Infographics

Over the last 12 months or so I have really come to enjoy infographics. As I have stated in previous blog posts, Infographics are becoming more popular, and widely effective in the world of football recruiting.

I really liked the infographic prepared on "The Retailers Guide to Big Data" from the Shopping and Social Media. It really details the importance of the shift from digital consumption on computers to digital consumption on smart phones and wireless devices. This is a key point that executives and strategy makers will have to keep in the forefront in the coming months and years.

For a while there was a trend in football recruiting to create expensive "micro" websites that were a football-only focus. These sites could be upwards of $80,000 to create. An example is http://lesmiles.net/#/main. This is a site that LSU contracted Overtime Software to create. It relies heavily on flash media, which led to LSU having to create a mobile app, thus costing more money. From my experience I have also found these sites are tremendously difficult to maintain if a staff does not have one full time staffer solely dedicated to the site.

What I have found (without hard data, more word of mouth-type conversations) is that the traffic to these sites consists of more fans, the media, and others that are not part of the target audience (football recruits). So schools were dishing out thousands upon thousands of dollars without asking what the return on their investment was (maybe one of these schools should hire me to manage their recruiting efforts).

Recently a firm called JumpForward released a new concept for a recruiting based microsite called a "Social Media Hub", which had a desktop platform, but is geared toward the mobile consumer. Their first client to implement such as site was Northwestern: http://www.thewildcatway.com. JumpForward was able to develop a site that gave a one stop shop for all of Northwestern's social media accounts. Aside from the practicality of being very mobile friendly, it is also about 12% of the cost of those other "flashy" flash based sites.

Now, back to the Infographic in the article - This piece contains so much information and it is presented very succinctly for the reader. I think this is something that I could take and re-work (with different data) to be geared towards a football program.