information analyst

Infographics and data visualization are more popular than ever these days, and on the flip side of this trend is the fact that for each amazing piece that gets published, there is at least one that… well, should never have seen the light of day.

Bad data visualizations can be misleading, confusing — or simply wrong.

Good ones, on the other hand, can be helpful, informative, or both — and fun, to boot.

So, we decided to create a little bit of that joy—and be a little meta—with a simple infographic about whether or not to make an infographic...

This a great blog post from Rian van der Merwe , describing the noise you can find on the web now, and especially content just created for SEO purposes or advertisers. As many, Rian is tired of it.

Rian speaks for many of us who are overwhelmed, overloaded with content that gives us no value at all. This is the problem

"I used to believe that if you write with passion and clarity about a topic you know well (or want to know more about), you will find and build an audience. I believed that maybe, if you’re smart about it, you could find a way for some part of that audience to pay you money to sustain whatever obsession drove you to self-publishing"'

Here's what caught my attention:

****The wells of attention are being drilled to depletion by linkbait headlines, ad-infested pages, “jumps” and random pagination, and content that is engineered to be “consumed” in 1 minute or less of quick scanning – just enough time to capture those almighty eyeballs[2]. And the reality is that “Alternative Attention sources” simply don’t exist.

The Scoopit team agrees!

My input:

****The Opportunity: This is the time for all good curators to come forward - 2012 will be the year of the content curator -

**Know your audience

**Know their pain points

**Find and select the best content, add your own opinions, information or anything that will provide more value for your audience

**Select only the best content, don't just aggregate links that add to the noise

**Become a trusted resource - many opportunities will come to you, it's your time to shine

Curated by Jan Gordon covering "Content Curation, Social Media and Beyond"

Read full article here: [http://bit.ly/tF0opI]

It’s often said that we’re in the midst of the information age, which may help explain why there’s been a surge in infographics in recent years – they make data just that little bit more…palatable. But if you’re more of a spreadsheets kind of person than an artist, this application could be what you’re looking for.

DataAppeal is a Web-based, data-design visualization application that allows users to transform their location-based data into infographics through the creation of 3D and animated maps.

This piece and infographic is from Adam Vincenzini on his blog.

I selected this article because it's another way for you to find key influencers and these tools will help to narrow your search

Here are some highlights:

Instead of focusing on the subjectivity of this process (and how this insight is deployed) Here's how you can use a combination of free tools to narrow your search.

Where do online influencers operate?

**They are active everywhere:

     Most popular are:

     blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Online

     communities, discussion boards

Assumptions:

**Influencers are active on Twitter

**Influencers operate some for of blogging hub

Focus on the intelligence you can glean from Twitter initially then verify this initial sweep with blog (or relevant hub) data

The initial steps involve:

1. Search by keyword

2. Search by location

3 tools useful in the process: The first two you can also search by location:

**followerwonk.com - then run this through another influencer tool -   

     tweetlevel to give it even more relevance (this isn't fool proof)

**locafollow.com

**twingulate.com

There are more suggestions in this piece having said that:

**No matter how hard we try, a 100% fool proof influence rating is near on impossible because influence is not a science, it can't be.

** this can help narrow things down, significantly

Selected by Jan Gordon covering "Content Curation, Social Business and Beyond"

Read full article here: [http://tinyurl.com/7humubp]

I selected this piece was written by Chris Sietsema for convinceandconvert blog because the post plus the infographic lays out a very clear and concise plan to create your content marketing strategy.

**Whether you're creating or curating content, this is something I think is very useful. This is why I rescooped this from my content marketing, social media and beyond  topic.

Here are a few highlights from the article:

He compares selecting and producing content to what he calls "bricks" and "feathers".

Bricks are referred to as research reports

**are larger content productions such as research reports, events, white papers        .

    video series, mobile apps, etc

**have the potential to make a larger splash when executed and promoted correctly.

Feathers are comprised of simple text and photo content published via popular social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, etc.

**Less intensive than bricks from a production budget standpoint, feathers are created consistently to maintain an ongoing stream of communication between a brand and its audience.

The infographic shows you how to discern what content to use and illustrates the how, what, why and when to use it.

Curated by Jan Gordon covering, "Content Marketing, Social Media and Beyond"

Read article and see infographic here: [http://bit.ly/A6NhFb]

This  very informative article was written by Shobha-Atre for Fulltraffic blog

"Content curation can and WILL  play a vital role in advertising your business and providing greater exposure to your products in the market."

Here's what caught my attention - a few takeaways:

Content curation helps in defining a niche target audience and providing content relevant to their needs.

It is a smart and an inexpensive marketing tool that can help in achieving amazing results for your online business.

In addition, it can assist in refining your content and sharing valuable information to provide greater online visibility to your company.

Brand building can be a huge exercise and also challenging for many companies at the same time.

However, with the use of content curation tools, it has become a lot easier to achieve successful branding results.

It saves valuable time and effort of the online users in searching for enormous amount of information on the web.

Content curation is the best method of providing purposeful information that may be extremely useful to the readers in addressing different issues.

Rather than looking at a variety of sources, they can get all the valuable information under one roof that can be immense value for companies.

Besides, it helps them to discover and find all the latest information about your products and services and encourages them to make a final purchase easily.

Curated by Jan Gordon covering "Content Curation, Social Media and Beyond"

Read full article here: [http://bit.ly/s1py23]

A solid idea is the essential foundation of a great infographic. While this may sound obvious, it is the most common mistake made by companies developing infographics today, leading to a slew of poorly thought-out visual disasters.

I aim to spotlight a few of these pitfalls, to help you first recognize what you are trying to do, then identify the types of ideas that will help you achieve it.