There are some great examples of dynamic and interactive, visualisations:

Trends in higher education - clear, concise with traditional infographic aesthetic.

Political Climate

Bloomberg

One of the issues with standard delivery is that by the time the graphic is produced the data is out of date. However, the development costs and accessibility issues of producing a dynamic, content managed infographic are in reality often unworthy of its lifespan. This becomes increasingly relevant with information ‘Snacking’ in the mobile and tablet market and through social media channels.

Relevant, up to date data, combined with effective, attractive data visualisation for the consumer or industry market is the holy grail.

Combining cross browser compatible svg libraries such as Raphaël with innovative data delivery you can push the boundaries of beautiful interactive graphics that will look as good on your desktop as on your tablet or smartphone.

Here are a few examples from Raphaël, imagine the potential with a great design team at your disposal…
Gears
Circles

Not only will these graphics look fantastic on any device or machine, print to any size you want, create a pdf, these vector graphic will never lose quality. With techniques developed here at Beyond these graphic can even be translated straight from an Illustrator file into Raphaël and manipulated from there.

Keeping the data up to date can be implemented through Google docs or any spreadsheet data source, no CMS or server side technology required, simply update the source and save. This facilitates a self sustaining, up-dateable infographic, without the need for an expensive content management system.

This has so many uses, not only to feed your Twitter stream or blog, but presenting data in a visual, communicative way as easily as updating a spreadsheet.

Promise.

Finally its over. After nearly a year of working in my spare time, the third and final Star Wars Iconoscope is finished and has now been spreading its way around the web like a nerdy virus for the past week.  Its just reached the 25,000 view mark on my blog, and has been picked up by a number of great sites:

• Wired: http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2012/02/return-of-the-jedi-in-iconoscope/
• Fast Company: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1669075/return-of-the-jedi-retold-in-icons
• Creative Review: http://creativereview.co.uk/feed/february-2012/15/star-wars-episode-vi-retold-in-icons
• JESS3: http://blog.jess3.com/2012/02/wayne-dorrington-strikes-back.html
• Laughing Squid: http://laughingsquid.com/star-wars-episode-vi-return-of-the-jedi-retold-using-only-icons/
• BestInfographic.co.uk: http://www.bestinfographic.co.uk/?s=star+wars+episode&x=0&y=0

As well as being picked up by some big accounts on Twitter, including (and this is the big one for me personally) the official starwars account.

I’ve been asked to give a quick recap on how its gone and some interesting finds in terms of where the bulk of the traffic has come from.

This is the third retelling of Star Wars in Icons that Ive done in 2 years. The first was a stripped-down, basic retelling of the first movie, editing a lot of the story down to its basics. It gained quite a bit of viral traffic and ended up crashing my own hosting server. I eventually transferred to Blogger.com, where it has nearly reached 40,000 view mark, which is fantastic!

The second ‘Iconoscope’ for Empire Strikes Back went live a couple of months later – once again it received some great coverage, on most of the sites listed above, and also iMDB.com.  It was the first time I used Twitter to spread the word. Its created a huge amount of traffic, and is still seeding to this day. Twitter is a great tool for quickly spreading interest – I’ve watched how quickly Tweeters retweet any kind of interesting link to generate new followers – they often add in the @handles of new streams at the same time.

I tried this myself with Mark Hamill’s account, but so far he’s failed to send his congratulations. (I think I captured his performance perfectly, but there we are.)

Up till now, the Empire Strikes Back Iconoscope has generated close to 100,000 views on the Blog, a large chunk of which have come from Twitter.

But for all the bulk of the hits tend to come from Daily Link Blogs – the kind of sites (like Wired and Laughing Squid) that just post things of interest to click on.

For the Third Iconoscope instalment, Return of the Jedi, I’m keeping an eye on the statistics to see what kind of sites generate the most traffic. So far heres the top results for the last month:

1. Fast Company (link sharing site)
2. www.notcot.com (link sharing site)
3. Laughing Squid (link sharing site)
4. Facebook (interstingly even though I didnt publically share it via my Facebook account)
5. Wired (link sharing site)
6. Pinterest (I have set up an account, but it started seeding on Pinterest before I did this)
7. t.co (Twitters link shortening service)

And for ‘All time’ on the blog, here are the top referring sites:

So really interesting how many of the top referring sites are Link Sharing Blogs – it seems that targeting them with an interesting post is a great means of generating traffic back to your own site. Obviously you need to pick the right ones to suit your audience, but there are so many out there this isn’t too difficult.

The Iconoscope is still seeding, so I will continue to monitor its progress and add any new findings to this post.

But Im definitely not doing another one.

See the infographic we created of the study on Mashable.

We conducted a survey of over 3000 consumers in the US and UK and asked them to share their online experience of researching products that they were intending to purchase. The research covered 12 categories of brands that could be grouped into High Involvement (typically higher priced goods including consumer electronics/travel/financial products) and Low Involvement (typically lower priced goods including health and beauty/baby products/music products.)

To put the research into context, it is now over 4 years since Forrester published its Social Technographics research which showed that 13% of population could be defined as Creators (upload their own content, for example a YouTube video), 19% were Critics (consumers who had written reviews of a product or service) and only 19% had used a social networking site.

The picture is very different today. The number of people who could be classified as Creators and Critics has gone up three-to-four fold, while the number of people on Facebook (THE social networking site), we can estimate at over 64%, using Facebook and US Census data combined.

Like it or not – the social consumer has arrived.

High Sharers vs. Low Sharers

Every day, consumers are creating and sharing millions and millions of pieces of content related to brands. One of the most fascinating pieces of the research was the fact that consumers are clearly divided into two different camps.

1. High Sharers: people who actively create and share brand content across a range of different channels

2. Low sharers, people who are more passive consumers of content.

High Sharers, who account for approximately 20% of the population, are more likely to be younger, more likely to be loyal to a brand and three times more likely to recommend products to their friends.

Low sharers on the other hand tend to be older, more concerned with brand quality than image alone, and are more likely to switch brands.

Influential Channels

Another facet we looked into as part of this research was the relative influence of owned and earned media channels as well as the influence of search. It turns out that there are some very important differences when we look at the influence of individual channels for High vs. Low Involvement brands.

For High Involvement brands, their own brand web site, as well as review sites and search have a much higher relative influence. However, for Low Involvement brands, Facebook and Twitter are relatively much more influential.

Even at a category level, there are some very important differences. For example, if we look at the consumer electronics category, review sites are the single most influential channels alongside the brand web site, which also has a very high relative influence. However, for these types of products, Facebook has a relatively low influence.

What Can Brands Learn From This Research?

This research is, we believe, the first study to show that people who share content about a brand are more likely (by a factor of three) to recommend that brand to a friend. These fascinating findings are what brands need to incorporate into the way they approach their digital social strategy. Using this research, brands may identify some very specific ways in which they can turbo charge their digital social strategies depending on the product category.

To cut to the chase, if there are three things to take away form the study, we can summarize them as follows:

1. Brands need to use the data they have to understand the relative influence that each of their digital channels have on different stages of the purchase and advocacy lifecycle. Then they should optimize each channel’s respective content.

2. Brands need to identify and nurture High Sharers as these sharers hold the keys to driving brand advocacy. (The result? Sales.)

3. Brands need to make sure that both their communications and marketing teams optimize everything they create in order to drive value in organic search.

However, the question that we are increasingly being asked now is:

“How do we understand who these people are? And what can we do with them?”

I think this is where it gets interesting. After all, the whole point of getting fans (or Facebook “Likes” as I should call them) is to help build Word of Mouth about the brand and drive loyalty.

Last year we conducted a study, the Beyond Brand Interaction Study, where we analyzed the Facebook pages of the top 100 brands to understand the type of content that engaged people most. This study gave some really useful insights into the activities that would most likely engage and activate fans.

We have now done some exploratory work with a new piece of technology looking at the Facebook fans of Coca Cola and Whole Foods by mining some of the publicly available data. I should stress we are still experimenting (in line with all the privacy laws) with this type of data mining, but it presents some intriguing possibilities.

What we can do is begin to build up a picture of the fan base and their activity by answering the following questions:

• What type of content creates most engagement?
• How do the engagement levels compare with the competition in terms of interactions per post?
• What other brands are the fans also most likely to have an affinity with?
• What are the shared interests of the fan base?
• Who are the most passionate fans?
• What TV shows or films are my fans most likely to like?
• What is the demographic and geographic make up of my fans?

In the data below we compared the likelihood of a Coca Cola fan “liking” a particular brand compared to the average Facebook user.

For example, a Coca Cola fan is over 13x more likely to follow Discovery Channel than the average Facebook user.

I think what is really fascinating about mining interest data in this way is that it can give some really strong directional insights for campaign execution. We have now done this for a few brands and it does help identify TV programs, celebrities or past times that are most likely to resonate with your fan base. By exploring the long tail of this data, and taking out the Starbucks’s and YouTube’s of the world, there are some compelling insights we can derive.

On top of that, for the first time, we can also start to provide some really great benchmarking for Facebook activities for the world’s biggest brands, across different sectors and different countries.

There are limitations to the data we can analyze, but it can give some powerful directional insights into the type of content and brand experiences that are most likely to resonate with your fan base.

Launch: The Age-O-Meter by Mitchell Linden

Some are shocked, some relieved and some simply laugh, but everyone at the Beyond offices is having a blast with it, and we’re all thinking a little more about proper skin care!

Kenneth Cole’s Social Mistake by Sarah Wulfeck

We work with brands to create and communicate their voices. Part of this learning process also involves understanding that this commitment of resources to social media is no longer an “also-ran” in marketing budgets.

How to Choose an Agency & Avoid the Coming Zombie Apocolypse by Judith Lewis

The main message I hope I got across was – don’t blindly trust your search agency.  There are free tools available to check the work they are doing.  Expect reports and simply outputting Google Analytics (a FREE analytics software package) is not enough.

YouTube Adblitz by Tiffany Shelton

Beyond designed and developed a custom video gallery for desktop (Flash), Google TV (HTML5/JavaScript) and mobile (HTML/JavaScript) that included voting and sorting features, as well as a live chat module that allowed users to talk about their favorite ads in real-time using their Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Breaking Down the Wall to Gain Real Customer Insights by Nil Mork-Ulnes

So much of social media measurement talk is about demonstrating its ROI, or just plain “how did my campaign do?” Which we believe is increasingly the wrong question to ask. Or at least, the less valuable one. Because it is the insights given from understanding what your customers and potential customers care about, who they are, and what makes them special, that really can allow you to optimize your marketing in a fundamental way rather than just fine-tuning details of what you already do.

RootsTech: Family History Meets Technology by Sarah Wulfeck

In every corner of the expo hall, high-tech sponsorship booths provided by the likes of FamilySearch.org, Dell, BrightSolid.com and countless others, boast technological innovation, next-gen data-preservation solutions and, yes, plenty of Kinects to play at the Microsoft Playground.

There Really is No Difference Between Advertising and PR Anymore by David Hargreaves

Having worked in a PR agency environment for 20 years and having lost out to ad agencies around web 1.0, I suddenly thought that maybe ad agencies have moved into the listening space (which, let’s face it, has its roots in the work of PR and content monitoring) and are doing things differently, or worse still, doing it a lot better. I was reassured.

Viva la Community Manager! by Faith Chihil

So, stairs were climbed, beers were opened, and I was seated (along with around 25 others) for a PowerPoint prepared and presented by Evan Hamilton of UserVoice on the imminent obsolescence of my career.

“I have a bad feeling about this…” by Wayne Dorrington

I wondered if it would be possible to recreate the entire plot of the movie using nothing but iconography – that is, using no text, just symbols to tell the story. How would Star Wars be told in hieroglyphics? Or, if you prefer, what if the movie was remade by IKEA?

Four Takeaways From The Pay Attention Social Listening Panel at Social Media Week by David Hargreaves

I thought it worth summarizing some of the speakers’ main points alongside a few comments of my own. The areas of discussion could be broken into four: the future of listening, Radian6, Influence and Facebook listening.

How Do I Rearrange Complex Algebraic Formulae?!?! by Emma Downham

Beyond has worked with Google to deliver this innovative educational programme that aims to showcase and praise the wealth of teaching talent that we have in the UK. Teachers are invited to answer one of the 21 hardest GCSE questions as selected by Britain’s exam boards, to be in with a chance to win £3,000 for themselves and £7,000 for their school.

Why You Should Be Going Beyond Sentiment — and How NPA Can Help Get You There by Nils Mork-Ulnes

For one thing, sentiment is typically measured as “good,” “bad,” or “mixed,” i.e., it is typically a three-point scale. Second, it tends to be a blanket catchall of opinions towards a company. NPS is a very specific metric, measuring the likelihood of someone recommending a brand to someone else. The more specific you are on what you measure, the better you can read what the outcome means.

On Radian6

Kyle Monson of JWT focused the importance to have the “right person sitting in front of the Radian6 pane” and that journalists were perfectly qualified to do this. He also noted that Radian6 does produce lots of data that needs to be cleaned and sifted to get to the meaningful results.

Comment: While I agree to some extent, social listening isn’t just about sitting in front of the Radian6 pane analyzing conversations it is about finding the data, manipulating the data, mashing that data up with other sorts of data and using statistical analysis to draw insights.

On the Future Of Listening

“In the future can social listening data be used to predict brand sentiment/reputation,” – Michael Learmonth of Ad Age.

Shiv Singh of PepsiCo noted that “smart agencies have already moved beyond just listening but the next thing is to start identifying pop culture moments so that the brand can insert themselves into that.”

He also noted that “the future of listening is to study how memes spread both geographically and from influencer so that you use this to predict the spread of news and content.”

On Facebook Listening

Shiv Singh commented, “The elephant in the room is that 25 per cent of all online time is spent on Facebook and yet we only see a small about of that conversation on fan pages. Listening won’t be complete unless we can listen to the whole of Facebook.”

Comment: there weren’t many people that really is either a good idea or likely given the obvious implications for all profiles being set to be public!

On Influence

I was surprised the conversation about Influence took so long to come up. One of the comments, again from Shiv, that really hit home with me was that “we shouldn’t be letting technology vendors define influence, we should be drawing on the numerous people in academia who have been studying influence since 1950s.”

Comment: As a company that employs an academic and statisticians, this was music to my ears. If you want our head of R&D’s view on influence and some of the debate around it check it out.

1. www.bestnetbookreviewz.com (a blog rounding up netbook reviews)

2. http://reviews.cnet.com/best-netbooks/ (traditional media publisher)

3. Shopping results for best netbook (google shopping results)

4. www.pcworld.com (traditional media publisher)

5. http://www.netbooklive.net/about/ (a specialist blog)

So were these results any better than the ones for my ski resort search? In short, Yes. These results show a combination of original content from well established publishers such as PC World and CNet mixed in with a couple of blogs that have a mixture of original content and third party content.

So what are my conclusions from this very limited experiment? A lot of the content served up by Google for highly competitive terms is content that has been expressly designed to rank highly through the tricks of SEO spammers and as a result isn’t that helpful. My personal preference when searching for information about a product, place or service is for a search result that is dominated by editorial content from a trusted third party publisher.

If the search experience is to be improved when searching for information about a product or a service then either Google needs to try to find a way to keep the SEO spammers at bay or else PR people and authentic third party publishers need to find a way to make their content more visible. After all so much time and energy goes into recurring a positive review, why wouldn’t we spend an extra 20 per cent of effort trying to make it visible to the search engines.

YouTube Planet Inspired by Tiffany Shelton

Beyond has partnered up with YouTube once again to produce another cutting edge co-branded YouTube channel — Planet Inspired. Planet Inspired is presented by YouTube and National Geographic, and sponsored by The North Face.

A City Celebrates: SF Giants Win the World Series by Faith Chihil

Whether it was the beard, the hat, the rally thong, or just well-played, old-fashioned American baseball chops, one thing’s for certain: on November 1st, 2010, the San Francisco Giants beat the Texas Rangers and won the World Series.

Social Media Case Studies Presented at Budapest Affiliates Conference by Judith Lewis

“Anyone who knows me, knows I’ve been around longer than Google. They also know I love sharing knowledge and one of the ways I do this is by speaking at conferences. I recently spoke at the BAC – Budapest Affiliates Conference. Affiliates are an important marketing channel for non-branded keywords in search and they are often able to capture sales a company might otherwise miss.”

The Gold Rush by Nick Rappolt

“We’ve just finished a digital campaign for Amadeus called the Gold Rush 2020. The aim of this campaign was to drive traffic and downloads to the research report they created with Epoch PR and Oxford Economics.”

It’s Nice That. What Is It? by Marley Petropoulos

“I don’t know if anyone in the audience really knew what to expect from last Wednesday’s It’s Nice That future:content event and even now they are probably still scratching their heads – well, at least I am.”

Is Search Broken? (Part 1) by David Hargreaves

I have had a number of discussions recently with brands about how they can increase traffic from organic search and which function is best placed to drive organic search: Comms or marketing? I would certainly not profess to be an expert on search (we have our very own Judith Lewis for that) but I know enough to be dangerous.”

My Love/Hate Relationship With Automated Media Measurement by Seth Duncan

“The key takeaway is that the artificial intelligence that these tools offer don’t necessarily work for every brand or communications campaign and, even when they do work well, they require more human intervention than you expect.”

The Facebook Four: What a Fan Wants by Faith Chihil

“Recently, Beyond completed a study analyzing over 14,000 posts on the corporate Facebook Fan pages of the world’s 100 most valuable brands, as well as a consumer poll of nearly 4,000 people based in the UK and the US.”

Web Design: What Ever Happened to the Design Process? by Troy Chafin

“Don’t forget that design is a process, this includes web design.  Yes, I know – your client wants their site live yesterday.  And yes, your client is tech savvy enough to know that something can be pushed live on the internet in a matter of minutes and then changed 34,358 times post launch.  But that does not mean the value of design should be ignored. This value depreciates when the process is taken for granted.

Mashable Awards Nominations by Joann DeLanoy

We have decided to nominate for 3 categories: Most Promising New Company, Must-Follow Personality (@JudithLewis), Best Use of An API (Connected Kingdom)

How to Build Your Facebook Presence by David Hargreaves

We have just released our Brand Interaction Study which helps to give some insights into the dos and don’ts for brands in running a Facebook presence. In talking to PR Week they asked us what we are doing with it so, given the article couldn’t cover them all, I thought it would be worth pulling out ten things we learned from conducting the study which any brand can implement today.

Thankfulness and Giving Back by Sarah Wulfeck


from Hryck on Flickr

So, the spirit of giving has definitely come early to our offices on both continents, and we’ll be announcing a special holiday program. Get ready to have your bells jingled!

I am a founding Modern Muse by Judith Lewis

Not only do I work at Beyond as Head of Search but I am the volunteer coordinator for London Girl Geek Dinners, a blogger at Mostly About Chocolate and I am a part of the everywoman Modern Muse project as one of 100 founding Modern Muses (“Rebel With a Cause” section).  Our goal as Modern Muses is to increase the number of woman-owned businesses by 100,000 in the next decade and to inspire one million women.

Why Cloud Hosting is Important by Kieran Alington

There are several benefits to Cloud Computing – most obviously being able to access your data anywhere without being on the network where the files are stored, less risk of data loss, and being able to collaborate without constantly sending files back and forth.

• Social Media Case Studies Presented at Budapest Affiliates Conference by Judith Lewis

“Anyone who knows me, knows I’ve been around longer than Google. They also know I love sharing knowledge and one of the ways I do this is by speaking at conferences. I recently spoke at the BAC – Budapest Affiliates Conference. Affiliates are an important marketing channel for non-branded keywords in search and they are often able to capture sales a company might otherwise miss.”

• The Gold Rush by Nick Rappolt

“We’ve just finished a digital campaign for Amadeus called the Gold Rush 2020. The aim of this campaign was to drive traffic and downloads to the research report they created with Epoch PR and Oxford Economics.”

• It’s Nice That. What Is It? by Marley Petropoulos

“I don’t know if anyone in the audience really knew what to expect from last Wednesday’s It’s Nice That future:content event and even now they are probably still scratching their heads – well, at least I am.”

• Is Search Broken? (Part 1) by David Hargreaves

?I have had a number of discussions recently with brands about how they can increase traffic from organic search and which function is best placed to drive organic search: Comms or marketing? I would certainly not profess to be an expert on search (we have our very own Judith Lewis for that) but I know enough to be dangerous.”

• My Love/Hate Relationship With Automated Media Measurement by Seth Duncan

“The key takeaway is that the artificial intelligence that these tools offer don’t necessarily work for every brand or communications campaign and, even when they do work well, they require more human intervention than you expect.”

• The Facebook Four: What a Fan Wants by Faith Chihil

“Recently, Beyond completed a study analyzing over 14,000 posts on the corporate Facebook Fan pages of the world’s 100 most valuable brands, as well as a consumer poll of near 4,000 people based in the UK and the US.”

• Web Design: What Ever Happened to the Design Process? by Troy Chafin

“Don’t forget that design is a process, this includes web design.  Yes, I know – your client wants their site live yesterday.  And yes, your client is tech savvy enough to know that something can be pushed live on the internet in a matter of minutes and then changed 34,358 times post launch.  But that does not mean the value of design should be ignored.  This value depreciates when the process is taken for granted.”

Although I haven’t done in depth research, my purist instinct tells me that if I go to Google and type in a search for: “best places to ski in Colorado” I would see search results which are dominated by the Colorado tourist industry, maybe a NYT article on top 10 best places to ski and maybe an overall US ski guide from a specialist publisher. In other words, editorial content that PR had a hand in placing or creating.

I thought I would put my theory to the test. I typed “best places to ski in Colorado” into Google. Here are the top 5 organic results (the first two results alone get more than 50% of all click throughs):

1. www.articlesbase.com (an articles directory)

2. www.tripadvisor.com (the biggest consumer review travel site)

3. www.travels.com (a travel aggregator site)

4. www.destination360.com (another travel aggregator)

5. www.yahoo.answers.com (another consumer content site)<p>

Somewhat dismayed that none of these results were particularly useful or really what I was looking for as part of planning a trip, I thought I would go to Bing: “the decision engine.” The results were almost identical:

1. www.articlesbase.com (an articles directory)

2. www.yahoo.answers.com (another consumer content site)

3. www.destination360.com (another travel aggregator)

4. www.tripadvisor.com (our favorite consumer review travel site)

But then…

1. www.independent.co.uk (a UK national newspaper)

I haven’t yet done any detailed research across different sectors (that comes in part 2 of this post) but I suspect that the reason the results for this particular search are so disappointing is because ranking for organic search in the travel industry is hugely competitive (and valuable for those companies that achieve a high ranking) so the SEO gamers are out in force.

So what do I take away from this?

The people making money by creating a property, furiously building links to it and then acting as a gateway to other people’s content are clearly the winners when it comes to ranking in these search results.  In other words, the SEO spammers have won and in this instance, the search experience is truly broken.

In the second part of this blog, I will pick on another search term and see if search is really broken or just broken in the case of highly competitive search markets like travel, gambling and mortgages.