3 cool web-tools for visualization geeks

Hi guys! I am back again. 

You are not going to believe what I have been doing these past couple of months! While I am in the process of summing up everything that happened in a blog post or two - take a look at the following paragraphs. Here are some cool tools for making our life more visual and visually beautiful :) Enjoy!

As it has already been mentioned in one of my really early web-notes, it's all about visualising big data now. Just think of how you browse news on the Internet or read scientific reports (I can only imagine a person sitting in a big cosy chair reading something on nuclear physics) or even your Facebook timeline. There are only a few things to catch your eye - screaming headlines, videos and pictures...mainly videos and pictures. Thus, in order to spread the message people and companies have to re-invent the wheel. Well...in a cool way. Like Vice News with their cartoonish stories Correspondent Confidential or, say, 'I am a Drop in the Ocean' project (well known yellow&blue poster symbolising ideas of freedom, democracy, mutual help and all-national support in a minimalist picture). 

Of course, all great ideas soon become the over-used ideas, or move from 'Oh my gosh so-o-o amazingly original & fresh' phase to the 'we just had too much of it'. If you want an impression of 'infographics gone completely wrong' or 'how to ruin the idea of visualisation - I found this Guardian collection of 16 useless infographics. Moreover, I decided to share this great little guide from journalism.co.uk which looks into the psychology of visualisation and the extent to which colour, form and icons influence perception of the data. 

Now that you are completely backed-up with all the basics, let me share with you something pretty:

1. Easelly 

What's that? I would call it great easy-to-use and free-to-download online tool for infographics. But the 'official' definition would be:

'easel.ly (n) - a theme based web-app for creating infographics and data visualizations'

So basically it differs from the other similar tools in terms of simplicity. Easelly offers a huuuge range, like really impressive one, of pretty and unusual themes even a child could adopt for creating a nice original infographics. Like, for instance, this free hipster theme on the left. Have you seen anything better? Hipsterlicious! In addition to the standard picture formats, you can also download. pdf version which is supposedly nice. I was going to embed this video presentation of the app, but the music in it was too annoying and I do not want to annoy my readers, so I am just going to paste this link here, so you can see for your self. However, what might actually be professionally useful is this video below which shows the way Eeaselly may be used by journalists. 

Here you go:

2. Tiff 

Speaking of hipsters: 

'I got a tattoo of the word Helvetica on my chest in an Arial. It's ironic, you know'. If you don't get this joke from a PocketHipster app - the Tiff tool will be super useful. If you do get the humour, check how much an expert on fonts you are by taking this silly test here. This article from The Industry may also shed some light on the mystery behind the two alike looking fonts. Anyway, moving on to the tool:

'Tiff (n) - is a type diff tool that visually contrasts the differences between two fonts'.

The tool may help you to decide which font to use for your blog, or simply get more familiar with the styling differences. The only potential problem I see with this tool is that it only recognises Google Web fonts, but having tried many different combinations I did not see it as a big flaw. If you really do want to compare a wider selection of fonts or simply want to know more similar tools - check Typetester (may not be that hip, but super useful as it shows you text extracts in bold, italic and other styles and allows comparing 3 different fonts at the same time). To make it a list of 3, will also share with you this font-comparer with an original name Fontcomparer %-). It does not have a wow-design, but seems super convenient. So do not forget to check it out.

3. RAW 

Ok. Now when I have tried this web-application, I want to go back to my statistics course and re-submit my lame Excel tables, pasted-in-a-Word-document graphs and other simple-looking data visualisations. RAW has been specifically designed for aesthete-sociologists, journalists and other specialists who work with data. 


'Raw (n) - an open web app to create custom vector-based visualisations on top of the amazing D3.js library through a simple interface'. 

Beautiful graphs and charts can now be made in 5 easy steps: 

copy-->paste-->customise-->export-->enjoy

Your work can be exported in vector format (.svg) or .png

And here is another video illustrating more useful features of the tool.

Raw 1.0 - Basic Tutorial from DensityDesign on Vimeo.

That's basically it. Thank you for reading :-) 

It's April Fools' Day: Do Not Let Propaganda Fool You!

Dear Readers,

Thank you so much for reading me again. :) It's like I am now a perfect example of a student not being thrown on the street without any job opportunities, but a happily working young professional. :) If you Google 'I got hired', guess what appears on the first page? (although, if I was to choose the most creative graduate to get hired, this would be this genius LEGO fan).

As all of you may know, one of the hottest trends around the international media now is Ukrainian-Russian crisis (read: Russian occupation of Crimea, Putin using the whole country to satisfy his imperial ambitions and so on). I did not initially want to write anything on this issue, because I am not a political expert, but I am Ukrainian and I cannot keep calm. :)

Thus, I thought I would just share a number of valuable English-language sources on Ukrainian issue, that might shed some light on the crisis (these are actually the official trusted sources that do not participate in propaganda and bullshitting and simply cover facts). However, once again, these are my sources of choice, so they reflect my vision of objective media.


















By the way, if you are a journalists you can email me anytime to get details and media contacts.

So here they are:

1.  StopFake - not sure if the news is real, visit this website and check it out
2. Ukraine Crisis Media Center - all the official press-releases and news from the most influential speakers
3. KyivPost - English language Ukrainian newspaper covering events on the ground

A couple of stories to check out:

5. An open letter of famous Ukrainian writer on the protests in Kyiv
6. My interview for the Glasgow's alternative press - amazing brand new source The WeeG
7. Very thoughtful piece from journalism.co.uk explaining the whole media situation in Ukraine

International media to provide great coverage of the issue:
8. Mashable - and yes, this is my most favorite source and everything they do, they do brilliant!
9. The Economist - featured great article on Russian propaganda and many more important subjects
10. The Guardian - deliberate journalism, great analysis and debunking of propagandists' plans

Of course this is just a tiny little list, so it is not full. If you think there is something valuable I have not mentioned - let me know.

P.S. I would appreciate the English language sources or those that provide translation or subtitles.

P.P.S. HIMYM ends with the death of Barney's Granny... ;-) ... more like a :-(
Happy first day of April to you guys!

I got hired!

Hey folks!

I bet you missed me. :-)

Sorry for not writting about my job hunting success earlier - I was too busy strategizing my very own information war, more like a battle (p.s. I am gonna tell you all about it later on). So yeah, I got the job and now I am one of those office people wearing fancy suits and having my phone bills covered. Not really...;-) But here is what happened.

More than a month ago I have started this little job hunting experiment, to be precise I started looking for the job in the first week of February. On 19th February I had my first day of work. I now work on TV and do the stuff I love the most - manage PR and media relations.

In order to find the job I have used several techniques with most of them being fairly traditional (I did not make any viral videos, but probably should have). You can take a look at a little visual report below illustrating the progress of the experiment, although, first, I would like to make a little conclusion.

1. Your path to the dream job  almost solely depends on you. 
Knowing me, I can now say with 100% assurance that if I really-really wanted to get the job at Google I could have. I just needed to really work for it and really want it. Of course there always are circumstances you just cannot deal with. Like in my case, I can only work in the countries which do not require the working permit. And believe me this list is like super short. Thus, at this point of my career I decided to establish myself in the filed first before applying to work abroad and having amazing companies to do the paper work for me. So yeah, your success is directly proportional to the efforts behind it.

2. Your CV and your ability to make an impression is 90%, 10% is luck.
Clearly CV and your email, pitch or phone call to come with it is the first thing potential employer gets to know about you. Thus, it should speak for itself. To add something to this topic which I have already covered, you can also consider looking at this latest article on Mashable. The main rule to remember here is tailoring! You may and should have that one perfect universal resume to begin with, but you would very likely have to edit it for each particular job offering.

3. It is personal. 
Out of every channel tried, targeted emails seem to work the best. As you will see on the chart below, I have tried several ways of distributing my CV among the potential employers. If 100 is the maximum efficiency, email gets 100. Every time I have sent personal email with my resume attached to real people (not just HR department or a general email) asking them for a job, I always got the response.
References and letters of recommendations and  are also personal and extremely fruitful, it is like the word of mouth in action, like the true meaning of PR (when the person who says you are cool is actually not you, but somebody even cooler).

4. Social bookmarking works. 
Not just for blogs, but even for the job hunting. As this little technique helps increase traffic site and make your post (CV) more visible. Just imagine if the story of you looking for a job appears on Digg among the most sharable content. I bet somebody would hire you to do their social media.

5. Be creative. 
There is nothing to add here, except that every profession has place for fantasy and talent. If you can show at least 1% of you might add to the job while going through the application submission/CV writing/hiring process, it definitely increases your chances for success. 

Experimental Blog Post: Who Seeks Shall Find

Dear Readers! :-)

Today I am not going to share with you anything I know but rather ask you for a little offer. Could you please share something you know about me with someone you know? If that sounds a little bit confusing, let me explain.

For those who liked my thoughts on CVs writing and job hunting tips, I am starting an experiment in order to evaluate whether social media, word of mouth and basic PR skills can help one get a dream job! Here is how it's going to be:

1. Here is a link to my LinkedIn profile

2. Here is my email address: mzhdanova401@gmail.com

3. Here is my colourful CV

4. Here is what I am asking you to do:

Would you mind sharing the link to this blogpost on your different social media accounts, saying that your friends is looking for a job, please (I hope you view me as your virtual friend;-)? Or if it is easier, you could just share this text:

"Proactive and self-motivated team player with strong communication skills, leadership ability and problems solving talent is looking for a job in the field of communications, public relations and/or marketing. Please, check her CV here: http://ua.linkedin.com/pub/maria-zhdanova/75/287/76a

5. Here is what I am going to do:

I will use social bookmarking tools, my networking talent and this blog to distribute the idea of me looking for a job to as many sourced as possible, so it reaches a potential employer. On the other hand, if you want me to share your CV here at this blog - just email it to me and we will raise a number of variables in our experiment.

6. What's next:

On 1st of March I will publish the results of this mini experiment telling you what was the audience reach for this blog post, how many people contacted me (contacted any of the participant of the experiment) regarding my CV/ how many job offers I go and finally was it all worth doing! :)

Thanks a lot for your help and let us climb the career ladder together! 

What to expect in 2014 when it's already 2014?!?!

Aloha!!!!!!!!!

Can you believe that is really happening? Me neither, but that's for real - I am back for regular contribution to this blog, full of genious ideas and ready to impress you with every new post.

In this first paragraph let me quickly update you on what's happening in my life and on the 'where you have been hiding for the past little-bit-more-than-a-month' issue. I returned back home from Glasgow, celebrated Christmas and New Year, had great birthday party, celebrated Chinese New Year, got Glasgow-homesick (Glasgow-sick doesn't sound right...;) and have been actively looking for the perfect job! I have already had a number of interviews and almost been offered the President of the World role, but I will tell you more about it in my next post, while now I offer you to read the hopefully-still-relevant ideas on the Marketing/PR/Advertising trends of 2014!

I know it might be a little bit too late as 2014 has already arrived, but I tried my best to reflect this issue in the headline for this blog post to avoid confusion, disappointment and all those sad things. On the bright side, I had more than enough time to think this post through, read everything relevant news media had to offer on this topic and come up with some interesting ideas. Enjoy! And, please, come back for more, as I realised it will be too difficult to fit all 5 trends into one post. Hope, I have not lost your attention already...

The trends of 2014, according to me, are:

1. Storytelling is the thing of 2014

2. Transmedia storytelling/
cross-platform PR is hot

3. Old school is good as new

4. E-commerce is rising

5. UX is all about simplification 

1. Storytelling is the thing 

I don't think this will come as news to you that I advocate storytelling as the core to successful comunication. Not only have I finished online courses regarding this trend and already posted my ideas here, but started reading some cool literature on the topic as well! I am going to share it with you after I explain what is going to happen with storytelling in 2014. Wait for it. :-)

'No matter what you do, always and forever, our job is to tell our story, and that is never going to change. The way you make real money, the way you make real impact, the way things get changed is by great storytelling [...].  My biggest problem right now, in general, is that I feel that far majority of people, businesses, organisations, media organisations all across the board are storytelling like it's 2007 in 2014's world!' - says Gary Vaynerchuk in this inspiring video I have just found. In case you are to busy to watch it, here are some key notes I made from his talk:

• 2014 is the year of micro stories and 'breaking news storytelling' as opposed to 'heavy and thick movie storytelling' (which still works in some cases). 

What has happened is that everyone suddenly got ADD (by the way I read that the guy who invented this disease admitted it was not a real thing, anyway). Therefore, supply and demand of attention is completely out of control. I do agree. Have you noticed that even dinners with friends in restaurants and cool coffee shops are now all about Instagramming the food, checking-in for Facebook and spending more time with your smartphone that your actual smartfriends? I wake up every morning and the first thing I do - check my phone, not that I am addicted, but yeah...that's my first source of news and I just can't not check them.
 

On the other hand, the one thing we totally do have control over, or at least think we do - is time. We like text messages, because we can respond to them anytime we want. We tweet, because we want to capture this exact moment. We watch all 3 seasons of Sherlock in one night and do not really care about BBC programming. 

Those two factor (our control over time and our lack of attention) are the biggest challenges for storytelling in 2014. What this means for storytellers and marketers is that, according to Gary, 'you have to tell your story where the eyes and ears of everybody are'. To illustrate, you spend money and kill trees to send catalogues to your 'potential' buyers and they end up in a trash bin without even being opened. Moreover, that huge expensive billboard will never be seen, as your target audience 'is not looking on your billboard, they are not even looking on the road, because they are too busy texting'. 

• Quality storytelling always wins

The second cool thought I borrowed from Gary is that marketers ruin everything. They've ruined email marketing (which is now 'delete-spam-unsubscribe'), they are ruining Groupon, even Google Adwords is down by 15%. People don't watch YouTube ads, people hate annoying pop-up banners, journalists don't even look at our press-releases. To the contrary, P&G's 'Thank You, Mom' story is so touching, I can watch it forever. The same can be told about Dove's 'Real Beauty'. Those are not just commercials or instruments of selling stuff - they are stories of really high quality! If we think about marketing and PR in a broader sense, quality storytelling is recent Facebook 'Look back' tool (p.s. Happy Birthday, Facebook!!!). Moreover, I guess this is a highly valuable tool for brands who have their Facebook pages (I guess all of them do). Not sure if it is possible to create such video for business pages, but I guess it would be cool to see how their stories look like. Anyway, SMMs can ask themselves what those 'lookback' will look like for their products/pages/services. Will it all be about 'buy this/check this out/buy 2 get 1 free' or something meaningful/bright/hilarious/fascinating/shocking? 

I also think that product placement and branded entertainment are the most promising means of storytelling in 2014. With the first - you don't have to tell the actual story, but feature your product in the right story in a right way. While with the second, you get to tell a story with your product, about your product and in a way that is not as pushy as it is with commercials. Tough challenge which I guess is worth accepting! To provide you with at least one example of branded entertainment, IKEA and their 'Easy to Assemble' web series had really nailed the task.  

• It's not about the CONTENT, it's about CONTEXT

Surprisingly, although IKEA, P&G and Dove excite us with brilliant content, Gary argues that in 2014 'where everyone gets fucked up' is that 'we think it is all about the content, and all the action right now is in the context'. Thus, social media channels are mainly considered by marketers as means of distributing information and this though is wrong. When this is your image of SNSs, you use them accordingly - write and share the same stuff on all the different social networks (it's like email distribtuions). The correct or the 2014's way to tell stories is to respect the psychology of different channels and their users. We should ask ourselves what people are doing on Twitter and what they'd like to see you, as a marketer, doing there. It may seem like a very 2007s advice, but never ever handle your Instagram/Facebook/Vine/Tumblr/ Twitter identically. I would also suggest to think twice whether your brand needs all of those contexts, because Instagram for a local dentist sounds too odd to me. ;-)  To sum up with Gary Vaynerchuk's quote: 'The context of the room changes the way you storytell'. 

Well, I guess that is too much of What's Trending talks for one blogpost! In my next 4 posts I will explain the rest of the tendencies, so don't give up on reading me just yet. 

See you soon!

P.S. This is the promised short reading list.

Avi Savar, Content to Commerce: Engaging Consumers Across Paid, Owned and Earned Channels

John Truby, The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller

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5 tips for being sexy with your content marketing

Hi guys! Hope, you are all enjoying this lovely Wednesday and counting days to Christmas. :) I, on the other hand, am a little bit upset as my Glasgow days are almost over and my luggage is half packed. 

As for my blog - I am not saying 'Good-bye' to you anywhere soon, so here is my latest post. Let me share some sexy tips with you. Enjoy! :-)

Looking back on how TV, commercials and 'not-so-innovative' marketers work, one can always find that sex (sexy images, naked body parts, 'intriguing' noise and so on) always works as a fast and easy way to sell stuff to people, be it chocolate dessert, luxury car or the newest fragrance. 'Sex appeal' or the prosaic 'sex sells' rule has been long ago incorporated into the advertising/PR/marketing world agenda (which was 'scientifically' proven by Gallup and Robinson btw). 

And I am not here to judge what is and is not wrong with it. Let me just say that today's blog post was inspired by the growing popularity of 'Masters of Sex' and the iconic status of 'Sex and the City', people's interest to 'Secret Diaries of a Call Girl' and the idea that all commercially successful perfumes are 'Guilty' 'Pleasure' 'Seduction' 'Fallen Angel' and so on.

I guess there are so many decent ways to include 'sexy' principle into your strategy, be it in the field of marketing, content creation, or sales, that more attention should be paid.

One way to go, (which we have already discussed) is to feature half-naked people in your ads. The question is to what extent such idea is cheap and tacky.

Here is my rather tasteful solution of integrating the well known rules of seduction into the everyday content marketing strategy - 5 tips on how not to cross the line between sexy and vulgar.

1.  Every glamour magazine would advise women to be mysterious, because secret equals intrigue. With content marketing there is a similar trick. If you want to ‘write sexy’ something should be always left unsaid. To clarify, I do not suggest you write incomplete articles or do not answer questions in a proper manner; instead, your content has to be so engaging that the audience would strive coming back for more.

2. Pay attention to words and styles. Catchy headlines work better and so do witty articles. Always reflect on the people you are targeting: professional jargon might be appropriate for some industry-specific journals and websites, but general audience would prefer clear explanations. Would you say nerds are sexy? Who knows. In the meantime, don’t leave your audience feeling ‘What?! I did not get a word of this’. Do not confuse and provide great examples to illustrate your points.

3. Confidence is sexy. Confident people always have charm which makes them even more attractive. Make your content emphasise your expertise and leadership in the particular field. Moreover, let you style of writing be confident as well. No one will follow ideas like ‘our products seem to be better’; ‘you will probably enjoy our services’ and so on. Nevertheless, be careful with the thin line between the confidence and arrogance. If you claim you are the best - prove it (better have others prove this for you).

4. Flirt. Yes, just like in a real life, in producing and managing content, there often is a place for flirting. Of course, I believe flirt is art and talent, but some tips are pretty general so anyone can use them. Thus, engagement is one thing - replying to comments, Liking, re-tweeting and re-posting are all examples of modern digital life coquetry. You should make your customers, readers and potential buyers feel they all have their tiny place in your company's heart. The only exception to the rule in the context of flirting is customer service - if you provide this on your Facebook page - that is definitely not a place to ‘play hard to get’ despite how sexy you may think it is. Another way of flirting would be through the actual content. Talk through your content.  What this means is that engagement always increases when some real-experiences, case studies and illustrations are involved. When you write for your audience from their standpoint and in their words, real magic happens - readership starts ‘Liking’ you.

5. I thought of having tip No.5 here at first, but then decided to make it sexier by leaving some space for ‘fantasies’...I mean comments and questions. :) But than my colleague came up with this brilliant rule, which basically sums up everything written above - Think Pirelli calendar rather than Hooters bar...