Cliff Kuang designed a Designer Infographic including different types of designers as well as their focus on hands-on design vs design thinking. It may look a bit trivial and arbitrary, but then again, its a designer infographic, isn’t it? 
Seriously though, I there were some names on here, I didn’t have on my radar yet, so maybe you’ll find it useful as a starting point to some inspirational design. Read the article here.
Found a pretty good primer by Kendy Louwaars for Google+, the whys and whats in client-friendly language: all the salient points in one deck. Saved me a whole lot of time boiling it down.
Need a quick fix with some facts about global mobile use? This slideshow is almost 5 months old and still a great resource.
Enjoy!
Here is a great resource for planners when it comes to defining people’s desired response to advertising. Before you submit your work to the client, make sure your stuff doesn’t sound like this:
Things real people don’t say about advertising.
Check out this short video from Common Craft about how employees can participate responsibly in social media.
Ideal for HR and PR professionals, it talks about how honest conversations by real people in the company can help customers make better decisions and increase trust.
Even though the video is short - everything is covered in terms of setting up guidelines, processes to follow, and things to watch out for.
via Common Craft
Over on eMarketer there is a post about college student’s web browsing habits, showing the results of the ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology. The study shows that although teens and younger children tend to rely on feature phones, the college set is increasingly moving into smartphone ownership as a matter of course.
As the trend continues, we will begin seeing mobile browsing start to eclipse desktop computing across more and more segments, and companies should be preparing now for this situation. When we spoke about our mantra recently, we said that mobile must be a part of brand planning, and it will continue to be more and more vital to consider as plans are finalized for 2011. The frequency of access show in the following chart should be enough impetus for most brands to realize that the trend is accelerating at an astounding pace.
At the Forrester Consumer Forum on October 28-29, John Kosner from ESPN said that mobile is the #1 screen, personalization is expected and real-time is the new reality for content. People are learning to rely on access to solutions anytime, anywhere, and Brands that offer those solutions will reap the rewards.
Are you mobile-ready?
When beginning the planning process for a social media presence for Brands, one truism always trotted out is the “Top-Down, Bottom-Up” paradigm. From the beginning of our partnership with our friends at Facebook, we have heard the phrase repeated and repeated - but where was the data?
At last - recent figures from DDB Worldwide and Opinionway Research support the conclusion, and we have solid data to reference when we make proclamations like “You have to do more then just build it - they won’t come without an invitation!
On the off-chance you haven’t heard the whole Top-Down, Bottom-Up thing, I’ll summarize the basics for you. The top-down element is explained nicely by the first bar in the chart above - showing that 75% of fans’ activity is spurred by ads from the Brand. We call this fuel for the fire, and without it, brands are challenged to grow their fan bases on the platform. The bottom-up element is represented by the second bar, which shows the ‘viral’ impact that brands benefit from when users interact with the brand’s page. Their actions generate posts (”Jamie liked Cheez-It’s video”, Susan wrote on Special K’s wall), which show up in the news feeds of their friends - valuable earned media (called Friend’s Invitation above) that can drive new fans.
The secret sauce is therefore a combination of paid and earned media, where increasing your relevant presence on the platform goes most of the way towards fan acquisition goals, and ensuring that you have an active and engaged community gets you the rest of the way there.
Read more over at: eMarketer
On October 7th, ComScore released their latest study, a comparison of mobile phone use in the US, Europe and Japan. It’s a great resource for mobile marketers, and worth a read of the press release to get the top-level learning.
There’s nothing in here that should surprise you, but it effectively reminds us of the historical differences in mobile behavior across markets, due to both cultural, business and infrastructure differences in the markets.
Europe’s love affair with texting is highlighted, showing the power of that communication form that benefited from cross-carrier standards abroad, while we suffered in the US - waiting for the manufacturer and network operators to agree on anything.
Japan is shown to be the ‘most connected’ - with high levels of all advanced mobile activity. (Notice the relatively low level of SMS use - since email packages are standard, some phones don’t even offer this service.)
Via Cellular-News
Head on over to the TechCheck download page to check out the latest in technology and digital marketing or download it right here.
TechCheck is a quarterly publication from Leo Burnett/Arc Worldwide that highlights emerging technology and digital services that can enable engagement, conversation or transaction.
Enjoy!
Nmap just created a visualization engine based on Alexis.com data which lets you navigate the web’s most trafficked websites. Definitely worth a look even though the servers seems to be over capacity right now, due to all the traffic from Mashable.
