If you know me professionally, you understand that I’ve been balancing two great loves: marketing and experience design. And, like anyone who tries to juggle two careers at the same time, I’ve frequently wished for more time and energy to spend on both.

I’ve burned the midnight oil, risen before dawn, double-booked and juggled meetings, and somehow managed to help Mad*Pow achieve a 35% growth spurt over the past year. Not bad considering the whole economy is in the proverbial toilet.

I’m so proud of the work I’ve done as a Director of Marketing and as an Experience Design Director. It has been a unique opportunity that many people might give a limb for. But the time has come to choose. When I envision myself later in my career I see “DESIGNER” and want to spend as much time working those designerly muscles as possible.

I will miss wearing my marketing hat, but will make sure to pack those brand strategy and communication skills with me for my journey. If there were 48 hours in a day, I’d gladly spend them brainstorming ways to get Mad*Pow the massive media exposure we deserve or creating hilarious viral videos. Unfortunately, I’ve only got 24 and I’m going to spend slightly more than a third of those being a designer.

Which leaves Mad*Pow in need of a new Marketing Director.

So, consider this blog post as a kind of occupational personal ad: Single Marketing Director Position with highly attractive benefits package seeks passionate, nurturing, quirky, extraordinary candidate to knock my socks off.

Type “Social Media Influence on SEO” into Google, limit the results to the last week, and you’ll get 341,000 results. Even though these two search terms would yield billions of results if entered individually, combined they demonstrate how the Internet is abuzz with the connection between the two. Late last year both Bing & Google confirmed the trend outright. So, SEO professionals need to understand that social media will likely become even more influential as the year progresses.

Rand Fishkin, SEOMoz’s CEO and one of the top SEO thinkers around (twitter: @randfish), believes SEO would fall by the wayside without social media. In his blog 8 Predictions for SEO in 2012, he notes,

“Already, we're seeing SEO and social media marketing become intrinsically intertwined, but in 2012, I believe we'll see SEO without social fade, just as SEO without link building did from 1999-2000. It's not just that social signals are making their way into the ranking algorithms (in both direct and indirect ways), but also that social is becoming the dominant method of both sharing and discovery for web users.”

SEO experts didn’t focus on social media during its infancy, due to NoFollow tags. Now that those have been removed, and it’s clear that social media is driving content consumption, SEO experts should start taking note of social sharing. Previously, site traffic and backlinks to your site were the main data points used to prove to search engines that your site had valuable, consumable content and was worthy of high search rankings. Now that social sharing, Likes, RTs, and Shares are defining popular content, SEO experts need to put on their content creator hats, or at least help their clients understand this new shift in how rankings are calculated.

Personally, being a White Hat SEO expert, I am pleased that social sharing metrics are being used. Those SEO professionals using questionable tactics will have a harder time tricking search engines into thinking their site is worthy of top rankings.  Since search engines will be using some qualifying social measurements, such as Google’s “Author Authority,” as well as others like engagement level, timing (rss feeds posts), and quality of followers, these Black Hat SEO pros won’t be able to manipulate ranking as much. Search Engine Watch discusses these possible new ranking measurements in their blog, if you want more insight.

Google has done a good job of responding to questions on social site ranking in terms of social sharing:



Now listen, I’m not saying you need to actually create new content as an SEO expert. What I am saying, is that the list of SEO best practices will grow going forward. Clients will need to be educated on how to best use social outlets, how to set up reputable social accounts for “Author Authority,” how to craft engaging messaging that drives click-throughs to the content, and how to best use social networks to promote social sharing. Social media will be playing a much bigger role in SEO in the coming year so make sure you understand how to leverage each outlet to be able to continue to compete for top rankings.

Read other Search Engine Optimization & Search Marketing posts by Jonathan Mackin. Drop Mad*Pow an email about SEO and Social Media at solutions@madpow.net.

In 2011, infographics were as overplayed as that Adele song (you know the one I’m talking about), but I still can't get enough of them. (Infographics, that is.) And since it seems that they’re not going away anytime soon, 2012 should be the year we learn to use them more responsibly.

Infographics use static images, videos or interactivity to tell a story based on data. Data visualizations, on the other hand, are graphic representations (charts, graphs, etc) of numbers, text, conditions or other measurable items. Data visualizations are fairly objective and leave the reader to explore and infer. Infographics guide the reader to a predetermined conclusion, one which may or may not be explicitly stated.

Infographics are overwhelmingly popular because they make dry, data-driven stories fun. Instead of trudging through yet another fact-laden article, readers feel like they’re exploring as they scroll through, click around, or watch an infographic. Even when infographics are a few thousand pixels tall, they’re the antithesis of TLDR. ("Too Long. Didn't Read." for those of you not fluent in Internet lingo.) Both this expression and the infographic epidemic reflect the ever-shrinking size of the average Internet user’s attention span, which is sliced into smaller and smaller pieces by the constant, daily influx of information.

Although there is nothing inherently bad about infographics, bad infographics are all too common. The primary offenders generally fall into three categories: ugly, confusing and deceiving.

I won't spend much time on ugly since it's the most subjective of the three, and perhaps the least problematic. A beautiful infographic requires several rounds of revisions, the application of standard graphic design principles and an awareness of current design trends. From a marketing standpoint, infographics are a great way to spread brand awareness. Check out the blog at Mint.com for some good examples.

Confusing infographics are a more complex issue. An infographic has failed if it leaves the reader wondering what a piece of data means or what the moral of the story was.

Designers must take care to choose the appropriate visuals to communicate individual pieces of data. IBM's ManyEyes project does a great job of breaking down some of the core dataviz patterns based on the reasons they should be used. The Periodic Table of Visualization Methods shows a broader swath of approaches (though I'd like to see an updated version with some better examples). To get a feel for the amount of iteration it takes, check out some case studies from the visualization company JESS3.

In addition to choosing appropriate visuals, it's important to provide context and frames of reference. Is 53% good, bad or mediocre? Is 50 million active users more or less than normal? Relevant comparisons are critical in helping readers understand concepts like growth, size, value and frequency.

Once you have some puzzle pieces to play with, start fitting them together until you have an elegant, comprehensible picture. Edit judiciously, but don't be afraid to throw pieces away if they aren't critical to telling your story. "Usability test" your infographics to make sure your message is being conveyed smoothly and clearly.

The third type of bad infographic is the deceiving infographic. These leave the reader feeling confident and understanding the data, but the data is inaccurate – on purpose or by accident. Designers may unintentionally portray data inaccurately if they’ve chosen an inappropriate visualization technique or haven’t double and triple-checked their math. Before creating the infographic, you have to be clear about the scaling and level of precision you need to convey the data honestly. It helps to explain your methodology where feasible and, of course, make reasonable inferences.

Atlantic columnist Megan McArdle recently called companies to task for deliberately using incorrect data to create viral infographics to bump up their search rankings. A number of responses to McArdle's article accused journalists of being part of the problem for spreading infographics via social media without verifying the data and conclusions. It’s only reasonable to expect high-profile figures to check the credibility and accuracy of any infographic before posting or retweeting it.

However, fact-checking and verification isn’t always easy. Although most infographics list their sources, these URLs are frequently placed in the tiny print at the bottom of the graphic. Readers have to squint and retype to track down sources. Many times, it’s unclear which data came from which source if multiple sources are listed. Using footnotes with simple citations (author, title, date, publication/website) would make it much easier to assess the data’s credibility and relevance. Even if the URL changes, readers can still Google the citation information to find the source. A single shortlink leading to a page of reference material would also be a great solution and provide a chance to elucidate methodology that isn't included in the graphic itself. Hunch often does this, and this poster on scholarly tweets adds the nice touch of a QR code since it was designed for print.

With the rise of HTML5 and CSS3, I hope to see infographics made from markup so they are more accessible and can provide easier access to sources. Granted, the main point of infographics is visualization, but that doesn't mean users with screen reading software should be excluded from gleaning the meaning. There's plenty of text used in infographics, but few actually have appropriate alt-text or long-descs to pass along the message. HTML graphics will also allow for interactivity and representation of real-time data. They can still be converted to static images when needed, or embedded similar to YouTube videos to facilitate viral sharing.

So...TLDR:

• Readers, be skeptical. Infographics are by nature biased, and accuracy is not guaranteed.
• Journalists (and prominent social media figures), check the facts and think before you tweet.
• Businesses, know the potential SEO value of viral infographics, but don’t abuse it. Make sure you have a point, and don't create a graphic just to create a graphic—some things are better said than shown.
• Designers, honor thy data and make it easy to access source material. Respect your audience. And make a New Year's Resolution to learn to code. As some of my colleagues say, CSS3 is the new Photoshop.