Social Media Resources & e-learning

Informative post from Pinterest.  Which of the stages below do you think Pinterest is most often used in?

Pinterest is a tool that people use to plan their lives— from what they’ll make for dinner this week to the someday vacation of their dreams.

To use Pinterest successfully for your brand, think about the interests your business has in common with your customers. For a food company, it might be cooking. For a travel company, it might be vacation planning. For an outdoor goods retailer, it’s likely helping people discover and go on great hikes.

Whatever the interest, people tend to pursue them through four stages:

1. Aspiration: the moment you get inspired to pursue a specific interest (say, taking up golf)

2. Anticipation: the phase where people look into the interest and start prepping to actually do it (like, researching golf clubs).

3. Participation: (this is the fun part!) when people actually participate in the interest they’ve decided to pursue (like, playing nine holes at a local course)

4. Reflection: where people reflect on the activity, maybe by taking a photo and framing it or sharing it on a social network

Good article, not just on how LI can help students get noticed by College Admissions professionals, but also about the need to behave on the social web, if teens want to go to college.  

From the article:

Starting this college admissions season, teens can use the professional networking site LinkedIn in two ways: to research universities and to create profiles highlighting accomplishments that would otherwise be hard to include in a traditional application. LinkedIn made these features possible by lowering the age requirement for users to 14 in the United States and by launching what it calls university pages.

University pages offer basic stats about a college, but also leverage the power of a user's LinkedIn network. When you a view a page you can instantly see how you're connected to the university. Perhaps you know alumni who graduated in a subject in which you're also interested.

"People have said I want to be an astronaut when I grow up and there was never a way to see that footprint or that pathway to get into becoming an astronaut," said John Hill, LinkedIn's higher education evangelist. "We give you that through data and that becomes aspirational."

Excellent resource from Julien Rio.  Thanks Julien! 

From the post:

You should only move to Social Media when you want to build up your brand, when you have sufficient resources to reply your customers online, when you have sufficient manpower to post content regularly and when you are keen to know your customers better and accept their feedback.

Very interesting infographic here.  I wonder how much the social web factors into the brand recognition strategy of these companies.

Piktochart is my favorite but Dipity looks cool!

Want to know more about infographics?  Here is a good article on the basics PLUS an very good example on Responsive Design.

From the article:

Infographics have become modern way of presenting a complex data in a simplified and visually appealing manner. They turn information into design created with an innovative idea.

Infographics have become quite popular and successful way to interpret data to the target audience in an effective manner. This practise has led to increased story telling images that picturize graphs and bars to present various statistics.

Infographics are the simplest arrangement of complex data in the form of text or images, they help the viewers to visualise a particular piece of information with ease.