The SNO Report: Everyone likes an interactive story

Nothing in print is clickable like it can be online. Take your coolest infographic and enhance it online. Make it clickable — interactive.

These are some programs that make it possible:

Infogr.am makes it easy for you to create infographics. (Infogram. Infographics. See the resemblance?) You can create slick, modern visualizations of information using graphs, charts and more. And Infogram makes it easy with user-friendly menus, real-time data presentation and social media integration.

To add an Infogram to your site, paste the embed code, provided after you’ve created it, into a story, page or widget. The easiest way to do it in a story or page is to paste that code from Infogram into either the Video Embed Code area or as a Infographic SNO Story Element. You could also paste the embed code into the body of the story using the Text tab in the upper right corner of your body text box (not the Visual tab).

There’s a WordPress plugin for it here. Check out Infogr.am’s help page for further assistance.

ThingLink is one of the leading platforms for creating interactive images, maps and videos. Users can create multiple “hot spots” on specific parts of an image where you can embed video, audio, links and text, giving your reader an interactive experience.

Take the example from EHS-hub. They took a simple US map and applied hot spots to display where seniors planned to attend college.



To add a ThingLink to your site, paste the embed code, provided after you’ve created it, into a story, page or widget — no different than an Infogram.

There’s a WordPress plugin for it here. Check out ThingLink’s help page for more support.

PlayBuzz allows you to create content in the shape of lists, quizzes, polls, rankings and trivia. It’s what you’re spending so much time on BuzzFeed doing, and it can be a fun way to spice up your everyday lists and polls — just be sure to turn off the “related content” feature to make sure things stay on-topic and appropriate.

Take the example from The Leaf at Sycamore High School in Ohio. They set up a quiz to have readers guess which of their teachers is which in old photos.  



You’ll also be given an embed code once you’ve created something on PlayBuzz. Paste that as you did with Infogr.am and ThingLink to display on your site.

There’s a plugin for it here. Find some helpful info from PlayBuzz here.

It’s important to note, too, that these things working correctly on your site is not dependant on you downloading the plugin.

Storify is a social networking service that lets you create stories or timelines that integrate posts from social media, like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. So, these stories would be social media-driven. It can be embedded on your site the same as all the above.

It has a WordPress plugin here. Learn more about the program here.

So, these are four of the big ones. If you’re using something else to create cool, interactive content, tell us about it — share your tips with the SNO community here.