A selection of infographics about Indonesia and South East Asia

A selection of infographics about Indonesia and the surrounding region.

This wasn't meant to be a blog post; I have been trying to put together an infographic for an event I work on in Indonesia (infographic to be mainly about economics, investment and infrastructure) and as part of that did a search for other infographics about Indonesia and the region so I didn't repeat anything and maybe get some top tips. I was making notes as I went and thought that it would make quite a good blog post. So here you go!

I guess the digital marketing nature of infographics meant most of the ones I have found are about 'Digital Marketing'. (click on links for complete infographics):

INDONESIA – GENERAL INFORMATION (undated)

Beautifully designed infographic giving top-line information on Indonesia – population, area, history, economy - from a US graphic designer. No source or date though, so I probably wouldn’t quote it!

Pros: Beautifully designed infographic with what looks like quite extensive information
Cons: No date or source, so difficult to be sure of accuracy
Interesting stat: "Indonesia is made up of 17,508 islands"

Annalise Ogle | Indonesia

INDONESIA - THE NEXT BIG THING IN DIGITAL MEDIA (March 2011)

Although 2 years out of date, provides some nice simple stats on digital usage in Indonesia from the Singapore Management University (SMU).

Pros: Some interesting (albeit old) trends for anyone looking at marketing (especially digital) in Indonesia
Cons: 2 years out of date now. Best used as ‘trends’ rather than solid facts
Interesting stat: "Indonesia has more Facebook users than the population of Canada"

Indonesia: The Next Big Thing In Digital Media

DIGITAL MEDIA IN INDONESIA (Nov 2011)

Well, it’s more about social media than ‘digital media’ but goes into depth about Twitter and Facebook. Again, a little old (Nov 2011), but some nice graphics. Also from SMU.

Pros: In-depth information on social media, especially Facebook and Twitter
Cons: A little out of date now and some of the comments don’t actually make sense
Interesting stat: "Thursday is the busiest Twitter day in Indonesia" (in Nov 2011)

Indonesia To Become A Leading Nation For Tech Start-ups? - Tech in Asia

BURSON-MARSTELLER ASIA-PACIFIC SOCIAL MEDIA (April 2011)

I was hoping there may be a more recent edition of this by now, but it seems like this was a bit of a one off (this company did publish a Global Social Media Check-Up in 2012 which is also worth a look). Anyway this is still an extensive (22 pages) analysis of social media in Asia Pacific.

Pros: Loads of information here split by country if you’re looking at social media across this whole region
Cons: Sorry, it’s also a year and a half old.
Interesting stat: "16.5% of Indonesians use the Internet" (think of the potential to grow!)

 

Asia Internet Insights from Burson-Marsteller

INDONESIA MARKET OVERVIEW – MOBILE (Jun 2012)

This overview of the Indonesian mobile market is compiled by mobile company InMobi and gives a nice top level view on growth and use of different mobile handset brands.

Pros: Good info on handset usage
Cons: Not hugely helpful with regard to mobile marketing trends (beyond ad impressions)
Interesting stat: The prominence of Nokia and Samsung is interesting especially if you are used to the dominance of iPhones in some European and North American countries.

Indonesia Mobile Ad Market Doubles in a Year, Android Growing Fastest - Tech in Asia

TOP FACEBOOK PAGES IN INDONESIA (updated monthly)

This infographic seems to be published monthly by SocialBakers on We Are Social. Does what it says on the tin, gives you the top performing Facebook pages in Indonesia.

Pros: Gives you the current Facebook zeitgeist of brands and very up to date
Cons: Not much other Facebook analysis
Interesting stat: The two most prominent fan pages are Blackberry and Blackberry – showing the importance of this brand in Indonesia. Apple who?!

Top Facebook Pages in Asia, Feb 2013 [Part 1] | We Are Social Singapore

And finally...

IS INDONESIA MORE ENTREPRENEURIAL THAN THE US? (June 2012)

This insightful blog post calls into question the content of a recent infographic that looked at entrepreneurship and innovation around the world. 

Whether you agree or not, he does make a good point – don’t believe everything you see – by infographics making data easily digestible they can sometimes mask the information behind them, or even be entirely erroneous. So check your sources, and do your own research where possible! 

Beware of infographics, especially if the findings are too good to be true

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The ultimate SEO link building strategy from Blog Action Day

It was Blog Action Day '09 yesterday and to take part bloggers are asked to write a post about, in this case Climate Change, including the words "Blog Action Day" and a link somewhere to www.blogactionday.org.

However as an internet marketing blog I’m writing a post about how change.org (the company behind Blog Action Day) has created the ultimate link building SEO technique.

Backlinks from authority sites

In one single day they are getting 12,023 (as of 08:30 16/10/2009) backlinks from a variety of blogs. And not just any blogs, they include Number10, Google Blog, Mashable - "12 of the world's Top 100 Blogs" according to their website.

In terms of the power of those links, they are hitting both quantity and quality.


Links in context

Blog Action Day are specifying that you write a post on climate change. So most of those links will be from sites talking about different aspects of climate change.

The context of the copy around a link is an important factor in search engine ranking of keywords so this will help blogactionday.org appear higher for "climate change". In fact at the moment they are at the 6th result on page 2 of Google - which is good for what I imagine is a hugely competitive keyword (and they were the 10th result on page 2 yesterday so moving up).


What have they missed?

Link anchor text

They could have done even better with this SEO technique by specifying the link anchor text. Anchor text is used by search engines to define the content of your site - you only have to do the old "click here" trick to find Adobe Reader listed at the top of Google (because most people link to Adobe with "If you need a PDF reader, click here").

They could have even provided a selection of options. For example:

Please help Blog Action Day conquer Google for all the most important Climate Change keywords. Please make your link to this site consist of the words "Climate change" "Carbon Footprint", "Environment" or "Sustainability".

Unique URLs

The URL blogactionday.com will move on next year and push a different subject, in the past it's looked at the Environment and Poverty.

So all this association of subject, anchor text and context mentioned above will vary each year. This means that blogactionday.com will start to list in the search engines for "poverty", "climate change" etc. The unique pages on blogactionday.com devoted to that year's subject will be deleted or updated with the next year's topic.

If instead each year they were to create a unique sub-domain, i.e. climatechange.blogactionday.org, and then push links to this, they would have a site devoted to climate change that would continue to exist even when blog action day had moved on.

It would also have keywords in the URL - another important SEO factor. Both the uniqueness of the URL and the specific focus of each sub-domain would help to propel the site to number one in Google for ALL keywords as opposed to doing reasonably well for most but not amazingly for any and to start to lose all that power the year after when they change their website.

I do realise however that Blog action day isn't just about their website though, but the discussion (or dare I say 'wave') ALL OVER the blogosphere, and for that it's an awesome idea.

If you would like to read similar posts actually about Climate Change, as opposed to a ramble about their internet marketing strategy, from some of my colleagues at UBM, please click on any of the links below:
Brian Sims, John Welsh, Ron Alalouff, Phil Clark, Grahame Morrison, Rob Enslin

Related posts
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5 steps to improve your online presence (Feb 2009)
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Improve and check your website's readability

Is the copy on your website or in your emails readable or incomprehensible to the average user? Well you can check the readability of your copy using Microsoft Word's readability tool.

This tool uses something called 'Flesch Reading Ease' that will tell you what age level your copy is aimed at.

I picked up this tip from a seminar on digital strategy given by Dotmailer at TFM&A.

1. Copy and paste the copy you wish to check for readability into Microsoft Word - I’d suggest copying it to notepad to strip out all the formatting first, then into Word.
2. Turn on ‘readability’ in Microsoft Word 2003 under Tools>Options>Spelling and Grammar tab>Show readability statistics check box
3. Run spellcheck. At the end of the spellcheck you will have the following extra statistics (the following is the result for this post's copy):

The higher the number (50.1 in my screenshot above) the easier to read. Anything lower than 30 means college graduate level and so may be putting off some users from reading and understanding your website. Wikipedia has more about ‘Flesch Reading Ease’ and what it means.

Related posts
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Blogs need multiple authors to succeed

I read this nice review of the internet's top blogs and what we can learn from their success a couple of months ago and have tried (with moderate success) to incorporate some of the thinking into the blogs my company runs.

Image copyright - SEOmoz

There are lots of blog articles called "10 top tips to create a great blog" but how do we know whether any of it works? Well the facts contained within that review are just that, facts. They are the state of play in the blogosphere today so pay attention; it can't all be good luck, big brands and Perez Hilton.

The one phrase I take from the whole thing is the following:

“Can't do it all by yourself? Neither can the experts. 80% of the top blogs have more than one primary writer.”

This is so obvious, the advantages are clear:

• More people, more posts, more content
• Get different view points on the same subject
• Attract different audiences by having this varying content

The strategy for any company with a number of blogs should be obvious. Take all your bloggers and ask them to categorise all their posts by subject. Then turn these subjects into your blogs rather than the bloggers. So if you have a number of internet marketing bloggers create blogs on specific subjects such as SEO, PPC, usability, email marketing etc.

Search engines look for content based on keywords. Therefore a blog based on a subject area contributed to by a number of bloggers will work better than a blog on a variety of areas written by one blogger. It will also be more useful for your readers, which after all is the point of all this, isn't it?

Add Google Analytics to blogger

Check out this post on how to add Google Analytics to blogger sites.

It's really simple and the post above is a step by step process. Essentially all you need to do is add the Google tracking code directly before the </body> tag in your HTML template.

I'm already on Google Analytics as an administrator for my work websites so obviously didn't want to add my website profile as everyone at work would see it. That's when i discovered that just because you may have administrator access doesn't mean that you have your own 'Google Analytics account' - you just have a login. Within Google Analytics you can have access to a number of different accounts.

So if you're in the same situation as me make sure you click 'Create New Account...' in the top right of Google Analytics then you can edit who can see it, who has access and get tracking code specific to you. You will also become the main contact for that account as you input your name and details.

Feedjit widget provides your site's most popular pages

Just stumbled across (in the traditional sense of the word not stumble upon) the feedjit site after checking out this rather interesting real time traffic map.

There's also one of those 'popular pages' widgets that you see more and more on sites these days - see image.

It won't work on every website in the world, the widget has to be able to get the information from your website - therefore it works with blogger, typepad and the open source version of Wordpress (but NOT Wordpress.com).

There's so many widgets out there and most of them are utterly pointless and not even slightly amusing. However there's no doubt in my mind that the 'recommended reading' and 'popular pages' widgets are really useful - it's just another way of highlighting other areas of your site to your users.

The live traffic map may be less helpful but i clicked on it didn't I?!

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Adding a tag cloud to blogger

UPDATE: Google now offer this as an option on the label gadget saving you the coding hassle.

Ever since i was asked if i'd heard of a 'tag cloud' in a recent job interview i keep hearing this phrase all the time. I love them far too much for their simple way of presenting information, it's what web 2.0 is all about for me - making information clearer.

Anyway I've just added a tag cloud to this blog, it's all very exciting.

Go to phydeaux3's blog to learn how.

Putting social networking bookmarks on blogger posts

UPDATE: I can't guarantee this still works. I've since ditched it now that blogger provides share buttons as an option (it only took 3 years...).

OK, about 2 hours ago I thought, 'Those bookmark links at the end of BBC articles look really cool and encourage traffic, how would i do something like that?' Scroll down for the answer, read on for my wibbling.

Simple I thought, someone else must have figured it out, i'll just search Google Groups and the answer will appear.

Well lots of answers did appear but not quite the right ones. I want

• Bookmarks appearing at the end of my post
• With little logos for each
• And with nice accessibility touches such as "Bookmark with" and "What are these?" written at the end plus alt text coming up when you hover over the links.
  

Well as you can see I figured it out eventually (except the "What are these?" bit but I'll update this post when I figure that out) and the steps are described below. First off I'll acknowledge the people who helped me on the way.

I first considered the add this option which is really easy but clicking on it does take you to the 'add this' page before the relevant bookmark page which i didn't want. I'd recommend this though if you want a really simple option.

I then thought, well i'll try and figure it out myself! So i copied the source html from the BBC page but that just broke my template funnily enough.

I then found most of the answer on tips for new bloggers (the reason why i'm not just redirecting you there is because they don't add the little accessibility things that i wanted!). I've had a play in photoshop to get the little images looking right and hosted them on my Google Page Creator site (don't use these images on your own blog as i can't guarantee i won't move them at some point, get your own, it's FREE!). Also i needed a Facebook image as the facebook site doesn't have a nice one so I used the png file on this facebook icon request forum. I figured out the alt text using the source i'd viewed on the BBC site.

Also I've written basic html before but as you'll see, this code doesn't look like normal html. For example you use expr:href as opposed to href and instead of "quotes" either side of text you put 'apostrophes'. Well this is because it's in the blogger code as i was told by this new blogger blog site, I'm sure you'll find it thrilling...

Enough of how i've wasted the last two hours, here's what i did:

1. Go into 'Template' > 'Edit HTML'. Save your current template somewhere so if you balls it up you can revert to the old one.
2. Tick the check box 'Expand Widget Templates'.
3. Find (ctrl + F) the bit of code that says <div class="'post-footer'"> and immediately after this put the following code: (change the red text for wherever you host the images)
   <!-- Start of social bookmarks. --><br/>
   Bookmark with:
   <a expr:href='"http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=" + data:post.url + "&title=" + data:post.title' target='_blank' title='Post this story to Digg'><img alt='Digg' src='http://edsexton.googlepages.com/digg.gif'/></a>
   <a expr:href='"http://technorati.com/faves?add=" + data:post.url' target='_blank' title='Post this story to Technorati'><img alt='Technorati' src='http://edsexton.googlepages.com/technorati.gif'/></a>
   <a expr:href='"http://del.icio.us/post?url=" + data:post.url + "&title=" + data:post.title' target='_blank' title='Post this story to Delicious'><img alt='del.icio.us' src='http://edsexton.googlepages.com/delicious.gif'/></a>
   <a expr:href='"http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=" + data:post.url + "&title=" + data:post.title' target='_blank' title='Post this story to StumbleUpon'><img alt='Stumbleupon' src='http://edsexton.googlepages.com/stumbleupon.gif'/></a>
   <a expr:href='"http://reddit.com/submit?url=" + data:post.url + "&title=" + data:post.title' target='_blank' title='Post this story to reddit'><img alt='Reddit' src='http://edsexton.googlepages.com/reddit.gif'/></a>
   <a expr:href='"http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=" + data:post.url + "&Title=" + data:post.title' target='_blank' title='Post this story to Facebook'><img alt='Facebook' src='http://edsexton.googlepages.com/facebook.gif'/></a>
   <br/>
   <!-- End of social bookmarks -->
4. Save template
5. Admire your handiwork

It's 7.29 on Saturday 13th October and England are about to play France in the World Cup so i'm not staying around here any longer, there's beer to drink!

A diagram of Web 2.0 words

There's a really good image on Wikipedia about the history of web 2.0 and its associated words. As you can see "Web 2.0" is 2004/2005 but most of the words it embodies are way before then.

Image and author details can be found on Wikipedia.

The first day of Web 2.0

I've been trying to improve my company's website listing so i started a few months ago by redesigning. I got some accessibility experts at Clearleft in funky Brighton to tidy up the design and i've now started adding decent content - the best way to increase SEO.

Search Engine Optimisation was scaring me till i read this website helpers site. I've got friends who work for SEO agencies who bang on about how they have 100 sites that can link to my site immediately if i use them, I will now start ignoring them!

There are loads of really informative blogs out there about Web 2.0, just search Technorati. I'm only writing this one so i can get the hang of this blogging lark and can explain it to my colleagues with some degree of clarity! Will add a blog roll and other elements of Web 2.0 as i look at them.

Anywhere you can point me much appreciated...!