Customers today can spot a phony from a mile away, and brand success will require that companies foster real, authentic connections that mirror human relationships... The live streaming revolution will be awkward. It will be messy. It will be funny, and it will be sad. And all of that is exactly what customers want... there’s something pure an…

Things that happen in an instant are mostly bad ... this earthquake or that horrible murder. ... But once you turn to statistics it gets much harder to have a pessimistic story... The kind of maths that people are taught at school focuses on algebra and calculus, which they hardly ever use later in life... You use statistics all the time - T…

Americans say they want accuracy and impartiality, but the polls suggest ... most of us are seeking affirmation. Americans want the news to be patriotic ... The news media is most valued when it reflects our best selves... the Internet has ... enabled us to construct digital silos, battlements from which... we fire invective on the people below…

FarmShare is a decentralized platform for community-supported agriculture (CSA) organizations, using the blockchain to tokenize shares and enable community governance... enable communities to buy, sell and trade cryptographic tokens that can be exchanged for weekly deliveries of locally produced organic food... an evolution of the CSA model ...…

Take a look at any successful sales pitch, investor pitch, or marketing message, and you’ll nearly always find the Move... can make your website messaging more engaging, your positioning more powerful, and your product collateral more effective. - Want a Better Pitch? Master the “Move.” — Firm Narrative — Medium

Twitter has an amazing, yet somewhat little-known Advanced Search tool to help you find exactly what we’re looking for. Looking to find your next customers? ... Want to measure the happiness of your current customers? Advanced Search is what you need... some top tips and tricks to help your business win with Twitter Advanced Search. - The Su…

the human communications equivalent of Murphy’s Laws. - If communication can fail, it will. - If a message can be understood in different ways, it will be understood in just that way which does the most harm. - There is always somebody who knows better than you what you meant by your message. - The more communication there is, the more difficu…

Mark Zuckerberg proves not to be a fan of links... On Facebook, he doesn’t encourage you to link. On Instagram, he has simply forbidden them. He is quashing the hyperlink, thereby killing the interconnected, decentralized, outward network of text known as the World Wide Web. Facebook likes you to stay within it. Videos are now embedded in Faceb…

this week El País pulled the plug on Aguilar’s column after he told the New York Times that the Spanish newspaper’s financial problems were compromising its editorial line... there are people so exasperated that they’re leaving, sometimes even with the feeling that the situation has reached levels of censorship.” - El País goes to war with t…

BBC journalists have been told to follow youth-friendly media such as Buzzfeed and Vice by making more “dynamic” and “informal” short videos in which the reporter acts as “a friend” to the viewer... “snappy, energetic” films of between 60 and 90 seconds that will be more popular with viewers watching on mobile phones... 60 per cent of its digit…

a new 300-page report ... looks at the likely effects of a robot revolution... huge numbers of jobs being wiped out: up to 35% of all workers in the UK and 47% of those in the US, including white-collar jobs... The longer you look, the more you find computers displacing simple work... while some jobs are replaced, new ones spring up that focu…

People who advocate for comments on social media ... often argue that Twitter and Facebook engender higher-quality discussion in part because commenters are (usually) attached to real names ... [but] Twitter trolls are rampant, too. And a retweet or quick comment isn’t exactly the same as a thoughtful response. So recently we’ve seen a couple o…

Extinction-level events have more or less become the new normal in the news business... journalism should have been wiped out by now. And yet it’s surprisingly resilient ... necessary to step back from the #contentwars and start, well, building new things. Every minute spent debating whether bloggers are journalists... is time not spent making …

news operations  are... losing a degree of ownership over their audiences... the number of people they reach is potentially greater than ever [but] through much larger third parties... coming to terms with just how directly their industry’s business model is coming into competition with that of their new, and much larger, partners... The tec…

looking for ways to bring his voice directly to people... a balance of focusing on the president’s priorities and being flexible and opportunistic as conversations are happening online ... to open the White House, to pull the curtains back and show people how government works... data metrics showed how his appearances on social media — like You…

the key to breaking bad habits is tricking yourself into swapping out the habit you want to pick up for the one you want to drop.

Racontr is an easy tool to create and diffuse interactive content online

There's never been a better time to innovate in media, so it's good to be back to EurActiv. Eight years ago I helped launch BlogActiv, before leaving for the world of EU communications agencies. Give or take a month or two, my 6-month stint fell in the middle of EurActiv's 15 years of life so far. It's good to be back, albeit p…

In this week’s edition, a months’ reading - some 30 posts - on social media, digital transformation, content/system design and EuroPCom2015. But first some news from me

We are fascinated with Essena O’Neill because she reveals things we could live our whole lives hiding from. In the span of a few years, she rocketed into Instagram fame, made hundreds of thousands of dollars and then decided to chase a life of meaning... We have always sold the dream and faked it to our neighbors. We’re just upset that now the …

Two-way communication, engagement, dialogue, conversations, collaboration, and participation are buzzwords in contemporary public communication practices... how well do organizations ... listen — the essential corollary of speaking in communication? An international research study ... organizations overwhelmingly create an ‘architecture of s…

If we dig too deeply into everyone's internet data we will become afraid to ever type anything which might one day be seen as dangerous... police forces around the world are investing more money trying to predict crimes and stop them before they occur. It’s not precog intuition or strange telepathic gifts, but big data and algorithms... ... …

This is how we should be running meetings and you should hold your colleagues accountable to this standard: - Meetings — Medium

A quick post to Medium in response to: Facebook Will Be Every Publisher’s CMS And That Is Probably A Good Thing: For a publisher to adopt Facebook as their CMS would be a form of surrender, handing over their future to someone else. - I don’t know if you’re wrong, but I hope you are — Medium

I feel reasonably confident that within the next 6–12 months, you will only see Instant Articles in the mobile newsfeed. Why? Because they are better... they will eventually be available on all Facebook environments. There is seemingly nothing stopping Facebook from rolling out a full front-end to the product so writers can produce directly in …

in the first quarter of 2015, I began to notice fewer and fewer publishing notices from my connections and those whom I  followed; and I could tell that my connections and followers were receiving fewer and fewer notices about mine. - Arrogant Control Is Not Leadership... On Social Media or Anywhere Else | PHIL FRIEDMAN | LinkedIn

"The experience of users happens beyond the screen and in the gaps... between channels, devices and business silos." (and between government departments, and indeed governments) "You might be thinking this sounds more like customer service design than user experience design. You might be right." - User experience design is not what you th…

The Writing Cooperative is a community of people who help each other write better through collaborated editing. - How to Write Better on Medium — The Writing Cooperative — Medium

Blog posts take hours to write, those great images need to be found or created and those social networks need to be managed and nurtured. It is often not done or persisted with because there are no apparent quick rewards. This is where the tortoise can beat the hare by slow persistence. It is a marathon and a journey not a sprint... you are bui…

it will be quite unusual to see cars that don’t have full autonomy – let say for new car production in the 15 to 20 years timeframe… for Tesla a lot sooner... at the point which cars are being made that have full autonomy, any cars that are being made that don’t have full autonomy will have negative value - Elon Musk says owning a non-autonomo…