Overview: Communication Strategy

The Horror! The Horror! - Enquête de la Commission européenne Survey

There'll be different answers from different organisations, but most of the time it is, but shouldn't be, 'reach' (pageviews, shares, etc.). Lot of useful thoughts and links here: "Sites like Upworthy ... choose to focus on metrics that measure something approaching “engagement” — so not only whether a page was loaded but how long the reader sp…

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Place all your content eggs in someone else's basket, you'll get what you deserve. Facebook it, after all, a business. Some basic advice here, but it amounts to the same thing: monitor, optimise & diversify: "Facebook organic reach was around 6% in February, 2014 — a decline of 49% from October. For brands with more than 500,000 likes, the fall-o…

"Marketers now have a very real option to bring the majority of their media agency work in-house. If agencies want to maintain relevance ... [they need to] break down the silos they’ve spent the last two-plus decades creating.... The silos will come down one way or another. Smart agencies will dismantle them by design; the rest will crumble under…

"Crafting the perfect pitch: Create a message, tailor it to your audience, and include a call to action. Journalists, bloggers, and other PR pros receive dozens of email pitches a day. To make your pitch stand out, take a page from movie marketers. They’re experts in capturing the audience’s attention in three minutes or less and leaving them on …

Researchers show that the fatter the annual report, the shakier the company: "they compared the file size ... to various measures of market volatility ... the size of a report a better predictor of subsequent market volatility ... The less material investors and analysts must digest to get valuation-relevant information from company managers, the…

Excellent overview of a complex topic. Makes me think that a lot of EU communications could benefit hugely from reframing itself as "non-profit news", and considering these questions in depth. Alas, the only interesting debate in this field seems to be limited to the US. "The value of online and offline audience engagement is a question that bot…

Applies equally to projects, where for step 1 (quoted below) the focus should be the project's USP: "Define what exactly your company is, its motto and the sole purpose of its existence. Write down everything that you think your company/website is about. Is it about marketing tips, social media, mobile apps, etc.? Define the existence of your com…

Well, plus ca change - absolutely none of the things some BloggingPortal editors said we'd do after our meeting in January have been done, apart from our own posts and what Stefan did, which is ironic given that he told us he had no time to do anything.

Particularly true when you work in a unique environment (e.g., 24-language online communities...): "when I am asked if I know of companies who are doing really well with social tools I say "Less than you might expect, those who you know of were less successful than they claim, and why not become the one that really makes it work?" ... ... if I t…

5 brief points on how leaders can get everyone thinking strategically, and not just reacting. I personally like point 4: "4. Create a philosophy. ... communicate a well-articulated philosophy, a mission statement, and achievable goals throughout your company. Individuals and groups need to understand the broader organizational strategy in orde…

Original linkTonight I'll be toddling along to Grilling Kippers, a UKIP-focused anti-Eurosceptic campaign from deep within the Brussels Bubble.

Great idea for explaining EU affairs or just wishful thinking? "A new game called Fantasy Geopolitics (think Fantasy Football meets Model United Nations) is radically changing the way high school students in Minnesota are interacting with the news." - How a High School Teacher Is 'Gamifying' World News

"Ektron does this as well, but with version 9, it has also baked in more native marketing functions like allowing for personas to be created based on attributes in a CRM or marketing automation system. What will a site look like to a current customer versus a partner, or a first time visitor versus someone who's closer to being ready to buy? Build…

Last Thursday I finally caught up with Eric Maurice of PressEurop, which recently had its plug pulled by the EC following their decision to cancel its renewal tender some weeks after publishing it.

"The winners and other leading entries in the annual Intranet Innovation Awards show that WordPress and other open-source technologies can provide an intranet platform to meet both organisational and user needs. One of the aims of the Awards is to showcase examples of successful approaches and practices which can be applied by intranet team wit…

These questions are worth asking whether you're thinking of Influencer Outreach or not. "There are all sorts of tools you can use to reach your marketing goals, but before even getting into the discussion of goals and influence marketing, you need to ask yourself these questions: - Who are you targeting? - What are your objectives? What does…

"Barack Obama, Jerry Seinfeld, a line cook at Applebee's, and a guy with two penises walk into a bar. Actually, no, they would never do that. No venue could bring these people together. And yet, each of these people has stood before the IamA subcommunity on the social network Reddit, and typed those immortal letters, "AMA." Ask. Me. Anything. "…

Great advice for web data analysis everywhere: "We don’t live in a perfect world. Vague requests are going to get floated. ... that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t recognize and strive to minimize how often that happens. Here’s how: - Condition yourself to go to full alert whenever the word “interesting” is used ... - probe for clarification as much …

"Too many companies make the mistake of assuming their global audience speaks English. I hear it all the time. “We don’t need to translate. All of our customers can read English.” And “English is the language of the world. Everyone speaks English.”" - Rule #2. Everyone Speaks English, Right? | Content Rules, Inc.

How nice to see the Brussels Bubble meme continue to spread ... ;) "In a damning indictment of efforts in Brussels to promote stronger public attachment to the EU through the European Year of Citizens 2013, Emily O’Reilly said the campaign was “not succeeding”. ... the new office holders needed to be courageous enough to address the union’s demo…

This video is aimed at developers interested in combining machine translation, automatic semantic analysis, human curation, faceted and federated search, and social media to create a machine-assisted multilingual longform content curation engine.

Gratifyingly, the preview of the Hashtag Europe wireframes seemed to do the job, and allow people to understand just what this tool could do...

" Engaging employees internally has a direct impact on how the company is perceived externally. While the term employee engagement (or any of its variations) don't appear in the report, it's clear that combining social media with good management practices produces more engaged employees who have a direct impact on how the outside world views the o…

Pour le Journée Européenne du blogging multilingue, a video of one minute (waltz) length sur the bloggingportal.eu reboot, avec une "first look" à les wireframes et pas un mot dans mon accent francais de vache espagnol.

"Concept search allows users to specify a concept and documents that describe that concept to be returned as the search results. It is a technique to identify potentially relevant documents when a set of keywords are not known in advance. SearchBlox uses text clustering, which is a technology that analyzes a document collection and organizes the d…

"The rise of content marketing, despite well-publicised scepticism, continues — as illustrated by a new report ... - almost two out of five marketers (38%) still question whether content marketing can deliver measurable ROI. - 70% believe that content marketing helps drive sales leads more effectively. The metrics that are being used suggest a …

"Constellation's Connected Enterprise is the intimate innovation summit for senior business leaders successfully using disruptive technologies such as social business, cloud computing, mobile enterprise, big data and analytics, gamification, and unified communications/video to drive business value and transform business models."

Data from bloggingportal.eu, extracted by BrusselsBlogger, gives some idea of the dominance of English as a blogging language on EU policy.