reactive storytelling... quickly, nimbly, be part of the cultural conversation in a meaningful way... When you don’t have budget to put behind your campaigns, real-time or reactive storytelling is a really powerful tool to intercept consumers where they are and get them to believe in you...

confidential document prepared by Facebook that revealed the company had offered advertisers the opportunity to target 6.4 million younger users, some only 14 years old, during moments of psychological vulnerability... the big fear isn’t just what Facebook knows about its users but whether that knowledge can be weaponized in ways those users canno…

A little bit of something bad helps you resist a full-blown case... Inoculating text requires two elements. First, it includes an explicit warning about the danger of being misled by misinformation. Second, you need to provide counterarguments explaining the flaws in that misinformation... explaining the misinformation technique completely neutra…

a bias likely to cloud the minds of the audience – the halo effect.... when we see something we like or dislike, and associate this emotional reaction with something else... “illusory truth effect.” This bias causes our brains to perceive something as true just because we hear it repeated... the illusion of control bias occurs when we perceive o…

I’ve been meaning to blog about the ‘backfire effect’ cognitive bias since first coming across it last December. It went to the top of my ToBlog list thanks to a little serendipity...

This comic was inspired by this three-part series on the backfire effect from the You Are Not So Smart Podcast.

a comprehensive Electionland case study. This 66-page playbook provides a detailed account of how Electionland was conceived, planned, and executed as the teams involved worked to track and cover voting on Election Day in 2016.

Our bodies exploit fractal networks to maximize surface areas ... Blood vessels branch out like root systems; the brain houses folds within folds... means we don’t simply enjoy looking at fractals—we are designed to process them effortlessly, and even have a need to be looking at them....That’s also why you might see a face in a cloud... or a prof…

a policy paper on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to help navigate some of the opportunities and challenges ... de-mystifying some of its fundamental concepts

We went to Antarctica to understand how changes to its vast ice sheet might affect the world.

someone that saw a Facebook native video had a higher likelihood of clicking on a link post in the near future ... we look at top performing articles and then see if we can turn them into short form videos for Facebook... we strive to be original storytellers... We understand what the mission is. It’s not just to get views... it’s always to be tel…

for innovators who are tasked with problem solving and imagining the future, human curiosity and playfulness will always have the advantage.. . machines cannot yet have intuition, nor the ability to empathize, reframe problems and truly innovate.. . The robots may be coming for our jobs, but it is too early to call checkmate on human ingenuity.

Mobile First should not be taken as an opportunity to over-simplify and, by the same token, Desktop First should not be taken as an opportunity to pile on complexity.

Social media is making us miserable... “Don’t compare your insides to other people’s outsides.”

asking the following question of a given activity: will this add significant value to something I find to be significantly important to my life?... is this activity “the best” way to add value to this area of my life? ... focus on finding the small number of activities that offer the most such value... Many of the best uses of the online world s…

It will still need human workers to review the machines’ output and make decisions AI can’t, but the greater need will be for the middle-level employees who have the experience to make judgment calls....[but] Where do those middle-level employees get that experience and judgment?

for your most cherished beliefs about things like climate change or vaccines or Republicans, instead of changing your mind in the face of challenging evidence or compelling counterarguments, you resist... your challenged beliefs then grow stronger.

"Internet subcultures take advantage of the current media ecosystem to manipulate news frames, set agendas, and propagate ideas..." plus a lot more: it's a 100+page report

Cambridge Analytica (part of SCL Group Ltd.) constructed a significant data set based on US voter rolls... Some respected observers argue the firm’s psychographic profiling methodologies may not be nearly as potent as its sales pitch suggests... the firm’s psychographic practices remain as unreviewable as the campaign’s voter advertising. Journal…

Having an agile learning mind-set will be the new skill set of the 21st century.

A chatbot like CNN’s is a great way to send news and alerts ... How can you build a chatbot like this?... Tangowork, a platform for communications teams that lets them easily create news-type chatbots... the Microsoft Bot Framework ... lets us support 9 channels — Facebook Messenger, SMS, Skype, Slack, Web-part, etc.—from a single codebase... you…

there are more than 1.97 million blog posts published online every single day... four (specific) ways that marketers can fix their broken content marketing and social media programs...

The new right’s echo chamber is hermetically sealed, while the left’s is not.... Private platforms like Facebook are under no obligation to provide us a diverse worldview. If it is more profitable to ... isolate us in a bubble of ideologically comfortable information, they will.... build an aggregator where the algorithms can be reviewed by schola…

rather than asking “Is the internet good for democracy?”... explore whether the human characteristics ... amplified or diminished by the internet support a functioning democratic system... The internet... collapses geography, greatly amplifies people’s ability to make connections ... However, the American democratic system is structured in a wa…

A communications strategy answers the question, “Why are we doing these activities?”... if you’ve been doing customer discovery and using the value proposition canvas, you know a lot about each customer/ beneficiary.

combat fake news by combining professional journalism with volunteer fact checking... professional journalists will be paid to write “global news stories,” while volunteer contributors will “vet the facts, helps make sure the language is factual and neutral... transparent about the source of news, posting full transcripts, video, and audio of in…

The open internet is a powerful tool in the fight against discriminatory mass surveillance... democracy’s antidote to authoritarianism... where the voices of dissidence that have always been watched, can watch and talk back.

every individual picks their idea, we vet it ourselves and make sure the data’s there, that it’s interesting, and we just go off and do it... We specifically seek out stories that aren’t news related, because we don’t want to compete in that space

The main advantage of starting with mobile first is that it forces you to pare down your experience to the nuts and bolts... Once you commmit to scrollytelling, you have two mobile choices: keep it scrolly, or stack it... preserve the scroll is if the transitions are truly meaningful, and not just something to make it pop. Seeing change over time…

“Scrollytelling” is when content (e.g., a graphic) is revealed or changed as the user scrolls... creating a scroll-driven story is hardly a standardized practice, and there are many libraries out there