From Flickr's photo sharing to Facebook's social snaps, Instagram's instant on-the-go cool to the beautiful boards of Pinterest, this chapter explores the channels and the content which turned the web from words to wow.

A bird's eye view

If the old adage “a picture's worth a thousand words” is to be believed, today's web has got enough for a team of travelling encyclopedia salesmen. If web 1.0 was characterized by copy, images are now the king of online content with millions being tagged, tweeted and tumbled each and every second.

The visual web has been the hottest online trend of 2012 and the march of the megapixel is inherently linked to the rise of mobile web. 1.2 billion smartphones and tablets are predicted by Gartner to be sold worldwide in 2013 and 20% of web visits are now on the go.¹²⁰ The latest mobiles from big players Apple and Samsung, the iPhone 5 and Galaxy S III, come equipped with an 8 megapixel camera. Almost overnight, the streets and sidewalks have become populated with people with the ability in their pockets to photo-document their lives, loves, friends, families, communities and campaigns.

Let's take a look at three of the biggest image-led networks, Flickr, Facebook and Instagram, to explore how the visual web has developed over a relatively short space of time. Image host Flickr was (emphasis on the “was”) the web's online photo album of choice, with bloggers big fans of its functionality. A child of unintended consequences, the site emerged from services created for a multiplayer online game. When Yahoo signed a cheque for the start-up in 2005, the fledgling Facebook only allowed users to upload an image for their profile picture. A cursory scroll of my feed in December 2012, filled as it is with cats dressed up as reindeer and Coca-Cola Christmas trucks, illustrates quite how much that has changed.

Where Flickr got left behind was in its social sharing elements.

Notwithstanding some aggravation to early adopters caused by the new owners – anyone arm-wrestled into a Yahoo account to sign in to the service back in 2007 will testify to this.

Sure, Flickr had groups and comment options, but when Facebook put the picture at the front and centre of its community, integrated with its other functionality, everything from marketing a gig to being nudged to wish your old school friends a happy birthday, there was only going to be one winner as the go-to gallery for those summer holiday snaps. Despite some new filter features, Flickr is now in danger of becoming the online equivalent of a dusty box of sepia-tinged snaps in the attic.

While Facebook was photo-friendly and share-centric, its slow-moving mobile app wasn't delivering the user experience today's web wanderer demanded.¹²¹ Champs don't stay champs through complacency (just ask Mike Tyson about Buster Douglas). The network's emphasis on mobile since its February 2012 IPO has been a necessary step. In September 2012, the company announced that a new mobile app would be released every four to eight weeks in order to improve performance, develop new features and keep fresh-air Facebookers in the family. Latest figures¹²² on Facebook's mobile use, up from 425 million users in February to 600 million monthly active users with 10% of these only accessing via their handheld devices, show the strategy is working.

Then, like Roman Abramovich¹²³ on a January transfer window spending spree, Zuckerberg and co bought Instagram for a cool $1 billion. Launched in 2010 and developed with mobile in mind, Instagram has shareability at its very core. Why wouldn't you want to pass on pictures that look like a sun-kissed Santa Monica scene even if they were taken in a wet and windy Wales?

With over one hundred million registered users¹²⁴ uploading over one billion photographs, numbers post-Facebook integration were on a steep upward curve (users were at 27 million before the buyout). But before the ink was dry on the marriage certificate, Instagram caught flak from fans for giving in to its new partner's demands. A proposed change in the Terms of Service, which was interpreted as meaning images and information could be sold to advertisers, went down like a drunken sailor.

The data behind the storm seems to show that despite a big fall in daily average users (from 15.6 million in December ’12 to 9 million in January ’13¹²⁵), monthly average users are still steadily increasing (up from 41.5 million to 46.1 million over the same period). Power users got peeved, but Instagram is still being used by more people each month.

The digital archivists of the future could well be scratching their heads at how their forefathers' photos seem to skip from the noughties back to the 1970s. Those Walden and Lo-Fi filters will have a lot to answer for.

Contrast Instagram's on-the-go omnipotence against the fact that Flickr's not even in the top 50 iPhone photo apps and you can see where the networks of now are syncing perfectly with today's web-browsing trends while the old guard get left behind.

Networks and top tips

But it's not all about Flickr and Facegram. Here's a rundown of some of the most crucial of the visual web:

Tumblr: A rich content, youth-driven¹²⁶ micro-blogging site, Tumblr's clean interface and mobile integration ensure it lives up to its strapline of being “the easiest way to blog”. Its quick set-up process and simple upload system make it the perfect choice for those who want to share imagery through a blog without delay.

Pinterest: Taking the marketing moodboard online, Pinterest became the fastest growing community around in 2012.¹²⁷ An idea-collecting platform where users can “pin” pictures from across the web to their boards, content is dominated by home decor, fashion, food and crafts. Appealing to the lazy sides of social curators, the way Pinterest allows users to consume and order images in a simple and structured grid is having a big impact on the design of shopping sites across the web. Spin-offs include Trippy, a travel-focused network perfect for planning sojourns to sundrenched destinations on dreary days.

Twitter: While not a visual network per se, around 1/12th of links shared on tweets are images, accounting for over 41.5 million pictures a day.¹²⁹ After years of reliance on third-party hosts like Twitpic and yfrog, Twitter's native photo app has evolved to take the fight to current photo trendsetters. The December 2012 release of tools included a “magic wand” to improve images, crop tools and Instagram-like filters. It remains to be seen whether Instagram users will exit their X-Pro II for this copycat functionality.

Okay, we'll look at Instagram too (I couldn't resist):

Instagram: Flip reversing the path trodden by others, the ultimate mobile network hit desktops in November 2012. Looking a bit like parent Facebook's hand-me-down profile pants, it's an albeit useful addition for brands to anchor their snaps to the static. Joining the Facebook family seems to have been a good move so far, with Instagram's biggest day to date coming on Thanksgiving 2012 when over 10 million Toaster-effect turkeys were shared. But on-the-go is where Instagram's functionality and community comes into its own.

The new press release?

In the aftermath of the 1906 Atlantic City train wreck, Ivy Lee issued what's widely considered to be the first ever press release. The impact his tool had on information distribution and influence has been palpable to this day.

It'll be clear to everyone reading this book that in this social age, communicating through the conduit of the traditional media can be bypassed by direct interaction with online communities. As such, it's increasingly “data visualized”, or infographics, that we're sharing on the networks mentioned earlier in this chapter. But could the infographic be the new press release? Well, yes it could.

When today's average attention span is shorter than that of an amnesiac goldfish with a hangover, any way that communications can stand out from the noise and be more easily understood is going to give you a puncher's chance of message penetration. Whether on Twitter or in a journalist's inbox, a visually striking infographic which combines data or text with imagery certainly makes you stand out from the crowd.

Add to that the speed with which the information contained can be scanned and understood (65% of the population are said to be visual learners¹³⁰) and you'll begin to understand why “data visualized” could really signal if not the death of the press release, then a snap at the ankles of old Ivy's invention.

Everything from complex health data to new studies on the impact of food waste disposal systems has been given the infographic treatment, turning dense (and, let's face it, potentially dull) information into easily understandable information. As well as making the complex comprehensible quickly, an infographic pulls out facts and figures and feeds them ready for reporters to hang their story on. Beautiful isn't it?

A campaign my agency worked on proved the long-form feature could benefit from the infographic treatment too. Upon the promotion of their local football team to the Premier League, City & County of Swansea Council realized they had a once-in-a-lifetime shot at marketing the area. With Swansea City being given little hope by the media of maintaining their top flight status beyond a solitary season, the world spotlight (the Premier League is broadcast in 212 territories with a television audience of 4.7 billion) would be on the region for potentially just ten months.

We worked with the council's tourism arm, Visit Swansea Bay, Mumbles & Gower, on a campaign to showcase the area to football fans and the wider public. Alongside the journalist junkets you'd expect of a destination campaign, we produced a series of infographics which used football as a foot-in-the-door to highlight the region's offer in a fun, informative and shareable way. Kicking off with one where users could measure out landmarks in (beanpole England striker) Peter Crouches, we followed up with a WAGs guide to the area for Mrs Wayne Rooney, weekend packing advice for Aston Villa fans (riffing off the Birmingham team's motto of “Prepared”) and #Swanselona, where an existing on-the-pitch conversation comparing Swansea and Barcelona was taken to weigh up their respective tourist trappings.

People love to content curate through a click, and a shareable infographic can really deliver traffic back to your website. Within an hour of seeding the Crouch-o-Metre on social media, the Visit Swansea Bay website crashed due to the volume of traffic. Visitors to the site rose by 44% on the same period in the previous year and four of the six top regions for Facebook fans reflected Premier League cities, representing ten teams. Our innovative tactics made front pages, street billboards and praise in Premier League's 2011/12 season review.

Before you commit your story to an infographic, ask yourself these questions:

• Do you have a story or statistics that could move a conversation on?
• Do you have an existing online community with whom to share it?
• Is your target medium open to carrying infographics?
• Do you have the design capability to turn your digits and words into wow?

Biography

Dan Tyte (@dantyte) worked in PR pre-social networks and has run campaigns for professional sports teams, pop musicians and alcoholic drinks using on and offline tools. A director at Working Word and committee member of CIPR Cymru Wales, Dan's debut novel, Half Plus Seven, set in a PR and digital agency, will be published in spring 2014 by Parthian Books.