Producing a valuable infographic requires a significant amount of work and talent. It is worth it because the company that commissions the infographic has a vehicle to drive traffic back to their website. Infographics are published in such a way that when they are used by others, they link back to the originator.
The disturbing trend is to link together several existing infographics and list the original links to give the producer credit but wiithout giving an actual link.
These are the two items I found just this morning:
http://blog.datajack.com/broadband-internet-speeds/
This promotes a commercial site. I accidentally re-pinned this on Pinterest, then removed it when I realized what it was.
http://www.davidrisley.com/blogging-platforms-compared/
This has inaccuracies, at least about WordPress. I noticed it again on Pinterest and followed it to the source in the interest of commenting on the inaccuracy about WordPress. The pin was to a blog post at JeffBullas.com.
Jeff has produced interesting success by creating blog posts using several infographics on one topic. The people who comment on them apparently have no clue what an infographic is because they comment as though Jeff created rather than curated the infographics. Jeff links back appropriately and no criticism is intended to his work – except that in choosing infographics – I would avoid this rehash no-link type.
As publishers we should have an obligation to give credit to creators of work. In the case of infographics, really that should be a link.
I want to publish this to my Social Media Infographic board on Pinterest which means it needs a “proper” social media infographic visual. Here is one by Argyle Social. The only thing I’d like to see that I don’t is the name of the designer. I think it is nice when that is included, especially if it is done by an outside company, the design company should be included as well.
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