“James Balm does a good job of framing the powerful use of visuals for an industry that is historically verbose: Medicine. Whatever your industry, communicating with visuals helps you impact people faster and with more emotion. And every brand and sale has an emotional, human component.”

– Mark Ingraham, Image Perspective

The following article written by: James Balm, BioMed Central

We’ve all heard the cliché, “a picture tells a thousand words”, but there is real value in using images to promote scientific content. Images help us learn, images grab attention, images explain tough concepts, and inspire.

Why do we love images so much?
We are very visual creatures. A large percentage of the human brain dedicates itself to visual processing. Our love of images lies with our cognition and ability to pay attention. Images are able to grab our attention easily; we are immediately drawn to them. Think about this blog, for example: did you look at the words first, or the image?

We process images at an alarming speed. When we see a picture, we analyze it within a very short snippet of time, knowing the meaning and scenario within it immediately. The human brain is able to recognize a familiar object within 100 milliseconds. People tend to recognize familiar faces within 380 milliseconds, which is pretty speedy.

Bright colors capture our attention because our brains are wired to react to them. Our vision senses are by far our most active of the senses. This may be thanks to our evolution. Quick processing of visual information would have saved our ancestors from the attack of a predator or during a hunt for food. A gatherer would need to be able to identify certain shades of red berries during their forage. These primitive behaviors come into play even now in our everyday lives. This is often a fact that advertisers use to their advantage.

Images on social media
As Social Media Assistant at BioMed Central, one thing I’ve realized is how vital images are in my role. A post on social media accompanied by an image is likely to receive engagement. Visuals are one way of grabbing your audience’s attention and gaining interaction, especially on Facebook. With this in mind, you can use these images to drive users to research.

And what if you have limited characters to write with? Twitter only allows users 140 characters of text, which can sometimes make it difficult to convey a complex message. With an image, you can help explain these tough concepts without taking up too much space. Here’s an example:

Images also have the potential to get an emotional response from your audience. This is necessary when if you want the work you’re promoting to have an impact on users.

Tumblr
We are seeing plenty of researchers and institutions taking advantage of images, especially through the microblogging service, Tumblr. Publishers, institutes, researchers, and schools are using Tumblr to promote scientific findings, with the help of vibrant and appealing images. Tumblr is also a great way to bring awareness to the research itself.

There is a selection of brilliant Tumblr blogs for science communication. There’s the Great blog, providing bite-sized bioscience highlights. You can get your daily dose of biomedical images with the MRC’s Biomedical Picture of the Day (BPoD) blog. Meanwhile, Biocanvas, the blog, unleashes the true beauty of science with dazzling photos that could easily be pieces of artwork. After something more unusual? Try this scientific illustration Tumblr.

With this in mind, we have started our own BioMed Central Tumblr, for scientific and medical images. We want to show that science can be beautiful.

Images help educate
In a world where we are bombarded by stimuli, we often seek the easiest and most fluent way of acquiring and learning information. Reading can be a slow and time-consuming activity. It takes a lot longer to read a long sentence than to analyze a visual scene.
At school we are expected to scour our textbooks and memorize sentences word-for-word. This isn’t always the best tactic. Many of us are visual learners, who memorize content more effectively if it happens to be image-based.

This is what makes infographics so popular: they crunch down data and findings and present them in an easy to digest manner.
The images, diagrams, and figures in infographics make the learning process more fluid.  Funnily enough, here’s an infographic explaining why we all love infographics.

Images help tell a story
Sometimes scientific findings, even the important ones, just don’t seem personal to us as individuals. People may not feel concerned about a certain disease or condition because they are not emotionally invested in it. Now, this isn’t because we’re all stone hearted monsters. It’s because sometimes these findings just aren’t reaching out to us in the way they ought to.

Images help us become involved. With images, we are seeing the science, rather than standing on the outskirts. The images help contribute to the can make science more engaging.

Do-It-Yourself (or ask a friend)
Just because you’re not an artist, doesn’t mean you’re banned from doodling. Art and science are not mutually exclusive. Sketching out a diagram, comic strip, or illustration, can help provide yet another channel to explain complex work.
“But I’m terrible at drawing”, I hear you say. Well, you don’t have to be a brilliant artist to help get your message across. People appreciate custom content, no matter its quality or its execution, as long as the information is reliable.

Thanks to open access and open data, we are able to construct infographics and custom content with raw information. With all these findings being open to the public, we are able to combine these ingredients and create a visual product that will engage and educate others: another way to put this research to good use.

Images are a vital part of science communication, and shouldn’t be cast out in favor of long blocks of text. In order to break down the often complex messages of science, we need the help of visuals.

Learn more about The eDot Family of Companies.

“This concise viewpoint from Daniel Newman bridges consumer products and business-to-business in a way that reminds us about our own unique targets. The simple list provided is applicable now, while also pointing to future trends.”

– Mark Ingraham, Image Perspective

The following article written by: Daniel Newman, Forbes

Marketers are constantly looking into the future, trying to predict the next big trend, be it for their brands or their clients. Naturally, marketers are preoccupied with questions like: What is the next big campaign? How can we turn our client into the “next big thing”? What is the next hot trend going to be in retail? Etc.  Everyone wants to the answers. Knowing this, what do some of the top minds in marketing predict for their own futures? A recent article by Jeff Beer on Fast Company Create collected 25 future trends that will change the marketing landscape five years from now based on top innovators in marketing and advertising. After reading this, I started to ponder what I saw as the top trends driving marketing.

Here are the 10 trends that I think are going to have the biggest impact on the future of marketing.

1. Mobile is going to become the center of marketing. From cell phones to smartphones, tablets to wearable gadgets, the evolution of mobile devices is one of the prime factors influencing the marketing world. As the focus is shifting to smaller screens, brands will be able to strike up a more personalized relationship with their customers by leveraging the power of mobile.

2. Transparency will dictate brand-customer relationships. Currently, customers are seeking more engagement from brands. This trend will continue with customers becoming more demanding in their expectation of transparency. Genuine brands – the ones that “walk the talk” and create real value – will be rewarded. This means brands that still haven’t made their customer dealings transparent are headed to a future of doom.

3. The need for good content will not slow down. Ever. Content, particularly visual content, will rule the roost in the online marketing world, evolving into various forms and disrupting the conventional marketing models. Moreover, the speed at which a brand can create amazing content will play a part in their success.

4. User-generated content will be the new hit. The power of user-generated content will surpass branded content as brands begin to relinquish control of their own brands’ marketing to their customers. From online reviews, to social media posts and blogs, this means there will be a strong need for brands to create a positive impact in their consumers’ minds. In response to this model of content production, content co-creation between brands and consumers will become a popular trend.

5. Social will become the next Internet. Social will become an integral part of the “broader marketing discipline.” As its impact grows stronger, most brands will fully transition their marketing efforts to social channels. As such, social has the full potential to become not just one of the channels but the channel.

6. Brands will own their audience. By cultivating brand community and entering into direct conversations with their customers, brands will begin to own their audience in a way that will create loyalists and brand advocates. In the future of marketing, branding and marketing efforts will have their seeds rooted in what customers are talking about. The customers’ responses and feelings toward the brand will dictate future campaigns. Essentially, if the customers are happy, they’ll gladly wear the marketer’s hat and do what is needed to bring their favorite brand in focus.

7. Brands solely-focused on Millennials will go out of relevance. Brands will need to understand that the millennials are not a niche “youth” segment but a generation of people who will ultimately give way to a newer generation. Therefore, millennial-focused brands will have to change their game to stay relevant.

8. Good brands will behave like product companies and not like service companies. While service companies aim to create a happy customer and look forward to a contract renewal, product companies thrive on innovation. So, for brands of the future, customer satisfaction and retention will not be enough. They will need to innovate more efficiently to create more value for their customers. However, great service will NEVER go out of style.

9. Personalized, data-driven marketing will become more refined. There is a difference between data-driven marketing and intrusive marketing. While the former is based on relationship-building, the latter is nothing but old-school push marketing wrapped in a new cover. The difference between these two formats will become even more prominent in future. Marketers who focus on relationship building will be rewarded, while intruders will be shut out.

10. More accurate metrics will surface. What most brands do in the name of measuring marketing success is look at hollow “vanity” metrics such as likes, shares, or tweets. Even in terms of data mining, we are still developing more sophisticated means to capture the right data. Many ideas are hypothesized, but few are practical. The future will witness the rise of better analytical tools to help marketers gauge the success of their campaigns.

Learn more about The eDot Family of Companies.

“A business owner will save time and money utilizing a call center that has already invested in software, training, and infrastructure to make your cold calls. With Movere Teleservices it’s simple….We Call…You Close!”

– Bill Kerth – Principal Movere Teleservices

The following article written by: Susan J. Campbell, Telemarketing Software

The cold call – it’s something every sales rep has had to do at some point in their career. For me, it was a 50 cold calls in one day challenge. I sold office equipment at the time and my manager told me they had done away with the challenge. My coworkers in my particular branch had to do it when they started, however, and I wasn’t going to be known as the one who couldn’t hold her own. So I set out to prove I was just as good as the rest of them.

In this particular story, I was able to report success. I got all 50 stops done (these were cold calls in person) – but I didn’t make a single sale. Does that mean the cold call is no longer effective or just that particular approach?

I would have to go with the latter as I still was able to turn cold calls into business, just not in a whirlwind day like that one. Cold calling can still grow a business; it’s the reason there’s still a demand for telemarketing software. In a recent Gulf Business report by Edward Mainwaring-Burton, the question is asked – can it still happen? In the telemarketing world – it has to happen. The key is to remember a few important tips.

First, telemarketing software can go a long way to helping ensure you reach the right person with that cold call. When you do, however, you need to make sure the information you have to share is valuable information. Make it worth their time to pick up the phone and listen to what you have to say. If you can’t effectively communicate your point in just a few seconds of time, you’ve not only hurt your cause but you ruined an opportunity for every other sales person who calls that particular lead.

Second, take the time to make sure you’re calling the right person within an organization. While this is where telemarketing software can lend value, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pay attention to the details. If you’re selling paper, you shouldn’t be talking to the mechanic in the bay. You want to connect with the office manager, so look for that title in your account information. It seems like a no-brainer, but too many telemarketing agents just start hitting the phones instead of checking the details, first.

Finally, the sheer volume of calls that are done on a daily basis means you will eventually get to someone who wants to hear what you have to say and can turn into revenue potential for you. The key is honing the process enough that it continues to improve over time. A failure to do so can limit your ability to ever be effective. Instead, do your homework, pay attention to the details and place enough calls that you start to turn in sales. With a focused approach, you’re bound to continue to get better and produce the results you need.

Learn more about Movere Teleservices.

“Knowing our clients are thinking about their customers and Business Technology investment; here is some insight on Business Technology trends for 2016 and beyond”.

– Melvin Thoede – Principal – eDot

The following article written by: Bobby Cameron, Forrester

CIOs already face significant pressure to understand and respond to digitally empowered customers. And as their firms’ customer experience (CX) focus intensifies, CIOs must bring digital into the heart of customer engagements — leveraging technology to assure high value end to end across the customer life cycle.

The next wave of tech trends to watch — 2016 to 2018 — support tech management’s move to the heart of digital CX implementation. Today’s mainstream CX investment path has individual organizations making point investments in the latest technology inventions — like social, mobile, big data, cloud, and analytics. But today’s leading firms are delivering solutions that reach end to end across customers’ journeys and across systems that connect the employees who service the customer life cycle. And these trends will accelerate over the next three years.

We see the top tech trends making this shift in three phases from 2016 through 2018:

• Visionaries will dominate dawning phase trends as they drive point inventions to address specific business organizations’ opportunities.
• Fast followers will discover the limits of point solutions in the awareness phase and begin to work through the challenges of end-to-end innovation.
• Enterprises will shift investment toward integrating capabilities across the customer life cycle in the acceptance phase. We call this an “insight-out” approach, as it reaches across customers’ ecosystems.

In our research report, we plot this year’s top technology trends to watch across these three phases. The figure below summarizes our trends. It also illustrates where we think each is relative to point and end-to-end investments. And the figure names some research reports to check out for more information.

CIOs should work with the other business leaders and their tech management teams to adopt the capabilities necessary to leverage these trends. This work begins with the enterprise architects planning appropriate shifts in technology use for their firms. To enable effective adoption, CIOs should invest in:

• Customer-in strategy and design.
• Fast-cycle planning and governance.
• Continuous delivery.
• Flexible sourcing.
• Information security.

Learn More about eDot..

“The Cloud” is finally becoming a viable alternative for the SMB market.  Costs are decreasing as performance and reliability increase.  We expect to see an even larger adoption among our clients new and old in the coming year, and anticipate lots of migration discussion ahead!

– Patrick Torney, eDot

The following article written by: Jeff Bertolucci, Information Week

The migration to the cloud is well underway. According to the Verizon State of the Market: Enterprise Cloud 2014 Report, 65% of today’s enterprises are using cloud computing. That figure is sure to rise as more businesses discover the benefits of moving to the cloud, including lower capital and operating costs for data centers and improved application performance and resiliency, to list just a few.

But migrating to the cloud can be tricky. Common challenges include finding the right cloud vendor or vendors; transitioning from years of legacy IT investments and hardware; and determining how to best manage cloud resources. KPMG’s 2014 Cloud Survey Report, which polled nearly 800 global executives, found that roughly half of organizations surveyed use cloud technology to lower costs — the most tangible benefit. Of respondents, 42% said they use the cloud to better enable their mobile workforces, while 37% use it to interact more efficiently with their customers and partners.

Business analytics is another driving force. “Cloud enables greater levels of data access and makes it easier to share data between IT systems and collaborate across the business,” the KMPG report states. And because cloud data storage is relatively affordable, organizations can store and analyze vast amounts of information.

Cloud computing comes in a variety of flavors. For the uninitiated, here’s a quick primer, courtesy of Accenture’s 2014 report on cloud services for the healthcare industry.

Clouds (the computing variety) typically take one of four forms: private, public, hybrid, or community. They can be a combination of these forms as well.

• Private clouds: These are generally dedicated to a single organization for private use. They can be built either on-premises or off-site — the latter option usually provided by a third party — and they deliver virtualized application, communications, and infrastructure services.
• Public clouds: As the name suggests, they’re accessible to the public via a network. A public cloud is owned and provided by a third party.
• Hybrid clouds: These offer best of private and public clouds. They enable an organization to retain private, sensitive information in a private cloud, but also provide access to a variety of cloud computing services offered by public clouds.
• Community clouds: These are collaborative systems shared by a limited number of organizations, often within the same industry (e.g. healthcare) or geographical region. Costs are split among the users. Community clouds can be hosted internally, or externally by third parties.

Whichever cloud option you choose, here are 10 migration mistakes to avoid.

You’ve seen one cloud, you’ve seen ’em all

All clouds offerings are pretty much equal … right? Nope, not even close. As CloudEndure, a cloud migration and disaster recovery provider, points out in its whitepaper on migrating to the AWS cloud, each cloud setup or provider brings its unique set of strengths and shortcomings. A private cloud, for instance, may offer greater flexibility but less scalability. And with a public cloud, if you’re already invested in a particular vendor you’ll have an easier migration journey by sticking with the same vendor’s public cloud offering.

Junking your old IT hardware

After migrating to the cloud, what should you do with your stockpile of used data center equipment? A common mistake that enterprises make is either to throw out their old hardware or pay someone to remove it, Frank Muscarello, cofounder and CEO of IT hardware trading exchange MarkITx, said in an article by William Toll on the ProfitBricks blog. Pointing out that the market for used IT computers and other gear is north of $300 billion, Muscarello recommended that enterprises should try a hardware exchange to recoup some IT budget cash.

Migrating all apps to the cloud

Not all business applications should migrate to the cloud, and enterprises must determine which apps are best suited to a cloud environment. Mitigating factors vary by industry, of course. Healthcare organizations, for instance, should carefully study how a cloud-based operation might impact their applications’ ability to meet stringent compliance, governance, and security issues, according to an Accenture report on the subject (via a blog post by David Linthicum of Cloud Technology Partners). Another important tip: Your service contract with a cloud provider should clearly define the security services the provider is required to provide, Accenture said.

Not tuning your apps for the cloud

Here’s another app-related misstep: When businesses migrate their most essential applications to the cloud, they often fail to check how those apps will perform in their new environment. For instance, apps running on an in-house data center can access the company’s full computing power: server CPU, memory, storage, and so on. But as ISPFast.com, a company that connects businesses with Internet service providers, points out, those same apps in the cloud must share computing resources with other apps hosted on the cloud provider’s servers. It’s important for enterprises to tweak their apps to run optimally in the cloud.

Not doing your due diligence

Do your homework! Organizations often fail to thoroughly research a cloud technology or provider before embracing it. It’s important to carefully study your IT infrastructure, needs, and usage to best determine which cloud service is right for you, advises cloud communications provider 4PSA. Jot down a list of expectations to discuss with potential providers, and explore what new possibilities a cloud-based system provides. Also, find out how to leverage the cloud’s on-demand processing power to maximize your applications’ “bursty” needs.

Lacking in-house expertise

Your cloud service provider has an experienced team of cloud technology experts (or so you hope). But you should have cloud expertise in-house as well. An enterprise needs tech experts to ensure that its cloud platform delivers sufficient computing muscle. “You need a person/team that can implement your business’s cloud strategy for you and ensure it is optimally managed and controlled. This is how you can maximize the potential of the cloud for business benefit,” writes Stan Roach, chief customer officer at Agiliron, a SaaS solution provider.

Not starting small

It’s wiser to dip your toe in the cloud service pool than to cannonball into the deep end. Start by migrating modest services that will have limited negative impact should something go haywire. An enterprise should pick “the low-hanging fruit” for early migration to the cloud — for example, batch processing systems, big data analytics platforms, collaborative tools, or Web applications, advises CloudOps, a Montreal-based cloud provider.

Ignoring cloud geography

Enterprise applications may run within a single geographic region (e.g., a specific nation), from multiple locations, or perhaps across the globe. As Cisco explains in its cloud-migration whitepaper, consumer-focused apps are often used in multiple geographic regions — and sometimes unpredictably. Enterprises may want to block certain apps — often for regulatory or security purposes — in specific regions. And since multinational companies have offices scattered around the world, they might benefit from distributing apps closer to their points of access.

The moral of the story? Always explore the geopolitical ramifications of your cloud architecture, and ask potential providers if they’re capable of handling your far-flung needs. Global cloud providers, for instance, typically allow enterprises to configure expected access for an app by purchasing capacity in different geographic regions, according to Cisco.

Ignoring big data

Large enterprises often find themselves facing a data-transfer dilemma: What’s the best way to migrate massive applications and terabytes of data to the cloud? Delphix technical evangelist Kyle Hailey, in an article for CloudTimes, outlines such concerns as determining the best way to move behemoth enterprise apps to the cloud. (One tried-and-true method is to ship customer storage disks to the cloud provider.) Another thorny issue is finding the most affordable way to sync on-premises and cloud environments. The bottom line: Pre-move preparation is the best way to achieve smooth cloud migration.

Not keeping a scorecard

Organizations are increasingly recognizing that every application has its own unique cloud migration path, says Verizon in its Enterprise Cloud 2014 Report. The telecom giant recommends enterprises try a “scorecard” approach to prioritizing their application portfolios. This requires evaluating each workload’s economic, security, and risk profile.