Mike Arauz's Blog – The Archives

Collecting my favorite links, photos, and videos from the week on my Tumblr blog.

Incredible collection of classic graphic design, typography, and diagrams. This diagram shows how news used to work in the olden days.




Xiaochang Li, at MIT's Convergence Culture Consortium, breaks down the discussion around YouTube stars and sponsored content.

What this ultimately means for brands is that the best way to integrate your brand into communities online and launch campaigns that depend on social media participation is to offer yourself as a resource and let the participants decide how to make you valuable. It feels risky, but people build a more lasting relationship with your brand if you let them use your brand as a means to build relationships with one another, in their own voices, on their own terms. And at the end of the day, when you're talking about vloggers or fan producers or other people who are remixing, remaking, and creating in these new media spaces, consider what vlogger Alandistro points out: "You really can't go wrong asking creative people to be creative."

Beautiful video of the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium in Japan, the 2nd largest aquarium in the world.




The Onion shares some great tips on how to add that Wow! factor to your next presentation.

When we first finished the PowerPoint, the content was all there, but it still lacked that certain something," head market researcher Jeremy Batson said. "For example, we wanted to drive home the fact that, in the age of Twitter, we as a marketing company have an obligation to harness the power of distinct thoughts within a limited space. So we spiced that section up by including pictures of celebrities who use Twitter. The Ashton Kutcher photo we found is freakin' hilarious.

And Tumblr gets some love from Brandweek (with a quote from me), "Tumblr: What's in it for you?"

Marketers trying to keep pace with Twitter and Facebook may want to check out another emerging social media platform: Tumblr. At first blush, Tumblr, described as a “blogging platform,” which aggregates online content on a particular theme (like, say, skateboarding), doesn’t seem to have an obvious marketing application. But IBM, EMI and Universal Music have all discovered that creating a tumbleblog (a term that preceded the two-year-old Tumblr’s existence) is a good way to help control the message online, reward fans and, in IBM’s case, position oneself as a thought leader on a given topic.