the skills gap is an education problem .. we’re not preparing our future workforce ... although millennials collectively hold more college degrees than any preceding generation, they face record unemployment rates - The (Free) Crash Course in Social Media You Need to Land Your Next Job | Ryan Holmes | LinkedIn

most people are too busy to keep up with whatever it is you’re doing. They have their own lives and can’t be expected to sit around and click every link you post to Twitter... I don’t think you can rely on social media to do your work for you. You have to put it in front of people directly. - The Work Nobody Can See — Medium

an app that combs through your Twitter or Facebook feeds, identifying the links being shared the most by your friends... a very efficient way to use the curation you’ve already done of your Twitter followers to curate news... what we’re not doing is semantic analysis, and scanning keywords in articles. Nor are we using human editors ... If …

Had Turing executives kept mum when the news broke, it is likely that the story’s lifespan would’ve been short lived. Unfortunately for them, Shkreli opened his mouth. - The Art of Handling a PR Implosion

I spoke to seven news organizations - Recode, The Verge, Reuters, Mic, Popular Science, The Week, and USA Today's FTW - about their decision to suspend comments, the results of that change, and how they manage reader engagement now... Here's how they're all using social media to encourage reader discussion. - What happened after 7 news site…

At Buffer, we create all the images for our blogposts and social media sharing without any outside design help. We rely on a handful of amazing tools and resources to get the job done, and I’ll be happy to share with you the ones we use and the extras that we’ve found helpful or interesting. - 23 Tools and Resources to Create Images for Social …

nothing about Federman’s job responsibilities at Fortune are traditional for a Time Inc. employee. He works closely with colleagues in editorial, public relations and marketing. He mines analytics for data about the best times to post stories and what’s connecting with readers. He identifies trending stories and occasionally writes one ... helps d…

FalseHilarious: “[US] Corporations on Twitter”. Worth watching if only for the humour, but it’s interesting that these sort of mistakes haven’t been made that often by the EU Institutions, as I originally feared in 2009, with the more-amusing-than-revolting exception of The Great Berlusconi TwitterWall Kerfuffle (2010).

If you stop to think about it, you might get appalled at how much time, money, and effort are meaningless for brand social marketing.... Get back to basics... It comes down to two simple mentalities. They want compelling content and they want a connection that makes sense for them, not you. - There Are Only Two Things People Want from Your B…

My first subscribers, surveyed last week, were equally split between the diverse formats and styles of my first four editions, so here’s a 5th.

I have been under the impression for quite a while that eventually one of the large content marketing platforms...  will develop social media capabilities ... that content marketing would be the parent, and social marketing would fit underneath it. What Sprinklr is trying to do is flip the script on that, where social media becomes the parent a…

You really have two types of people you can leverage to aid your target marketing and social strategy efforts: - Influencers: Popular, well-respected, quasi-celebrities in your industry/space that share and engage in relevant content, and have a large audience and an engaged following. - Advocates: Vocal evangelists who are already a big fan o…

What does the rise of digital distributors mean for the Open Web?... is there a point at which distributors create enough value for publishers to stop having their own websites? If distributors are capturing market share because of a superior user experience, is there a future technology that could disrupt them? And the ultimate question: who will…

We collected a trove of interesting and actionable headline formulas from some of the best sources for headline writing, and we’ve tossed in a few of our favorite Buffer headline formulas, too. - 30+ Ultimate Headline Formulas for Tweets, Posts, and Emails — Social Media Tips — Medium

"There are times you simply need to destroy what exists in order to replace it with something better. Such is the case for social media... brand organic opportunities have disappeared and social media marketing has become entirely a paid game... Evidence of social media's remarkably poor reach is all around, and many social media marketers ar…

A tl;dr version of “From One Spokesperson To Millions” the brilliant 45-minute longread by @jessedee on taking one of the most successful campaigns of all time - Paul Hogan’s 1980s Tourism Australia campaign - and updating it for the age of user-generated content. Some key quotes:

Social and mobile have fundamentally altered attention. Platforms for self-expression and communication are the largest and most important media companies of the millennial age, dominating share of attention and engagement for young people. And the behavior of the young is predictive of the future. - May I Have Your Attention, Please? — Medium

We seem to be suckers for a happy ending ... Upworthy and Viral Nova, have become skilled in coming up with headlines that turn a sad tale on its head. Shifting the focus away from sadness changes a story’s emotional footprint, helping it travel further on social networks... While bad news is a mainstay of the media, people tend to avoid passin…

"sometimes organizations get so caught up in showing off their use of social media tools that they forget that those tools have a purpose – strengthening the relationship between an individual and your organization. A healthy social strategy includes both content created to get new folks in the engagement funnel AND to strengthen the “passion-c…

Let’s hope [Beme] catches on ... and make social media about real people again -  not their carefully edited versions, and certainly not companies, Institutions and all the others choking up my feed with their marketing as they desperately try to appear human.

social media platforms are ... the main avenue through which we make comparisons with our peers, acquaintances, celebrities ... those comparisons are often what we base our life-expectations on, these platforms can lead to anxiety about our place in the world... Most of the content on social media wasn’t improving my life — in fact, by taking u…

One of the best longreads re: the future of news media I've read in a while: "Websites... have been able to accumulate enormous audiences with incredible speed by harvesting referrals from social networks... Websites plausibly marketed these people as members of their audiences, rather than temporarily diverted members of a platform’s audience.…

While most the activity on LinkedIn occurred within the first 24 hours after posting, Medium was more of a slow burn... led to shares from outside networks. Of the 1,500 views of my article, 500 came from Facebook, 400 from email, and nearly 300 from Twitter... For years, we’ve been warned away from such tactics... in a world in which Facebook …

IN RESPONSE TO The Web We Have to Save... Unlike a blogger, it’s very hard to isolate and ban Facebook or Twitter. A blogger can be placed in jail, a network of people on a platform with millions of users is much harder... [BUT] these platforms have their own censorship mechanisms... Facebook is doing better now but ... many things were bloc…

The rich, diverse, free web that I loved - and spent years in an Iranian jail for - is dying.Why is nobody stopping it?... The hyperlink was my currency six years ago... represented the open, interconnected spirit of the world wide web ... a way to abandon centralization ... and replace them with something more distributed, a system of nodes an…

Publishers may be able to get more value out of their tweets thanks to a new design change on Twitter... on the platform’s iOS or Android apps... stories will get some extra room, complete with lead art and the first few words of a story... part of the company’s plans for bringing more media into your home feed. - Twitter’s new article prev…

"@NASA is the 104th most popular Twitter account in the world... and 3.5 million on Instagram. The Department of the Interior, whose stunning wildlife and nature pictures make it the only government agency with cool visual content to rival NASA’s, has just 654,000 ... John Yembrick and Jason Townsend are veterans of other government agencies...…

Great example of how to cover a social media trending topic via video: "A video featuring a beauty blogger with adult acne has been watched almost seven million times.... shows some of the comments that Em Ford received online after posting images of her face with and without make-up... she wanted to point out the "unrealistic expectations" soc…

The reasons are simple but powerful: you can’t control the communication. Despite it being a communication channel/social network (emphasis on network)/community (very debatable), it points into the other direction: filtering information, needing to pay for content to be seen, very distracting by other things like games, Ads (which used to be cont…

The real story might have been that data played a more important role than social media... reports that smart campaigns used data intelligently to target the right voters with the right messages... This combination of data and social media, with more traditional campaigning techniques will surely develop still further in the next few years. …