Brand Madness! Social Media Bracketology

Brand Madness! Using Bracketology to Crown a Social Media Champion is a fun infographic design during the NCAA basketball tournament that uses social media scores to determine winning match-ups.  From UltimateCoupons.com, this design is a great example of taking boring data (Facebook likes and Twitter followers are available to anyone) and using infographic design to make it fun and engaging to the readers.

March Madness has officially arrived, but the UltimateCoupons.com team has Brand Madness! While everyone else’s mind is on basketball, we decided to fill out a bracket pitting 32 of the world’s most popular brand names against each other with the winners and losers being decided by social media popularity.

This is a great use of the visual company logos and the bracket structure to show the readers all of the match-ups, and you can look closer to see the actual numbers if you want to.  Only a year or two ago, this type of blog post would have been all text and a table of numbers, but this is a simple and very effective use of design to grab the readers’ attention.

Thanks to Scarlett for sending in the link!

Social Media Stats of the Day

This is a LONG one, but a good one based on statistics recently published in AdAge.  Social Media Stats of the Day from Dream Systems Media visualizes some fo the recent stats about Favebook Twitter and general Social Media usage.

Saw an article on Social Media stats the other day on AdAge by Sarah Evans (awesome list of stats she compiled) and of course, me being who I am, I wanted to visualize the data. So enjoy! I used several of these statistics in my recent SMX Social Media Scottsdale presentation on SoLoMo – Checking into the real world.

- Mat Siltala

I really like the coloring in this design that visually ties the data to the Facebook and Twitter brands instantly for the readers.  Although, big fonts don’t make a data visualization, and a number of percentages included could easily have been visualized as simple pie charts or stacked bar charts.  I do think there is too much text in the design, but I can appreciate how specific you have to be when describing the research data and where it came from.

Nice job Mat!

Social Media Usage in the UK

Social Media Usage in the UK is a new infographic from Umpf.co.uk. 

We then analysed the results to bring what we believe is the most up-to-date snapshot of social media usage in the UK.  If you like statistics, you can view them all here.

Our infographic, created by Vapour, helps visualise statistics; it outlines the gender and age differences in social media usage.

It needs a title.

I love that they included a link to the data file in GoogleDocs in the original posting.

I like the idea of the Man/Woman stacked percentages.  Although, I’m guessing they didn’t calculate the icon shape areas to get the section sizes right, which makes the visualization false.  They probably just calculated the height of each section, which visually misinterprets the data.  YouTube is shown to be much bigger than it really is because the shape is widest there.

They don’t need the Key/Legend at the bottom (“Legends are Evil”).  The social media icons were clearly used in the first bar chart, and could have been included in them all for clarity.  Build the data right into the charts, and you don’t need a legend.

At the bottom should be a copyright (or creative commons license), the URL to the original infographic, the Umpf company logo,  the sources listed and the designer credit.  Once this infographic is posted elsewhere on the Internet (like here on the Cool Infographics blog) all of the information that was included in the original posting is lost.  (unless a good blog author, like me, includes the links)

Thanks to Jon for sending in the link!

Client Infographic: Facebook, Privacy and Health

For the Path of the Blue Eye Project, InfoNewt (my company) recently designed the infographic: What You Need To Know: Facebook, Privacy and Health.  The group at the Path of the Blue Eye Project has done some fantastic, primary research about online users’ willingness and attitudes about sharing health information online, and specifically Facebook.

The answer is overwhelmingly “NO”.

If Facebook is so popular (Pew reports that 62% of Web users frequent sites like Facebook and MySpace), why are people shying away from sharing health content with others on the site?  To answer this question, the Path of the Blue Eye Project commissioned a national survey designed to tease out some of the reasons why Americans are reluctant to exchange health information on Facebook.  We found:

• 68% of Facebook users have not and would not share their personal health information on the site. The most commonly cited reason for refusing to share: “it’s no one’s business but my own (86%).”
• Privacy concerns may be one reason many refuse to share.  39% of non-sharers were afraid strangers would find their health information and 32% worried marketers might use it to sell products and services.
  

Online users do a lot of searching for health information, but very few are willing to share any of their own information on social sites like Facebook.

The Facebook Privacy Policy is huge, and most of the concerns why oline users are unwilling to share online information have to do with unintended people finding their information.  Insurance companies, marketers and strangers top the list of concerns.

Thanks again to Fard and the team at Enspektos.com.  There’s much more information available at the Path of the Blue Eye Project.

Humor: Corporate Organizational Charts

From Bonkers World, Organizational Charts is a very funny look at the corporate cultures and structures for some very high-profile tech companies using hand-drawn organization charts as the visual language.

Found on Daring Fireball.

Real Estate: Social Media Killed the Blog Star

Another good infographic from Fixr.com about the how the real estate industry is changing.  Social Medai Killed the Blog Star: Real Estate looks at how buyers are finding their information online and who are the most influential blogs and real estate people on Twitter.

I like the use of company logos and Twitter profile images.  I also like that all of the data is built-in to the pie charts and bar charts to make it easier for the readers to comprehend.

The side-by-side Top 10 lists are interesting, but because they’re based on different measurements (followers vs. Alexa page rank), the graphic should give the reader some context of how to compare the different values.  Why do these lists support the overall message that social media is more important than blogging?

Some major technical errors as well.  Pie chart percentages should ALWAYS add up to 100%.  The pie charts here add up to 71%, 99%, 91% and 100%, which means that the visual of the slice sizes doesn’t match the data.  You never want your data visualizations to tell a story that isn’t supported by the data.

Thanks to Raul for sending in the link!

Real Estate Professionals & Social Media Infographic

From Mashable and Postling, the Real Estate Industry + Social Media Use infographic looks at how social media is reshaping how realestate agents communicate with potential buyers.

The real estate industry has seen a number of social media innovations over the past few years. Real estate pros are using social media to provide online property tours, schedule showings and showcase local expertise.

Alexis Lamster, VP of customers at Postling and creator of the infographic below, told us that the company analyzed more than 500 Postling accounts specific to real estate and more than 7,000 small business accounts to extract information on how the real estate industry is using social media.

Although the infographic is made up of mostly pie charts and bar charts, it clearly communicates the information in a clean, easy-to-read format.

Social Media and College Admissions

Are colleges using social media as part of the student admissions process?  Schools.com explored this topic with the Reading Students like an Open Facebook infographic.  It’s hard enough to get teenagers to understand that online photos and status updates will be a permanent record of their behavior for the rest of their life, but even more immediately it could impact their entrance into college!

As Facebook has become more and more popular—if it were a country, it would be the third largest in the world—its use in the field of education has expanded, too. In fact, more than 80% of college admissions officers report using Facebook as part of their recruiting process. 

Are admissions officers really looking at the Facebook profiles of prospective students? And if so, are they making admissions decisions based on these profiles? Below is an infographic that highlights the answers to these questions and more—which might surprise you.

Thanks to Kristen for sending in the link!

The Current State of Social Networks #infographic

From ignite, a social media agency, comes The Current State of Social Networks.

It goes without saying that Facebook is the network du jour, but even though the reigning champion’s user stats keep soaring, social networking as a whole might be leveling off. Nevertheless, there are still scores of other highly competitive social sites that are waxing and waning; and different networks and apps are more popular in specific geographic areas, with certain genders or age groups, and even among various social classes.

For example, Plaxo is the network with the most users over the age of 65. Facebook is more popular with women, but Digg and Reddit tend to be more popular with men. LinkedIn is the “richest” social network, but Plurk outranks it when it comes to well-educated users who have graduate degrees.

They have a ton of traffic data to work with, and this infographic does a good job of summarizing some of the key findings at the top level. 

Found on Mashable and Social Media Graphics

2010 Facebook vs. Twitter Social Demographics

Facebook vs. Twitter is a good one from DigitalSurgeons.com.  They’ve done a great job of compiling the data from at least 10 different sources, to create an overall profile of the standard Facebook and Twitter users.

One has over 500 million users, the other just over 100 million. But who are they and what’s their behavior? What’s their value to a brand? How old are they? What’s their education? How much do they make? Just exactly what does the Facebook vs. Twitter landscape look like? Good questions. Here’s how we see it.

The use of the Polar Area Chart (also called a Nightingale Rose Diagram) does a good job of breaking down the demographic information into 11 different categories.  Unlike a standard pie chart, each slice is the same angle, and only the radius of each slice conveys value.

The difficulty in using this visualization style, is that it’s hard for the reader to compare between the two diagrams.  Does Twitter or Facebook have more logins by mobile device?  The reader can’t tell from the visuals, and they have to move back and forth reading the values to tell the difference.

One possible alternative would have been to put everything into one Polar Area Chart, so for every section the Facebook slice is next to the Twitter slice.  That way you could visually compare the two without reading the numbers or comparing between two charts.

Thanks Matt for sending in the link!