MOS Creative loves the holidays! Here’s a bunch of videos we’ve made in the past with a dash of holiday magic. Enjoy these throwback vids!
Visual Data Infographics
What does your business do? Why does the customer need it? Do they know that yet? Most importantly: Does your product/service need a simple, sharable, and visually awesome explanation? That’s where we come in, with infographics!
Infographics are used frequently all over the net. You’ve seen at least one. You can’t log into the internet without stepping across one. Maybe it was the awesome Batman one that was passed around twitter and Facebook for a couple of years now. That’s because it’s a great way to show data. It presents information in a beautiful, but purposeful and simple way. It serves two purposes—looks good and tricks you into learning. Those kind of go hand-in-hand.
Here’s an example of one of the many infographics we’ve produced for our clients.
There are four ingredients that make up any successful infographic. These are Data, Design, Why, and Shareability. If it’s missing one of these elements, it won’t reach much of any audience. Think of it as a table… a table of info. If you remove a leg, you’re not gonna have an amazing table. Each aspect is essential. So don’t go without these four things:
Data:
It’s he backbone of the infographic. The entire reason you need one created is so you can display your data in an easy and simple way. You want everyone to understand. Data without the rest of the elements is boring, and flat out invisible to everyone. Gather your findings and be ready to have them represented in a beautiful fashion!
Why:
Well, you’ve got your data all ready to be shared, but what for? Say you’re looking to educate people on your product or service. You’d state a problem, and the purpose of the infographic is to explain how and why your business is the solution. Here’s where you make yourself important; here’s where you deliver your message.
Design:
Here’s where you take your what and why from above and make sense of it. Design puts everything in order and educates the viewer. Several points are to be touched upon: the information must be displayed clean and simple, it must look great so as to encourage reading, and there must be purpose to it. Meaning, you display your info in a fun, simple and creative manner that shows you know what you’re talking about. Bring eyes to your data.
Shareability:
Okay, your infographic is almost complete! What’s left to do is load it up with links to you and your social media outlets. You must let the viewer know where this image is coming from. Which brings us to a big decision: where do you put it? Of course you’re going to put it on your twitter and facebook, but where else? SEO will help, and as long as this is floating around the internet, it’ll grab eyes and bring attention to your business. So proper placement is key. Besides creating the infographic for you, we here at MOS are also able to put it in the right places.
Get a hold of us, and let’s visualize your data together!
-The MOS Creative Team
Check out our other Tumblr!
Reviews Matter
While you may feel your company/brand/service/product’s awesomeness speaks for itself, you’re only half right. Good work only goes so far. Online reviews, yeah those matter.
You’ve used Yelp once or twice before, right? You saw how useful of a tool it was and you found that sushi restaurant in record time! That was a good dinner too. Maybe you ought to review the place. A higher rating pushes them up on the list, bringing them more business and ensuring the chances that you’ll get that California roll again. After all, good ratings and reviews brought you there in the first place.
So you’ve seen firsthand how beneficial positive feedback can be. Why not for your business? Over 90% of people who’ve researched a business on Yelp agree that positive reviews lead to purchases. Check out this infographic from Mashable.
Being the 30th most visited site on the web, small businesses are the ones that benefit the most from Yelp’s exposure. Increased customer awareness directly affects sales. Additionally, it’s a great way to get feedback from clients, with the ability to respond back to them! Create a dialogue! Seem like a business run by real people.
Though there is a bit of cautionary wisdom we’d like to bestow upon you: what’s worse than negative reviews are none at all. Don’t just start an account/claim your business on rating sites and let it sit stagnant. Actively encourage customers to leave reviews – there’s no downside to it. Perhaps you could get some inserts or packaging designed and printed to go along with your product, asking customers to write you a short review. In addition to Yelp maintenance, MOS Creative could design you up some snazzy printwork on top of it 
Get a hold of us at MOS Creative, and we’ll help YOU stand OUT!
-The MOS Creative team
Behind the Scenes: Foodem.com
We here at MOS Creative have done many projects, and here’s one of our recent ones, an animation for Foodem.com!
Our animator, Tony, cranked away at this animation. Here are some sketches of the chef character:
None of these made the cut
As you can see, our winning chef was born here! Tony then took this design, and made a full body. Then, the phonemes, or mouth motions had to be made. Here is a sketch sheet of the “happy” phonemes used in the animation:
These were all scanned in and drawn over in Adobe Flash. The animation was then completed with this full motion puppet!
This is just one of the animations we’ve made. We here at MOS Creative are capable of many different styles of animation/film/video and any other motion graphics projects you’d ever want! Remember our slogan: “We help YOU Stand out!” and that we do.
-The MOS Creative Team
check our our other blog, at moscreative.tumblr.com!
Twitter #1 Social Media for Global 100 Brands
Fortune Global 100 companies received 5,596,998 mentions in a single month on Twitter, making the social networking platform number one in driving conversation (The Nation). Continue reading
Rule 40: Not in Favor of Olympic Athletes
As the summer 2012 Olympics quickly approaches, an estimated 4 billion people will tune in to watch their country’s top athletes compete (NPR). This is an enormous opportunity for any company to drive marketing efforts and reach a massive audience, however, due to Rule 40 it is an opportunity that only official sponsors of the London games can truly take advantage of. Continue reading
Meet John! Baltimore’s #1 Graphic Designer
John A.
John’s lifelong love of art and design inspired him to pursue a career as a Graphic Designer and create the art that surrounds us every day! His creativity also propelled his desire to work for a creative agency and led him to MOS almost 4 months ago!
What it takes to be Steve Jobs
“Why join the navy when you can be a pirate?” Wiser words never uttered by a man more influential and responsible for single-handedly transforming the computing and mobile landscape.
Steve Jobs told us to be crazy. He told us he wanted to put a ding in the universe. He didn’t put a ding, but he sure left an Apple.
A single glance at the non-stop media coverage, and you’d think America’s greatest superhero finally befell to his kryptonite. #SteveJobs, #iSad and #ThankYouSteve rotate Twitter’s trending topics, and pictures of our generation’s Thomas Edison continue to flood Facebook’s news feeds.
But in no jest, he was a hero to millions, probably billions, of people he never met. He changed the way we think about and interact with the world. Every time you have to ask your kid a computer question, remember, he’s the reason.
We’re Issuing YOU a challenge!
Back to Basics: What is your Marketing Objective?
When it comes to this whole marketing thing, do you sometimes feel like you’re in over your head? Maybe you’re new to the “branding” concept? You hear so much talk about “engaging your audience” via Facebook and social media, but are you completely lost in where to even start?
I’m not surprised. Go ahead, just try Googling “marketing ideas.” You’ll get 40,200,000 search results.
Talk about information overload. No wonder most business owners don’t even want to think about their marketing, so they put it off for as long as possible. I’m thinking you need a little direction. Am I right?
I’m gonna level with you – doing it right is not as easy as it looks. That’s why there are millions of professional marketing firms out there. And for the most part, the professionals will do a good job for you. But whether you’re coming up with the creative ideas, or you’re paying someone else to do it for you, you should NEVER go into your own marketing strategy blindly. It’s EXTREMELY important that you get involved. After all, who knows your clients, your product and your company’s needs and goals better than you do?
So before you delve into the details of how often to Tweet and which keywords to base your SEO around, let’s start with the basics. I just want to get your feet wet and get you thinking. Always start by figuring out what your marketing OBJECTIVE is. Everything else will come from there.
What’s your Objective?
1. Awareness – Potential customers must know of, or be reminded of your existence, your location, your product, your price range, and what makes you stand out from the competition
2. Build Contact List – Your mailing list is like gold. It’s what you rely on for promoting any campaign, and it takes a lot of nurturing to build and keep.
3. Get Involved – Your business is not soul-less. Companies are made up of people, and people like to patronize companies that they know go out of their way to help other people. Your company’s positive image reinforces the perception that you are genuinely caring and sharing.
4. Staff Incentives – A cared for and happy team makes for a harmonious, smooth operation. Customers can tell when your employees don’t want to be there. Think about the grouchy, frowning cashier at the supermarket. Make sure your employees feel appreciated!
5. Excitement – This is the kind of energy and excitement that makes you stand out from the competition. This is when you need to turn on your thinking cap and come up with some really creative promotions.
6. Frequency – When you’re trying to be “the place to go.” This is a brand loyalty thing, and keeping them coming as frequently as possible.
7. Publicity – For this one you’ve got to be interesting and newsworthy. Maybe you’re doing BIG things for the community, or you’re doing something so completely out of the box that it’s a story too good to pass up.
8. Generate Traffic - Simply getting people in the door or on the website is your goal here. Contests are great for this! You want to get potential customers to complete some sort of action, whether it’s entering the contest or downloading a form.
9. Branding – Image is everything. Period. If you don’t define your company and your brand, the market will define it for you. And that’s never what you want!
10. Increase Sales – a.k.a. Up-selling – This is every CEO’s favorite! From the sneaky but ingenious psychological tactics (a la putting candy, gum and magazines in the grocery checkout line) to having an in-depth understanding of how your industry works, there are really unlimited opportunities to do this one.
11. Creating Activity - Most industries have their “slow” periods during the year, but that’s not set in stone. This is where you will get creative to make the slow season profitable.
12. Trial Offer – Who’s gonna turn down a free sample? Come on, you’ll love it. This is when you really want to get those potential customers who are living on the edge to finally make the plunge – but without any of the risk.
(Great list compiled by Tom Feltenstein – And if you’re looking for a good book on the basics, try Tom’s “Encyclopedia of 401 Proven Killer Promotional Tactics”)
