Future:Media:Change

If you want your content to be remembered, use color. More specifically, use natural color. So says an interesting psychological study I ran across today.

The Internet has surpassed TV and radio as the most essential medium for Americans, a new study finds, and roughly as many people would choose to live without TV as the Internet if forced to choose. Given the usage metrics reported in the rest of the study, it’s no wonder. Here are highlights of its findings.

Nielsen and Facebook found friend endorsement of brands through the site’s “Become a Fan” functionality increased ad recall 30%, brand awareness 13%, and purchase intent 8% with certain levels of social context

In a recent study, Hubspot found that small and medium sized B2C businesses that used Twitter saw twice as many business leads as those that didn’t. Blogging significantly increased business leads for both B2B and B2C businesses.

For a brand new social entrepreneurial outfit TANO design is already producing iconic designs. A quick look at their sleek site gives you the feeling of a fine balance between history and innovation, art and revolution.

In a similar way to Shepard Fairey’s iconic Obama image and Jim Fitzpatrick’s high-contrast drawing of Che Guevara, TANO’s designs are also centered around what its founder and designer Eddie Mandhry calls ‘iconic personalities’.

If you watched the Hope For Haiti Now special in January, you couldn’t help but notice all the stories being told about Haitian victims of the earthquake. Chances are you also couldn’t help but notice the tear running down your cheek or your hand reaching for the telephone. That’s because storytelling is the most powerful way of making an impression — and being remembered.

People read the Web differently from how they read magazines or books, so Web copy must take that into account if it’s to be effective. But the differences are mainly those of style–like the difference between driving an automatic vs. a standard–once you’ve got the basic principles, you can drive that copy anywhere.