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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

4 Best Practices for Influencer Marketing
medium.com
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Relevancy is one of the best practices for influencer marketing. The second thing is that it’s useful.... have influencers participate in programs that create something useful for potential customers... Co-creation makes it a lot more interesting for the influencer... more likely that they will participate... it was human.... about people, not ne…

27/05/2017
An interview with Vice's social media team
www.newswhip.com
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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…

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Marketing Communications
medium.com
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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.

Is There a Narrative Vacuum Surrounding Climate Change?
nautil.us
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Each side of the climate debate accuses the other of exaggeration and suffers from its own... sometimes feel like a shouting match in a roomful of children wearing earplugs... We have allowed our political, national, economic, and cultural narratives free play ... where... are the narratives from science itself? Where is the science teacher?... p…

Public media in Europe gets creative with digital news
www.niemanlab.org

not necessarily easy to get buy-in from the organization... different parts of the organization are responsible for their own little bits so you can’t always do it within your own team.

An effective communications strategy must be connected to other strategies
medium.com
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An effective communications strategy must be connected to other strategies, usually managed by different departments. Reframing it as central to your organisation’s innovation strategy helps sidestep turf wars. 

Public Service Bots Should Support the Open Web
chatbotsmagazine.com
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3rd of my posts for Chatbots Magazine: Chatbots allow governments and other public bodies to provide citizens highly customised content and services. And invade their privacy. Citizens deserve better choices. 

Legendary Physicist David Bohm on the Paradox of Communication, the Crucial Difference Between Discussion and Dialogue, and What Is Keeping Us from Listening to One Another
www.brainpickings.org
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what happens in a cultural ecosystem where the hearer has gone extinct and the speaker gone rampant?... so much of our communication today is defined by a rather ungenerous unwillingness to listen coupled with a compulsion to speak.

How to plan your digital strategy with the PROSPER framework
econsultancy.com
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The PROSPER framework is a jargon-free planning model designed to help marketers create consistent work in a digital world.

13/02/2017
Why Spiegel thinks Community is the killer app for EU Communications (Top3ics, Feb 13)
mathewlowry.myhub.ai

Three articles unpacking the relationship between community, communications, content and EU communications.

Scientists Need to Stop “Othering” the General Public
extranewsfeed.com
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Scientists often speak of the “general public” as a group that is far removed from the academic circles that they belong to.... Scientists have “othered” the general public... there is no such thing ... except for in very specific contexts (i.e. vaccine developers are not the general public vs those who do not develop vaccines when one is speaking…

The Vast Funding Machinery of the European Union - SPIEGEL ONLINE
www.spiegel.de
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EU money flows from Brussels into thousands of projects and ideas. Why does nobody notice?... some of the worst storytellers happen to be located in Brussels ... majorities in society and the media believe that the European Union belongs in the dustbin of history... eternal Brussels congresses where elitist Eurocrats engage in nothing but myopic …

Publishers use Instant Articles bundle for daily must-reads
digiday.com
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Publishers are using Facebook’s latest Instant Articles update, which lets publishers post multiple articles within one post, to publish regular editions of must-read content straight to the platform.... akin to receiving a daily email with the day’s top stories, but readers won’t have to leave Facebook to get it... option to subscribe to get aler…

How We Built a Successful Influencer Marketing Strategy – Convince & Convert – Medium
medium.com
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Find influencers, and partner with them to create Youtility content that helps people make better decisions about their home, auto, boat, motorcycle, etc. But at the operational level, this kind of program creates a number of questions, starting with, “What influencers do we want to work with, and why?”

Everyone's talking but no-one's listening: it's time to reclaim the art of communication
theconversation.com
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real dialogue seems to have given way to parallel monologues, paired with an inability to actively listen... Rhetoric teaches the art of using persuasive tools... resolving disagreement through measured agreeable discussion, known as the dialectic method... In 1922... "communication can by itself create a community". This early definition was clo…

The Backfire Effect: The Psychology of Why We Have a Hard Time Changing Our Minds – Brain Pickings
www.brainpickings.org
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When someone tries to correct you... it backfires and strengthens those misconceptions ... the backfire effect makes you less skeptical of those things that allow you to continue seeing your beliefs and attitudes as true and proper... exerting effort dealing with the cognitive dissonance produced by conflicting evidence, we actually end up buildin…

How to Change Minds: Blaise Pascal on the Art of Persuasion
www.brainpickings.org
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the surest way of defeating the erroneous views of others is not by bombarding the bastion of their self-righteousness but by slipping in through the backdoor of their beliefs... People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others... Pascal frames persuas…

14/12/2016
How to engage readers with digital longform journalism
www.americanpressinstitute.org
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Major enterprise stories — stories that take deep dives and attempt to inform readers in substantive ways or to elicit impact... require considerable resources... the potential audience is limited... how can journalists get readers to complete these long pieces?use multiple elements and platforms to tell the story... the parts that pull your reade…

Ursula K. Le Guin on the Magic of Real Human Conversation
www.brainpickings.org
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Every act of communication is an act of tremendous courage in which we give ourselves over to two parallel possibilities: the possibility of planting into another mind a seed sprouted in ours and watching it blossom into a breathtaking flower of mutual understanding; and the possibility of being wholly misunderstood...two people together can mutua…

What I learned from seven years as the Guardian’s audience editor
medium.com
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Seven years ago I started working full time at the Guardian in the glamorous role of SEO editorial executive. ... very like being in the Matrix but with less kung fu and more Polly Toynbee and Nigel Farage... here are a few of the things I’ve learned…

Vlogging events: authenticity ex-Osmo
mathewlowry.myhub.ai
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I finally vlogged my first event. Some first impressions.

Creating A Powerful Content Marketing Framework
steveologygroup.com

A content marketing framework... allows you to develop a process that can be duplicated... repeatable framework for any type of content to be better utilized... incorporate goal setting at the beginning... an understanding from goal setting to how you’re going to put that into a strategy ... Once you publish ... get feedback and optimize the conte…

Why Time Inc. is expanding its contributor networks
digiday.com
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two products, Springboard and Time Inc. Connect to help editors source content from contributors, some for traditional editorial content and some for native or branded content... a way for editors to create more content around specific topics or events rather than just getting content on the cheap... gathering ... people with some degree of social…

How Slate tried to wean itself from fly-by Facebook visitors in favor of loyal regulars
digiday.com
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To try and focus on all our energy to bring new readers to site as opposed to serving loyal readers began to feel like the wrong way to look at it… identified a set of metrics that stand for loyalty ... created content people wanted to come back for on the regular. So far, it’s delivering: site traffic is up 31 percent... People who come 25 times…

01/10/2016
How Morality Changes in a Foreign Language - Scientific American
www.scientificamerican.com
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when people are confronted with moral dilemmas, they do indeed respond differently when considering them in a foreign language than when using their native tongue.

Is Facebook’s Targeting Completely Bogus?
blog.markgrowth.com
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This new tool shows users what Facebook determines are their interests... has provided a glance into the deep flaws of Facebook’s interest targeting. Advertisers should be concerned about where their dollars are going... Here are the main flaws I came across:... I would just recommend approaching targeting differently:

The Guardian starts selling time-based ad campaigns
digiday.com
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The Guardian joins the Financial Times and the Economist in billing ads by time.... have found, unsurprisingly, that ads perform better when people spend more engaged time with them.... click-through rate as an industry benchmark for performance;. However a metric of 0.0 something percent should not be seen as a succes

31/08/2016
Translating and Promoting Medium Stories
medium.com
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The feature enables Medium users to volunteer to translate Medium stories into the language of their choice. Approved translators see a “Translate” button on Medium stories and clicking that button clones the post and seeds the clone with a Google translate version of the story in the language that they select. They then go in and make the Google …

Integrating IT, internal and external communications for META Ventures
mathewlowry.myhub.ai
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META Ventures provides venture capital fund management, entrepreneurial training and innovation consultancy to cities, regions and national governments in several countries, as well as EU Institutions.

European publishers are teaming together to translate the news
www.niemanlab.org

From large national newspapers to small independent websites, outlets are working together to cover news across the continent in many languages.

04/08/2016
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