“Infographic” is just a fancy term that refers to representing data with visual graphics. Visualizing data, or any message for that matter, is an excellent way for marketers present clear ideas that “stick”.

Let’s do a quick experiment. Below is list of US creditors from 2011. In other words, countries who own America’s debt. Quickly scan this list, then proceed to the directions below it.

Country               2011
                    -------
China, Mainland      1137.0
Japan                 936.6
United Kingdom        397.2
Oil Exporters         236.3
Brazil                210.0
Carib Bnkng Ctrs      161.2
Taiwan                150.3
Switzerland           147.5
Hong Kong             107.9
Russia                 97.1
Canada                 82.6
Luxembourg             62.0
Germany                60.2
Singapore              58.3
Thailand               54.5
Turkey                 39.2
India                  37.7
Ireland                33.6
Korea, South           32.4
Belgium                31.8
France                 29.0
Poland                 28.7
Mexico                 28.0
Philippines            25.1
Italy                  23.7
Netherlands            22.6
Norway                 22.0
Sweden                 21.3
Colombia               21.0
Chile                  19.4
Israel                 18.3
Malaysia               13.4
Australia              11.6
All Other             214.9

Set a stopwatch, then answer this question: If they were a single entity, approximately what percent of total US debt does China and Japan own? Feel free to use a calculator if needed, but keep in mind this is just an approximation.

The infographic below shows US creditors, but this data is from 2009. Quickly scan the image and answer the same question as above.

It’s the same answer: Japan and China account for nearly 50% of total US debt. You likely noticed it took much less time to quantify Japan + China’s share of total US debt in the infographic than the contextual list. This is because the human brain prefers comparing visual references (e.g. lines of dollar signs) over raw data (e.g. a long list of independent numbers).

So how does this relate to social media marketing? In the environment of social networks, your audience’s attention span is extremely short. One must be sure their messages are being understood and absorbed in as little time as possible, and using data visualization is an excellent way to do this.

Here’s a short video on the value of data visualization by Column Five Media, a leading infographic design firm:

The Value of Data Visualization from Column Five on Vimeo.

Formatting wallpaper for Twitter is different than other social media portals (like YouTube) in the sense that Twitter automatically left aligns any uploaded background image rather then centering it. Furthermore, Twitter page backgrounds look different from monitor to monitor depending on the screen resolution.

The least frustrating way to go about creating a wallpaper for your Twitter page is to start with a Twitter background template. There’s thousands of templates online for Twitter backgrounds but I’ve found that most are poorly laid out. The tutorial below by TechSupportGoneBad provides one of the most simple and well laid out background templates templates I’ve come across, which you can download here.

(Video: Watch this video on the post page)

I personally tested the template with CoZiggy’s Twitter page and it worked flawlessly (you can see I made quite a few changes). One general rule of thumb is to keep the images in the left margin to less than 200 pixels wide. Any wider and you risk having the images cut off by the tweet stream when viewing the page on small resolution monitors.

As you’ll see after downloading the template, all of the text and images and cleanly layered in Photoshop for easy editing. Hope this helps and feel free to comment below if you have any questions.

But is this like-then-reward tactic ethical? Probably. Annoying? That’s up for debate. While I believe this tactic can be a creative and powerful tool when used properly, I have to side with bloggers such as Asi from No Man’s Blog and Andy from Now in Color if this strategy becomes proliferated among Facebook Pages. There needs to be sufficient value in the reward provided. In my opinion, Nike’s ad was worth the “Like”. As for Liking a friend’s garage sale page to see her house address? Not so much.

I suppose the brand or organization behind the fan page is a major determinant of how we react to the like-then-reward tactic. Consider Pedigree’s recent abandoned dog adoption drive in the United Kingdom. For every “Like” of the Pedigree Adoption Drive fan page, the company donates 50 GBP to the PetPlan Charitable Trust, a non-profit organization that helps promote the health and welfare of animals. How can you not applaud that? The strategy generated a positive buzz, attracted thousands of Likes, and supports a good cause.

Up to this point, Facebook has done a good job of limiting the use of the like-then-reward approach to big brands such as Nike, Pedigree, and Papa John’s. It will be interesting to see if this tool becomes available to the general public. If so, Facebook needs to put sufficient measures in place to prevent the flood of this tactic across any run of the mill fan page.

What measures you ask? That’s a good question for which I don’t have a straightforward answer. In my opinion, there needs to be some sort of qualification process. Perhaps, and I know this will anger some, Facebook should make this a premium feature. Requiring a minimal monthly fee would help solve two problems: (1) It would make any Joe Shmo page admin think twice before using the feature, and (2) it would help Facebook earn revenue without worrying about causing a stir with privacy issues.

What do you think? Should the like-then-reward strategy be available to the general public? Should it be used at all?

This conveniently hidden trick allows you to easily track what’s going on with your Facebook account from one central place (your RSS reader or social media dashboard).  Unfortunately, Facebook does not allow you to generate RSS feeds for specific keyword monitoring as one can do with Twitter. Hopefully Facebook helps us social marketers out and enables this feature in the near future.

(Video: Watch this video on the post page)

As mentioned in the video, there are four individual RSS feeds that you can generate to monitor different notifications and updates (again, no specific keyword monitoring yet):

1. Friends’ Links: Status updates or posts by your friends that contain a link
2. Friends’ Notes: Any notes your friends posts using the Facebook Notes application
3. Notifications: Your personal notifications (i.e. new comments, wall posts, likes, etc.)
4. Friends’ Status Updates: Status updates or posts by your friends that do not contain a link

Thanks to jwz at http://jwz.livejournal.com/1144527.html for figuring out this nifty trick!

The tutorial provides an Adobe Photoshop template that fits nearly perfectly with the current YouTube “2.0″ Channel Layout. The narrator does a great job of walking through the customization process, although I suggest having a working knowledge of Photoshop to save yourself some frustration.

(Video: Watch this video on the post page)

I used this template and tutorial myself to create the current YouTube Channel background for CoZiggy. Here are the steps I followed to create it:

1. Downloaded the template file at octosites.com/downloads/ytbg2.psd
2. Opened the file in Adobe Photoshop CS4 (you can use any recent version)
3. Re-sized the black box in “layer 3″ by shrinking it about 20 pixels on either side, which made a tighter fit around the channel content (go to View > Show Rulers and eyeball the re-size)
4. Inserted a black-to-white gradient from top to bottom on the “background” layer (illustrated in the video)
5. Filter > Distort > Ocean Ripple for the background effect
6. Added the CoZiggy logo on the right side of the page and the text and images on the left side
7. Created a separate 1600 pixel wide white “serrated” edge, then inserted this at the top of the page
8. Deleted the “white area” layer to make the top serrated edge look fluid with the top menu bar on YouTube Channel pages. Check out the CoZiggy Channel to see what I mean.
9. Added a white color overlay to “layer 3″ (the black box in the middle)
10. Decreased the size of the outer glow to 5 px
11. File > Save for Web & Devices and saved the final design as a JPEG (use the highest image quality while keeping the file size under 256KB)
12. Uploaded the final design to CoZiggy’s Channel

The ad was premiered on a Static FBML tab on the Nike Football page last week, a few days before being debuted as a television commercial at half time of the UEFA Champions League final between Bayern Munich and Inter Milan. Nike made a Facebook announcement earlier in the week that an extended “movie” version would be available on the Nike Football fan page. Apparently this caught the eyes and ears of footy fanatics everywhere, causing the page’s fan numbers to more than double from roughly 550,000 on May 20th (the day of the announcement) to over 1.15 million as of today:

The reason behind the Facebook premiere was to reward its loyal soccer consumers by providing them access to the spot before a wider introduction, said Trevor Edwards, VP of global brand and category management for Nike. “Our entire approach that we’re playing around is insider, it’s access,” Mr. Edwards said. “What we are trying to do is to help bridge the gap between the greatest players in the world and people who have the passion for that game of football.”

Newcomers to the Nike Football fan page are automatically directed to a custom tab with a screen shot of the video and an enticing teaser: “Hit the Like Button. Watch the Future.”

Visitors are only able to view the video once they “Like” the page. It was this creative trick that resulted in the Nike Football’s explosive fan growth. You may recall that Papa John’s used a similar like-then-reward strategy on Facebook.

All of the buzz created by the ad may have some casual fans believing Nike is the official sponsor of the 2010 World Cup, when in fact this title belongs to rival sportswear company Adidas. Perhaps this viral campaign was an attempt (and a successful one at that) to steal some of the brand recognition associated with the Cup away from Adidas.

Will Adidas respond with a social campaign of their own? Only time will tell, but with only 11 days left until the tournament starts time certainly is not on their side.

In other words, this handy little tool can enable you to add a custom tab to any profile or fan page (among other uses) and place whatever content there that you wish. Brands of all sizes are using Static FBML to customize their fan pages in ways that make visitors forget they’re on Facebook. Check out Pepsi’s “Refresh Everything” tab or our post on Papa John’s “Specialty Pizza Challenge” for good examples of this. Both do an excellent job of using FBML to create a unique Facebook experience for fans and page visitors.

If you want to dress things up any more than using simple HTML tags, you’ll probably need the help of a web programmer. There are, however, a multitude of user-friendly embeddable applications that novice Facebook marketers can use with little difficulty. If you’re interested in anything in particular be sure to let us know by leaving a comment below. In any case, this short video tutorial walks you through the setup process of installing a custom tab on your Facebook fan page using Static FBML.

To be eligible to win an iPod or iPad, interested visitors needed to (1) fan MyEdu on Facebook, (2) follow the company on Twitter and (3) tweet the following message:

The free @myedu account is here! To celebrate #myedu is giving out #ipad & #ipodtouches daily! Fan, Follow & RT 2 WIN! http://bit.ly/dBA95X

Winners were posted every day to a dedicated contest page on MyEdu’s website, a portion of which is shown below:

If you want to get an idea of how successful the contest was, perform a quick Twitter search for the hashtag #myedu. Every hour people are tweeting about the contest…and it’s been over for weeks! When the contest was taking place a new twitter user was blasting out this tweet every FIVE MINUTES.

Can you believe that? MyEdu was virally gaining hundreds of fans and followers every day, and it’s likely a significant percentage of these contest participants also signed up for new accounts at MyEdu.com. Even if most of the contestants didn’t sign up for accounts, the company is now directly engaged with them on Twitter and Facebook, which provides great upselling opportunities.

Kudos to MyEdu for a well executed short-term social media campaign. What do you think? Was it worth it for MyEdu to spend thousands of dollars on prizes to create the amount of buzz they did?

Social Media Dashboard Tutorial: Pt. I
(Video: Watch this video on the post page)

A social media dashboard utilizes RSS feeds to aggregate information from various sources and can be setup in any RSS reader. In these tutorial videos, I use Yahoo!’s RSS reader (my personal favorite) as included in all free My Yahoo! accounts.

The tutorial is split up into two sections. Part I gives a general overview of what a social media dashboard is and how to install RSS feeds for Twitter keywords. Part II explores Google Blog Search (a great tool that alerts you when bloggers mention your name/brand/any keyword you want to track) and how to pull RSS feeds from news websites and blogs.

Social Media Dashboard Tutorial: Pt. II

(Video: Watch this video on the post page)

Bulk follower tools allow you to search for users based on keywords in tweets, profile or “bio” data, and user location among other options. This advanced search functionality allows you to follow targeted users that will likely be interested in your product or service and decide to follow you back.

Check out the video below for a tutorial by YouTube channel tweetaddertips on how to utilize  Tweet Adder, one of the most popular bulk follower applications, to its fullest potential.

(Video: Watch this video on the post page)

I must warn you, however, that Twitter frowns upon the use bulk follower applications. Although I haven’t found any documentation that explicitly prohibits their use, I have read of many instances where accounts have been frozen and/or shut down because of “unusual activity levels” (e.g. following large amounts of users at one time). My general rule of thumb is to never follow more than 40 users in one clip. If you keep your following activity at a low level such as this, you’ll likely avoid alerting Twitter of unusual activity with your account.

What do you think? Should “bulk following” tools be allowed?