By Alexandra Reid
Humans have used images to tell stories for millennia, beginning with the rock art, tree carvings, and even tattoos of our ancient ancestors. Since the birth of the practice, marketers have used images as a powerful communications method for company branding and to influence the purchasing decisions of other businesses as well as mass populations of people. It should therefore come as no surprise that images have recently risen as a focal point in our most modern communications practices.
There’s no doubt that social media is becoming more visual. The rise of Pinterest, new developments at Vimeo, the domination of YouTube, the proliferation of new image sharing tools, and Facebook’s new Timeline developments and recent acquisition of Instagram demonstrate that social sites are both acknowledging and encouraging a more visual web.
As Social Media B2B explains, “Facebook already told us that photos and videos are the most important types of content because they encourage the most engagement.”
“In a general sense, (Facebook’s) acquisition (of Instagram) on the heels of the dramatic growth of Pinterest in the last few months is a massive reflection of just how fast the Social-Stream is becoming visual in nature, meaning evolving social engagement driven purely around visual media, not text — and just how valuable that will inevitably be to every major participant in the social media landscape,” Michael Downing, founder and CEO of social video service Tout, told ReadWriteWeb. “This is a huge endorsement of the shift to the visual web and visual conversation in a social media framework.”
Read More
By Alexandra Reid
Introduced at Social Media Breakfast as the guy Klout calls an “authority on shoes,” Ottawa Tourism’s director of digital marketing, Nick Iannitti, is attempting to do what my fellow Ottawans might consider the impossible: change the perception that our beloved city is “safe and boring.”
As you may have guessed, he is employing the powers of digital marketing to influence potential tourists to come to the city. Mainly, he is aligning social media with a creative content marketing strategy to promote Ottawa as a destination and to encourage people to book vacations through the Ottawa Tourism website.
According to Iannitti, a city like Ottawa should be regarded as a very large brand with something to offer everybody. In Ottawa specifically, there are three broad categories of potential tourists:
Read More
March was an exciting month, full of changes and new developments.
In the commercialization ecosystem, all eyes were on the federal and Ontario budgets, which shook up government investment and spending in Canadian business and innovation. In social media, the Stop Kony 2012 campaign went viral, spurring fervent debates between its supporters and critics all around the globe. Facebook also unveiled its new brand pages, leaving many businesses scrambling to update their pages and understand the new format on deadline. We covered all of these subjects and more last month on this blog. If you missed any of our posts, here is a handy roundup.
March 22: What an IP co-ordinator should know, confidentially speaking By David French
March 14: Looking for that sweet spot to get market traction by Francis Moran & Leo Valiquette
March 01: Yikes … we forgot the demo! by Peter Hanschke
And on a related note…
Read More
By Alexandra Reid
As a regular weekly feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of some of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are The Telegraph, On Startups, eMarketer, Guardian, Inc., and Startup North.
The difference between a failed business and a successful one, in five key numbers
As author Alexis Dormandy explains, KPIs are supposed to measure the most important things in a business. They are useful for getting a whole business focused on delivering the really important things. However, KPIs have now become horrendously misused to include just about any number anyone in senior management cares about, someone in finance can measure, or someone in the middle just finds interesting. This post cuts through the noise and shares five vital KPIs that every business should understand, measure, and manage.
Read More
By Alexandra Reid
As a regular weekly feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of some of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are The Globe and Mail, Phil Marks, Fast Company, Startup North and GigaOm.
How to get the media spotlight to shine on your business
As much as startups and entrepreneurs rely on social media to spread the word about their businesses and products, it is still surprising how much they covet coverage from traditional media and blogs. This article shares valuable advice for startups seeking that kind of attention.
Read More
Humans have used images to tell stories for millennia, beginning with the rock art, tree carvings, and even tattoos of our ancient ancestors. Since the birth of the practice, marketers have used images as a powerful communications method for company branding and to influence the purchasing decisions of other businesses as well as mass populations of people. It should therefore come as no surprise that images have recently risen as a focal point in our most modern communications practices.
