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Overview: Communication Strategy

Communications appears complex. But a good communication strategy shouldn't be.

4-steps, 4 tables

I generally boil it all down to four simple, interrelated tables, defining:

  • Who you’re trying to reach: your audiences, including their needs and information preferences, and what your goals are for them
  • Why they should pay attention to you: starting with your Unique Value Proposition, craft a Global Elevator Pitch, and from that derive Editorial Messaging for each audience, reflecting their needs (above)
  • How you will get those messages to those audiences: an integrated, mutually supportive communications portfolio
  • When you will monitor and optimise those activities: key metrics, analyses and optimisation processes.

Process

A Word document entitled "communication strategy" gathering dust on a shelf is no use to anybody. The only way your strategy will have an impact is if:

  • you engage your colleagues during its development - after all, they have some of the answers you'll need;
  • and your ensure they understand the strategy once it's finalised - after all, their cooperation will be critical to its success.

There are many ways to go about this. My favourite option is to spend a few hours a week interviewing diverse members of your comms team and holding one or two workshops with them and others. That way we'll develop buy-in together along the way, and I'll be able to mentor your staff so that they can better implement the strategy.

But if that's not possible right now, I boiled my process down into an online course: 4-Step Communication Strategy Framework: demystify communications strategy

Relevant resources

Change My View Does Not Allow Rudeness or Hostility
www.theatlantic.com
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A place where users with radically different political opinions interact productively and politely, where a willingness to participate thoughtfully is the rule rather than the exception, and where people readily admit when their views on a subject have been altered... Reddit’s Change My View forum... promotes respectful conversation between people…

Short-Form vs Long-Form Video: The Answer is Sometimes Both
www.huffingtonpost.com
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On one hand, consumers have short attention spans, and on the other, studies have shown that longer video can perform better... first consider the goal of the campaign.... Determining performance on marketing-based goals can be a bit complicated to pin down... If site perusal is your goal, short video is best... Why produce a long video when you…

Change My View - You Are Not So Smart
soundcloud.com
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reddit community called Change My View ... a ready-made natural experiment ... feed it into programs ... to understand the back-and-forth between human beings ... discovered two things: what kind of arguments are most likely to change people’s minds, and what kinds of minds are most likely to be changed. https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/ : po…

Naive Realism - YANSS 101
youarenotsosmart.com
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naive realism, the tendency to believe that the other side is wrong because they are misinformed, that if they knew what you knew, they would change their minds to match yours... maybe WE are the ones who are wrong. We never go into the debate hoping to be enlightened, only to crush our opponents... When confronted with people who disagree, you te…

The power of fiction to change people’s minds – YANSS 113
youarenotsosmart.com
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One of the most effective ways to change people’s minds is to put your argument into ... a story — but not just any story. The most persuasive narratives are those that transport us. Once departed from normal reality into the imagined world of a story, we become highly susceptible to belief and attitude change.... learn from psychologist Melanie C…

Creative, Local, Young: what do Europe's young superheroes need?
www.facebook.com
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A workshop proposal for EuroPCom 2018 with @albawhitewolf, Mike Galsworthy (@Scientists4EU) and the original Captain Europe, reposted to Facebook by popular demand.

A tagline sucks. A rallying cry rules
medium.com
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A rallying cry creates the emotional shorthand that sticks in our heads and builds strong positive associations. Those are powerful elements that help a brand rise above competitors and help turn customers into advocates. Think about doing that for our organizations. That’s important work. Too important for a mere tagline. It’s time for a rallying…

29/08/2018
Generate free LinkedIn business leads (The one coffee method) - Marc Stoiber Brand Strategy
www.marcstoiber.com
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A fairly simple, free routine that’s enabled me to market myself on LinkedIn with surprisingly good results. It worked for me, it might work for you.

06/08/2018
Beyond Accuracy: Precision and Recall – Towards Data Science
towardsdatascience.com
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The metric our intuition tells us we should maximize is known in statistics as recall... number of true positives divided by the number of true positives plus the number of false negatives. ... true positives are correctly identified terrorists, and false negatives ... labels as not terrorists that actually were terrorists... a model’s ability to …

04/03/2018
Should we consider fake news another form of (not particularly effective) political persuasion — or something more dangerous? » Nieman Journalism Lab
www.niemanlab.org

What if “persuadability” isn’t the right metric to look at? ... Information warfare expert Molly McKew, who specializes in U.S.–Russia relations... "There aren’t good tools to evaluate the impact of shadow campaigns... Information and psychological operations ... are not just about information, but about changing behavior... of more than 36,000 …

Fake News and Bots May Be Worrisome, but Their Political Power Is Overblown - The New York Times
www.nytimes.com
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most forms of political persuasion seem to have little effect at all... Field experiments testing the effects of online ads on political candidates and issues have also found null effects... Here’s what you should look for in evaluating claims about vast persuasion effects from dubious online content: How many people actually saw the questionable…

How Advertising’s Killing Itself – Eudaimonia and Co
eand.co
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Which did the ad industry choose?... It tried to ignore technology and automation... when that didn’t work, it bought the machines.... It didn’t invest in research, development, innovation... develop new services, new ways, new formats, new ideas, whole new ways of helping institutions and people relate, connect, and bond... So the broken relatio…

Building Credibility Indexes from Fact-Checking to #TackleFakeNews
medium.com
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Fake News is suddenly on the boil in the Brussels Bubble. Here are some ideas I brainstormed earlier this week. Comments welcome.

How we used gamification to conduct audience research.
medium.com
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How do we convert users playing the game into users who would complete the survey?... take our readers on a visual journey around the world so they could explore where a news story happened. As a payoff, for every correct answer, the user would collect a stamp in their virtual passport... opted to follow an interesting take on the minimal viable p…

Taxonomy of Methods for Deep Meta Learning – Intuition Machine – Medium
medium.com
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Meta-Learning can be understood as algorithms the search and select different DL architectures. Hyper-parameter optimization is an instance of this, however there are another more elaborate algorithms

07/01/2018
Learning from #EUSuperGirl & Luc van den Brande (Top3ics, December 2017)
mathewlowry.myhub.ai
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I’ve recently published five posts on three interrelated ideas, two projects one report and a workshop. That happened because the competition brought a Brussels Bubble Outsider to Brussels. Which happens to be one principle of the participation model I presented at the EWRC workshop. Full circle.

The EU Lobbyist's quick guide to Influencers
www.slideshare.net
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The EU Lobbyist's quick guide to "influencers"

Does the Brussels Bubble care enough?
medium.com
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Engaging Europeans with the EU requires a new Brussels Bubble culture - fourth of several posts written in reaction to Luc van den Brand’s Reaching out to EU Citizens: A New Opportunity.

Don’t poison the hearts and minds you’re trying to win
medium.com
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Could hybrid crowdfunding allow public Institutions to support citizen-driven projects without killing them in the cradle?- 2nd post in reaction to Luc van den Brande’s Reaching out to EU Citizens: A New Opportunity

WTF is identity?
digiday.com
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Every day the web is becoming more personal... ... brands ... need to understand more than theoretical profiles or carefully honed audience segments.... master the fundamentals of identity...  In this report you’ll learn:  - What it takes to create a persistent individualized identity that crosses platforms and screens  - How brands and agencie…

What Makes a Good, Un-Sleazy Lead Magnet? 9 Utterly Clear Examples
fizzle.co
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"lead magnets” or “freebies” or “opt-in incentives,” and they are insanely effective for growing your email list. And not only that, they can be excellent for growing trust with your audience as well... In this post you’ll learn: What makes a GOOD freebie What’s working for others (9 examples) How to design the right freebie for your business

Coming home…to strategy
changingtheterms.com
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embracing and sharing the power of communication strategy much more broadly to help drive results and performance... supporting practitioners and clients to rediscover communication strategy as a source of real advantage.... the opportunities available to use targeted, intelligent approaches to getting the right people talking with the right info…

10 findings from psychology that every user researcher should know
medium.com
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Be wary of using expert judgement as your only source of data... by all means apply your expertise to make judgments about a design, but be sure to validate these judgements with data... Hick’s Law ... states that the time taken to make a decision increases as the number of choices is expanded... Fitts’ law... the time required to rapidly move to…

Download the open-source Platform Design Toolkit 2.0
platformdesigntoolkit.com
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New tools are needed to help organizations leverage on the power of ecosystems and enable participation of external entities in the business process. That’s what the Platform Design Toolkit is for: design systems that create much more value than they capture and motivate everybody to join.

This Is How Your Fear and Outrage Are Being Sold for Profit
medium.com
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Every time you open your phone or your computer, your brain is walking onto a battleground... Your captive attention is worth billions ... This has actually changed how you see the world... walls of code have turned you into a predictable asset — a user that can be mined for attention... by focusing on one over-simplified metric, one that suppor…

The evolution of The Economist’s social media team
medium.com
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We need to strike a healthy balance between striving to reach more readers across platforms over which we have zero control, with bringing them back to... our apps and website... here’s how we’ve changed our approach over the past year:... an over-reliance on social media can leave us particularly vulnerable to sudden changes by platforms. Ultim…

What the EU’s Mobile Roaming success taught me about innovation in bureaucracies
medium.com
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EUrope’s success in eliminating mobile roaming charges may be the first “data4policy” case study where the data was website traffic, and illustrates the rewards of allowing innovation to flourish at the edges of large organisations.

Storylining: the best-kept secret of successful strategic communication
www.steveseager.com
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Welcome to GAME — a four step process to improve the quality of your communications — and storylining, the step that comes before storytelling... moving straight to storytelling without first crafting strong, logical, persuasive key messages ... results in a ‘failure to communicate’ … when we don’t take the time to think from our audiences’ perspe…

Beware BackFiring when Battling Bullshit
mathewlowry.myhub.ai
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Fighting people with facts only makes them cling to their beliefs more strongly, further polarising our damaged societies. Different tactics are needed, and they start closer to home than you think.

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