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In their 1991 Pulitzer-winning book The Ants, E.O. Wilson and Bert Hölldobler described an ant colony as a super-organism – a vast social network. The ants in the colony communicate with each other by following chemical trails left by other ants. As we browse the web today, we are provided with social proof of quality by sites that let us know what our trusted friends have liked or shared recently.

When we made some of our first forays into the social web, in an attempt to promote a now defunct blog, we did what most anyone did in 2007 – we tried to figure out how to leave enough bread crumbs around to entice people who we certainly don’t consider to be ants to actually come to our site and then share with their friends to point the way back to the content, and all signs pointed to one place. We heard exciting mythical tales of a beastly site known to send enough traffic to wreak havoc on servers (which sounded like fun for some reason). Back then, if you figured out what worked on the mysterious creature known as Digg, you were able to send your content for a cascading ride to linkbait glory.

Early Campaigns

After some initial success and facing the reality that thrashing servers with traffic wasn’t entirely fun (although strangely addicting), we abandoned our first blog to focus on client work instead. We grew tired of the usual (but effective) top ten lists, and we started utilizing humorous (so we thought at least) charts and graphs to do something more interesting and to vary the approach a bit, and they worked really well across all social sites, and we branched out into maps and other types of visual content.

When we first started working with Mint.com back in 2008, we were commissioned with a fairly straight-forward goal of growing traffic to the blog by creating fresh content and helping to establish a presence on social news sites big and small. The first and easiest improvement was simply to add more eye candy through articles with photos. Along with more shareable, viral topics, we worked with the Mint team to create resourceful “pillar” content (as coined and described in detail by Chris Garrett more than three years ago, it is still a great and relevant read). We were able to start developing content that was doing really well on sites like Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon, which wasn’t always easy at the time for financial sites. However, we had an appetite for the big hit, an addiction developed from our first few big hits that had ever cleared 100,000 visits and even 1,000,000 visits in standard article form, such as an article of epic length that we wrote called 100 Must-Read Books For Men for Art of Manliness.

Rise of Infographics

In Digg v3, you could witness the rise of infographic submissions from close to zero to the initial explosion in late 2008 in a nifty little chart, and it was simply because they worked and people loved them. Almost any infographic at the time could clear 50,000-100,000 visits and the sheer novelty factor of using them in a social media/content strategy was enough to put a blog on the map for a brand. In the world of content creation for the web, there are only so many mediums you can use to create promotable content, so it was a bit of a goldmine to stumble upon the age-old medium of infographics and to put them to use not for the first time ever, but for the first time in consistent social media/content strategy campaigns.

We have come to see that the early adopter mentality, coupled with the appetite for constant innovation leads many of us to get antsy in anticipating what will come next. Of course, we always want to do something new and to discover what the next medium will be that has the luxury of being deemed “novel”. The challenge here is that we basically have text, images and video to work with on the web. The novelty factor of text and videos on the Internet has worn off to the point where you don’t even consciously pay attention to what the medium is other than to just start reading or to click ‘play’. And much like infographics, there is a huge range of quality in each of the respective mediums for content delivery. Some videos are horrifying, just like there are terrible writers, and now there are terrible infographics.

As the novelty factor isn’t enough to carry just any infographic through to social media promotion glory, it is more important than ever to not just have great ideas and good-looking design, but to have a robust distribution strategy. It isn’t enough to simply have a great graphic designer who can make ‘to the moon and back seven times’ type comparisons. In some cases, we start with data and find our idea in the analysis process, in other cases we start with a concept or question and look to see what data might be available to tell an interesting story. We think of the end result as landing somewhere on the spectrum of targeted content (aka thought leadership, industry messaging) to mass appeal, and set expectations accordingly.

The rise of infographics in the past few years has been very much driven by social media. While early social media campaigns we implemented were very reliant on Digg (which would spill into Reddit, StumbleUpon, Twitter and Facebook), now the process is driven by a hybrid of social and PR, as we have to be much more broad and strategic without a single fountainhead capable of spreading a piece of content throughout the web like Digg used to be. Another key connection between the staying power of social media and the longevity of infographics (in one format or another) is that they tap into fundamental ways that people use the web, and want to discover and share interesting content with friends. The novelty factor to a large extent has been eroded, but the underlying purpose and value of the medium has permanence, and has always served to inform and/or entertain people. One great example is the supreme graphic work in Fortune dating back to the 1930s as far as recurring, branded use in the publishing world goes. If you have a chance to meet Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land, ask him to show you the cool infographics he worked on in the 80s and 90s for LA Times and the Orange County Register.

Adapting to Changes in the Social News Landscape

What can be said of the new challenges in driving big numbers from a single infographic? It certainly has become more challenging to pull off the big hit, and the traffic from Digg’s front page isn’t enough alone to make a piece a resounding social success. Additionally, Digg is heavily moderated now more than ever, so even though submitting commercial content there isn’t frowned upon quite as much, most domains just won’t see success from Digg without extremely high volumes of quality content, because many typical front page stories hit 5,000 visits and top out around 40,000 visits now. It’s still worth keeping in your social media tool belt, but you need more.

We have found our service evolving more and more as we strive to create shareable content and then get the content shared by thousands of people. StumbleUpon is more important than ever, but like any other source, it can be hit or miss, and you have to be very careful to keep things very organic and diverse there or you can permanently hinder your domain’s ability to get a big hit. In many cases, establishing influence (and being able to call on an influential friend once in awhile) on Twitter alone can spread your content. We recently launched our infographic app for iPhone and iPad, and through a single blog post and asking for a few favors for retweets, it became a Gizmodo app of the week and was featured in Apple’s New and Noteworthy section in 23 countries in the first week.

For the most part, our new strategy is increasingly time-consuming, but is more valuable and consistently effective than ever. We build relationships with bloggers, journalists and social influencers who like our content, and trust the consistent quality of work we create. Even if their post only sends 100-150 visits to a client, we still appreciate it every time. We would rather have relationships with 100 sites sending 100 people than one site that sometimes sends 10,000 but sometimes sends zero. That is not to say we don’t go for both. Ultimately, if the content is entertaining, informative or both, just a bit of seeding in the right places will get the ball rolling and spread from there.