Monday, September 11, 2006
Embrace the visual
byHow do you present tons of content to a 24/7, hurry-up-gotta-have-it-now, don’t-email-me-but-text-me-instead audience? PR blogger Kevin Dugan suggests that PR writers “embrace the visual” to help their audience quickly understand complex data, and he illustrates how NewsMap does that just by organizing and displaying the constantly changing landscape of the Google News aggregator.
As stated on its site, Newsmap “provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.”
Similar to a “heat map,” such as this one on the Nasdaq site, NewsMap visually portrays the tie between data, patterns and trends.
As Blogger Dugan suggests from a PR perspective, “An aspirational goal for a media relations campaign is to make enough noise to land your client on this map.”
Or for some businesses (and their agencies) or politicians (and their handlers), perhaps the goal is to remain below the radar of this kind of map.
