Some of the more interesting panels I attended had to do with interactive infographics. For those not in the know, interactive infographics are the largely flash-based informational charts or pictures that many news sites use to represent events and data. Breakaway building blueprints and easy to manipulate demographics data, real-time trending maps and voting information, and even crime tracking maps. All of the bits of data that tell these stories have been turned into consumable interactive charts, graphs, and images that allow users to take it all in at a glance.

Unfortunately, despite the increasing flow of data, many companies are still processing and absorbing data in the same way, as a continuous stream of cells in an Excel, or a list of fields in a data report, or as a few slides in a PowerPoint presentation. While all of these have a solid place inside of business, the greater flow of data either washes over and away, or is consumed inefficiently and slowly, creating wasted time and opportunity.

At the panel “Interactive Infographics”, four companies demonstrated the way that infographics were being used today, from the New York Times, to CNN, to local and federal government, and even to business. Eric Rodenbock mentioned in the sessions that brands have yet to really harness the power of these. This sparked off a couple thoughts in my head regarding the two ways that I feel these tools can benefit not just the Pepsi business, but all businesses in general.

Branding

Pepsi is not unfamiliar with interactive infographics. In fact, SXSW showcases one of the most ambitious infographics that we do: the PepsiCo Zeitgeist. A twitter visualization on steroids, the Zeitgeist provides information about parties, lines, the SXSW buzz, where people are eating and drinking, etc. It is fast and informative. And while this is a great way to provide a subtle soapbox for all the work we do at the conference, it is important to see that we can extend these kind of tools beyond SXSW. Infographics that show Pepsi pour locations (these are restaurants and shops that serve Pepsi, for those not familiar), locations and tweets from events hosted or sponsored by Pepsi, tweets about our products, and feeds from our official tweeting outlets could all be streamed in unified places, allowing quick access to a snapshot of how our brand fits into culture at any given moment. These kind of showcases would also give us the ability to scrub this data on the backend, and create trends that allow us to target individual areas and events with promotions and brand-building activities. All of this information can really be pushed for any business to truly transform a brand.

Business
Every day, businesses throw or lock away valuable data. Financial spreadsheets are deleted, trending data for a year is flushed or pushed into a back file somewhere, and have to be dug up when they are attempting to reconcile or apply the data. It seems that there would be a great deal of value in creating infographic templates to allow this data to be broken into images that could be easily consumed and reused. Trending data, financial results, usage statistics, and even marketing campaign information would be prime targets for living on as a continuously evolving infographic. These sort of “dashboard” items, which obscure the data but still provide granular levels of detail, are perfect for interfacing with nearly all levels of audience, from high level executives to trenched analysts. Information waste is a significant issue for businesses, and there are few studies available yet to determine what the loss of access to data is really costing us. Obviously, we can all likely come up with anecdotal evidence regarding a time when missing or deprecated data cost us time or money in making a decision or moving forward with a winning idea. Creating and encouraging interactive infographics will help your business take your data to the next level, to spot trends quickly, to link data that might have previously seemed unrelated in new ways to create fresh perspectives on your markets. Businesses have an opportunity to create competitive advantage by exploring newer and faster ways to process the constant flow of data that is available to them.

I certainly encourage businesses to explore the possibility of interactive infographics both for their internal and external business. Thanks to all the panelists for really pinpointing the importance of how we interact with data in this day and age.

Ben Fry – http://www.benfry.com/

Casey Caplowe – http://www.good.is/community/casey

Eric Rodenbeck – http://stamen.com/studio/eric

Shan Carter – http://shancarter.com/