Up Market |
- Visual.ly poised to Destroy PowerPoint with Infographics
- The Buzz on Resilience
- (4) Marketing Must-Haves
- Enthusiasm Sparks Sales
| Visual.ly poised to Destroy PowerPoint with Infographics Posted: 27 Mar 2012 06:00 AM PDT
“We hear a huge influx of people saying, ‘How can I get someone to help me create an infographic or a dashboard or an interactive visualization?’” Langille told Fast Company. “People can't afford it: It's $5,000 to $7,000 for a graphic, and prices are going up. But now, if you want data-viz, you don't have to start by wondering, ‘Where am I going to get the data? And where can I find a designer?’” Langille created Visual.ly to help people display and access all the data out there. The start-up employs 4,000 freelance designers who create premade templates for data visualizations. The free service is available to anybody, though people can order custom infographics or set up premium accounts for a fee. Visual.ly's data visualizations enable people to input multiple, complex pieces of data into a premade theme. Simply choose the theme, choose the data set, and instead of 20 PowerPoint slides, the data displays in a single, well-designed format. Marketing managers, for example, can use Visual.ly to analyze Facebook or Twitter accounts. A manager just has to plug in the account, and Visual.ly displays the data, such as statistics on location, engagement, growth and more. “If I'm a marketing manager, and want to go present [this data] to my boss, all I have to do is authenticate [with Facebook or Twitter],” Langille says. “I don't have to do anything. I don't have to find a designer. If I don't like a theme, I can just swap it out in one click.” Visual.ly has raised $2 million in funding so far and unveiled the new platform at this year's SXSW. Already The Economist is using the service for its data visualizations. Try Visual.ly's new tool here, but before you do, check out their explanatory video.  |
| Posted: 27 Mar 2012 03:00 AM PDT
That is a lot of expectation! It might be worth picking that word apart:
(As defined by Miriam Webster at m-w.com) There are certainly more clinical definitions but rather than quote them all, I wanted to look at clearing up a common misconception about resilience. Resilience is not the same as endurance. Endurance means simply bearing prolonged hardship and pain in spite of the costs or the toll it extracts. For me, there is an underlying acceptance of depletion beneath the bravery and projection of strength (ego). Endurance relies on reserves you use while waiting out whatever it is that is causing the hardship. (Eventually, you have the potential to run out of reserves.) What is a primary quality that defines resilience? Flexibility! Flexibility is the freedom to move. It is the ability to bend, adapt, morph. You can use flexibility to avoid damage or depletion in the face of stressors, disruption and major change while shape shifting due to circumstances beyond your control. How will you design flexibility (the ability to move) in to:
What do you need to have more of to support that ability to move? What are the barriers that make your ability to move more difficult? What do you need to create to work around the barriers? There is so much beyond our individual ability to influence or control. But, what happens if we choose a perspective of flexibility — preparing for options we anticipate and a willingness to create unanticipated options on the fly? It shifts our focus from an inward belief that "this is the way things are" to an outward focus of "what do we need to do to be ready to move, to shift, to change?" I believe that outward focus and attunement to change-ready creates the condition for authentic resilience. Photo Credit: photos-public-domain.com  |
| Posted: 26 Mar 2012 02:00 PM PDT
Fee Conversational Skills Sounds simplistic, but the knack for creating, communicating and engaging perfect strangers about never-heard-about-before products or services requires a skillset that isn't bought with a fancy degree or the educational system. It's a combination of natural skills for sharing information, plus an ability to listen.
Fi You might say this goes hand-in-hand with conversational skills. But it's different. Conversational skills allow us to be good at talking – to anyone. Versus social skills are the ability to read people (and groups) and to tailor conversations. In a live-person meeting setting this allows a speaker to continuously find unique ways to keep his/her audience interested in the topic by reading clues – facial expressions, attentiveness level, and level of interaction. Whereas in an online environment it's often measured by site traffic, re-tweets and more. In short, whether offline or online, a marketer must listen to refine engagement. Fo Some might call this “optimization of every presented opportunity”. But in a simplified version, it's allowing every marketing effort to be built with the knowledge that this-will-change. Nothing in today's business environment allows anyone or anything to remain static. It must change, or die. Learn, or fumble and fail. Fum "Fail forward" rings in my ears from my tenure at Yahoo!. The philosophy continues to strike as a necessary for any business leader, especially marketers where there isn't much of a charted path. The "don't do this" list is out there, but there is also a very large grey area in which no one has answers. Instead, as marketers, we must be willing to fail. Even knowing that we will fail, many times over, in order to learn what works best. And knowing that what works best may change days, weeks or months later.  |
| Posted: 26 Mar 2012 10:00 AM PDT
A photojournalist I know told me about a salesman who pointed out to her newspaper editor that the automatic setting on a camera allowed all the reporters in the newsroom to take photos with the same camera. All professional cameras have an automatic feature, but the salesman's excitement, his listening skills and his ability to spot the real need—cameras anyone in the newsroom could use—netted him a big sale. He was able to get excited over the small feature that excited the editor—having a camera that everyone, professional or not, could use. For every sale you miss because you're too enthusiastic, you will miss a hundred because you're not enthusiastic enough. Photo Credit: BobPoole.com  |
We live in a data-driven world — from nutrition labels on food packaging to poll results in elections. Often, that data takes time to sort through and make sense of. But Stew Langille imagined an easier way, where people could see clear, concise data presented in an aesthetically pleasing and easy-to-read format.
Resilience is one of those buzzwords pollinating leadership parlance. It's identified as a really important measure of how successful individuals will be fighting off burn out and being overwhelmed. A quick internet search on the word turns up scores of websites imploring us to build resilience to inoculate ourselves and our children against the health ravages of stress. It is also touted as a character must-have for leaders who can cope with the speed of change.
While there are professions and buyers who are turned off by outright cartwheels and salespeople jumping up and down out of unrestrained excitement, it never hurts to show strong, genuine interest and passion for what you're selling. When you're excited about a feature you easily demonstrate the benefit of the feature in a way the customer gets excited too.| You are subscribed to email updates from Upmarket To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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