This week the infographic platform and search engine Visual.ly opened up beta access to create.visual.ly which lets people create infographics for free and automatically.

Create a few infographics on the platform and you will discover that not every infographic is equal; not even if it uses the same template. Some infographics work better than others. Some are certainly easy to outreach with or engage audiences with.

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Facebook’s Timeline feature has the potential to be as dramatic a change to the network as when the company controversially launched the now irreplaceable news feed. Unsurprisingly, brands are determined to cash in. There is quite a variety of companies using these apps too, it’s not just social networks and newspapers. Brands as diverse as Vevo, Foursquare, Nike, The Onion, and Pinterest have all launched new Timeline apps at South by South West in Austin, Texas.

Techcrunch point out that the data from the apps is of huge value to advertisers, and therefore Facebook. The data is structured, so instead of knowing the things that people merely ‘Like’, which is not always an accurate reflection of preferences or actions, these apps store what you have actually watched, done, or eaten.
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Interesting piece on Conservative Home by Conservative MP Robert Halfon writing about how he believes the right has lost its dominance online to left wing campaigners.

In particular he is talking about the online campaign group 38 Degrees, which organised the Save our Forest campaign and more recently a campaign to defend the NHS.  Read More »

This post is provided by our partner Headstream, the social brand agency behind the Social Brands 100.

first direct doesn’t hire bankers, says its Head of Public Relations, Amanda Brown, “From the beginning, we wanted great communicators who could be taught how to bank.” Founded in 1989 as a division of HSBC, customers’ needs have sat at the centre of the business from the beginning, she says.

first direct ranked 27^th in last year’s Social Brands 100 and was the only financial services brand nominated; this year six other financial services brands are also in the running. Amanda spoke to us recently about what’s changed since last year and what she expects to see in the year ahead. Read More »

In less than four years, an incredible 25 billion apps have been downloaded from Apple’s app store. That equates to roughly 80 apps for each of the 315 million iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices that the company has sold worldwide. With more than 550,000 apps available, and many free to download, it’s easy to see why the store has proven popular with consumers and developers alike.

However, other app stores are beginning to catch up. At this year’s Mobile World Congress, Google’s Andy Rubin revealed that there are now 450,000 apps available in the Google Play store (formerly known as the Android Market). That’s three times as many as there were just 12 months ago and only around 100,000 fewer than the Apple App Store. Read More »

The term content marketing has cropped up ever more frequently this last year. But what exactly is it, and how is it different from social media? Is the term of any use at all?

They are in fact flip sides of the same coin – the ever falling cost of creating media. Both speaks of media, that can be produced by everyone, and is distributed by everyone. These two terms can however also capture a distinction in approach to people powered media. How so? Read More »

San Francisco-based blogging and sharing platform Posterous that was once seen as a competitor to Tumblr has been acquired by Twitter.

No word on how much Twitter has paid but according to reports Posterous had raised more than $10m from venture capital investors.

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