How important is visual information in your business?

IBA GroupMark HillaryHow important is visual information in your business? What do you think of as visual anyway – a chart on Excel or some other reporting system?The most recent funding round for Pinterest boosted its valuation to around $3.8bn, which sounds like a lot of money for something that just looks like a visual scrapbook on the web.When Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook bought Instagram in 2012 for $1bn many commentators thought that it was outrageous – Facebook had overpaid for a phone based photo-sharing service that didn’t even have a website.Facebook eclipsed that deal recently when they purchased Whatsapp for $19bn. Whatsapp is a text messaging tool that is popular all over the world, but particularly in fast-growing developing nations such as India and Brazil. But what is really different about Whatsapp is that it allows easy photo and video sharing – it is not just a tool for texting, it offers a complete visual experience too.Take a look around the Internet. It is becoming more visual. Many bloggers are choosing to just create a video instead, or to create a blog that only contains photographs.Photo network, such as Flickr, offer free space to users that measures in the terabyte – unthinkable amounts of space just a few years ago, yet now it’s almost essential because the Internet is becoming more visual and more focused on mobile devices as the tool that is used to consume content.This means that companies using the Internet need to consider how their own information can be reflected. How do you publish corporate reports and information when the trend for information use is becoming more visual?Consumers are getting used to ‘reading’ Instagram and Pinterest in the same way they used to read the newspaper and this is affecting corporate life. A manager today will not want to read a dense report packed with numbers. Visual information has always been useful, but now it’s essential if you want to convey a message within your organisation.