SlideShare Launches New Infographic Capabilities, and Other Inbound Stories of the Week

It's finally that time of week again -- that time when, at long last, you can catch up with last week's inbound marketing news. You've plowed through Monday's emails, Tuesday's tweets (plus scheduled some more), and Wednesday's writing for next week's blog posts. You've even optimized a few landing pages. Yep, you finally have a second to catch up on all those updates before the rest of your morning coffee runs out. But that's a lot of news ... 

Well you're in luck! Here's a quick roundup of all the inbound-related news stories we found this week with some takeaways you can use in your marketing this next week. (Bonus: Get more details on these stories and more with our Weekly Marketing Update video all the way at the bottom.) Let's get started:

SlideShare Launches New Infographic Capabilities (HubSpot)

This week, SlideShare, a network primarily focused on distributing and sharing presentations, introduced support for infographics. With its all-new infographic player, SlideShare now makes it easy for anyone to upload, view, embed, and share one of the hottest types of visual content on the web. 

If you're a marketer who hasn't jumped on the whole infographic trend, now's the time to do so. By creating infographics and uploading them to SlideShare, you can take advantage of SlideShare's built-in distribution network (and extend the reach of your content) all while making it easy for your existing audience to share and distribute your content for you. And if your content does especially well on SlideShare, you might just get it cross-posted on LinkedIn (since they own SlideShare), thus giving you even more bang for your infographic buck. Learn more about this new feature in a previous blog post of ours.

What Happens When an Interruptive Marketer Tries to Give Away Free Money? (Video)

What better way to start off your Sunday morning than with a funny yet relevant video? Created by Boston-based comedy duo FatAwesome, the video shows a man standing around Beantown with a clipboard, trying to give away free money. Think people would be swarming to take it from him? Think again. Even when he says things like: "Giving out money here, no reason, no catch" and "Giving out dollars, just handing them out, no reason," the man handing out money still can't get people to take it. 

Why can't he give out the money? Are people in Boston just that rich? Nope -- it all boils down to the fact that he's interrupting other people's day to try to get them to do something. On top of that, people assume there is some hidden catch because he's holding the clipboard. There must be a hidden catch or something ... no one would really give out money for free without wanting at least an email address or phone number. The lesson for us marketers? We have to work hard to earn people's trust through our marketing efforts if we want them to be successful -- and that's not going happen if we're interrupting people. Check out the video below to see this interruptive experiment in action:

Free Crash Course in LinkedIn's Brand New 'Sponsored Updates' (HubSpot)

In other social network product updates, LinkedIn just announced a brand new ad offering called "Sponsored Updates." This new ad format allows Company Pages to promote their content directly in targeted user's news stream -- similar to Facebook's Sponsored Stories. If you're interested in trying this new offering, we've put together a quick crash course on getting started with Sponsored Updates on your Company Page. Click here to download your free guide, and you'll be running your own Sponsored Updates in no time.

Facebook to Let You Say Why You Hide News Feed Posts (ABC News)

Right now, you can hide content on your Facebook News Feed ... but you can't tell Facebook why you wanted to hide it in the first place. This is all about to change: Facebook will soon be rolling out a way for you to give more detailed feedback about why you hide posts. Users should expect to see this option roll out to them over the next few months. 

With the current Facebook "hide" button, marketers are flying blind. People could be hiding content for any reason: they feel offended, they hate it, they just don't care for it, or any other reason under the sun. With this new change, having insight into why people wouldn't want to see your content would be extremely valuable for marketers. With more data, marketers can concentrate on making marketing people love, not marketing people hide. Learn more about this update over at ABC News. 

How Native Ad Campaigns Are Shaping Up (eMarketer)

Lots of media companies are struggling to find ways to monetize content. The most popular attempts include banner ads, pay walls, and of course, the hot "native advertising." And while many companies are experimenting with native advertising, they're not all on the same page when it comes to measuring its success. Though 73% of eMarketer respondents are already doing native advertising, some media companies measure engagement, some measure traffic, and some measure social sharing ... but none of them have one specific way to measure the true success of native advertising campaigns. 

If you're in the media biz, one bet that we support and that some publishers have started adopting is to deploy inbound marketing tactics as a solution to monetization problems. These publishers have started to generate leads for their sales departments and advertisers, while even boosting engagement metrics. Even if you're not a media company, it's important to keep on top of these trends as it could affect the success of any native advertising campaigns you are running or other PR coverage of your company. Read up on the latest native advertising trends over at eMarketer.

Oreo's Royal Baby Tweet Gives Birth to Twitter Debate (Adweek)

By now, most of us have heard about Oreo's Super Bowl tweet (it even won some awards). The company was praised over and over for its excellent real-time newsjack, and the pressure has been on since then for Oreo to keep producing these clever newsjacks. This week, Oreo's newsjack of the royal birth nearly blew up Twitter with debate: was it clever? Or not? Should Oreo keep doing these tweets?

Prepare the royal bottle service! pic.twitter.com/Nlks2kT7Sw

— Oreo Cookie (@Oreo) July 22, 2013

Regardless of your position on tweet itself, there's a great lesson for marketers here. Successfully newsjacking events can be very tricky, so it's important to remember that the timing and context of your newsjack are crucial to its success. If you're unsure of how to newsjack, check out a previous post of ours that outlines four simple newsjacking formulas. And read more about this hotly contested tweet over at Adweek to see how one of those newsjacking formulas worked out in real life.

Weekly Marketing Update featuring HubSpot's Rebecca Corliss and Anum Hussain 

If you're interested in getting your weekly roundup in non-text form, check out our Weekly Marketing Update video below. Featuring two brilliant members of HubSpot's marketing team: Inbound Marketing Manager Rebecca Corliss and Inbound Content Strategist Anum Hussain. Check out the video below to get this week's update, or, if you can't imagine a Sunday without some video about inbound marketing, subscribe to this weekly video podcast through iTunes.

What inbound stories did you hear about this week? Share your favorites with us in the comments.

Image credit: Courtney Dirks