good articles that can be used both from a musician point of view – why shouldn’t you use your band as a brand? But also from a general graduate/recruitment approach.

Get a Job Using Social Media – Mashable

Consumers More Receptive To Brands - BrandRepublic

Logo Creator

Marketers Wouldn’t Attend University - Marketing Magazine

If you discover anything useful on the web then please get in touch

Promoting your music

RickyW's bespoke album

This week has seen the release of local Leeds band the Kaiser Chiefs, new album ‘The Future is Medieval’. There has been an unusual buzz about the record, not because of the tracks displayed, but how they are displayed. In a novel approach from singer Ricky Wilson and the advertising agency Wieden + Kennedy, fans get the chance to make money once they’ve purchased it.

The band’s website has 20 new songs available to download, and users get to choose 10 of these to create their ‘own’ version. Once the version has been created it is maintained as a page on the site and then fans can advertise their bespoke design and make money from getting others to purchase it.

Not only does the campaign and release have huge social and potentially viral significance, but for all the established die hard fans, they have the opportunity to buy not one but two albums of brand new music. Making the Kaiser’s twice as much money in the process…

Obviously not every band out there has the funds to use someone of the calibre of Wieden + Kennedy, but it’s exactly the kind of example that musicians should use in order to promote themselves and stand out. Go to the Kaiser Chiefs site to design your album.

Top 3 Infographics

Having recently used infographics for a client I’m becoming increasingly interested in them and how they can visualise data and information. A great site for infographics dealing with social media and online marketing is Flowtown. Really useful for including in pitches/ interviews/ presentations.

Here are my top 3 marketing infographics from their site:

Addicted to the Internet

ROI of Your Mum

Everybody's Doing It!