Overview: Communication Strategy

Conventional marketing techniques teach us to frame customers by attributes... ultimately create products and entire categories too focused on what companies want to sell, rather than on what customers actually need... Customers rarely make buying decisions around what the “average” customer in their category may do—but they often buy things becau…

Paul Leinwand, co-author of the book Strategy That Works, explains how successful companies solve this thorny problem.... the second problem is that often, strategy and execution are managed in very different areas of the company... And if you separate those activities, then you really risk not executing the very important things that are going t…

When people ask me how to build an audience, what they really want to know is, how do they get an audience to just come to them. You don’t. No audience just magically appears.... write up an entire profile of who your ideal customers/readers/viewers are ... go find them ... get your content in front of them

The heart of differentiation therefore is your company’s ability to develop and promote distinctive products, services, and branded experiences on a consistent basis.  It’s not the output that sets you apart, but the way that everything you do supports the product and gives it context... set apart your company as a whole, instead of staking your f…

Just putting this up there for all those who think:a) a ‘view’ on a LinkedIn post is like a pageview on your blog or site. It’s not: it’s a ‘stream view’, a la Facebook, and does not tell you how many people actually clicked and readb) LinkedIn are consistent and care about their bloggers. They aren’t and they don’tMore: see LinkedIn Community for…

the distance between strategy and execution is unfathomably wide for most businesses and executives... Strategy people too often have ideas that aren’t rooted in the reality of the operations. And operations people too often aren’t invested in executing the plans that the strategy people craft for them.... saying a specific individual is responsi…

content ... will continue to become the commodity... simply too much of it... the effort it takes to make sure that content will travel far and wide makes for considerable effort. Many will do this well but more will fail... If brands cannot create culture from scratch—they can co-create it with the right partners ... to do this at scale, they mu…

What happened when I was invited to “do a Rápido” at the IABC’s conference in Rotterdam earlier this week.

Any strategy that doesn't take the ability to execute is a lousy strategy to begin with. Strategy is not a game of chess, but depends on operational capacity... simply tacking on publishing functions to their existing operations without implementing any new processes or practices ... is a grave mistake.... The ongoing conversation with the audie…

After two years work analyzing more than 400,000 stories, the American Press Institute is beginning to find general patterns in what works to attract and hold the attention of digital readers... stories longer than 1,200 words, got 23 percent more engagement, 45 percent more social referrals and 11 percent more pageviews... photos (or audio or vid…

BART started talking back. The tweets weren't bland or automatically generated. They were super real, and sometimes super dark... a tactical move to both acknowledge the deplorable state of San Francisco's underfunded subway system and prove to residents that their government was aware of the issue and doing everything in its power to fix it.... T…

EurActiv.com is opening one of its media innovations to other media interested in increasing competitiveness through translated syndication. (Update, 31/3/16: this project was covered, among many other things, in an interview with professional EU interpreter Alexander Drechsel in his podcast Demos ex machina? Multilingual communication with Mathew…

The main Topics this time are language technology, mobile innovation and EU communications, with a few extras to catch-up since the last edition.

everything one needs to know about ... the Google Analytics add-on for Google Sheets.... value-add to a reporting workflow is that it’s extremely flexible, reliable, and a real time-saver... allows you to: Pull any data that you’d be able to access in the Analytics API (i.e analytics.google.com) directly into a spreadsheet...

if he tried to make ads that were beautiful and perfect, it wouldn’t work and his fans would know... his work routinely pulls in millions of views because he’s transparent with his audience... mostly teenage boys know when they’re being peddled a product.

many marketers spend their resources on talking at people, not listening. The key is to find the space between what you want to talk about as a marketer and what they want to talk about as a consumer. That small slice is the opportunity for true engagement and will shift the conversation from monologue to dialogue. Attention is a gift, and what yo…

companies made huge bets on branded content... to leapfrog traditional media and forge relationships directly with customers... invested billions pursuing this vision. Yet few brands have generated meaningful consumer interest online. In fact, social media seems to have made brands less significant. Digital crowds now serve as very effective an…

Brands have always had a tougher time spreading messages on Facebook than individuals, because they’re playing in a space that’s fundamentally not designed for them... What if our kids find the idea of any brands communicating as if they’re people even more awkward than we do? there are opportunities to re-think the role publishing plays in soci…

News organisations are increasingly embracing the use of analytics and metrics as part of editorial decision making, but what constitutes a sophisticated analytics strategy?... A new report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism looks at which organisations are building a competitive advantage over less advanced competitors through a…

The afternoon session at Future Media Lab 2016 showed that while European media are warming to the idea of using advanced language technologies to share content across borders, their audiences are already well ahead of them.

I’ve just spent a few days running the Discovery phase of a new project to further develop the communication strategy of an EU Institution, with a particular focus on retooling its online, social media and publications tactics. Apart from focusing on developing a new information architecture, I’m running the overall project. This means not only en…

I’m now at to the point where I can spend a few days interviewing key people in an organisation to develop a complete communication strategy.

Ultimately, what publishers and advertisers care about most, however, is how much quality time a person spends with a story. To judge that, publishers are developing newer metrics like “time spent” reading, “scroll depth,” “engagement,” “recirculation,” “shares,” and “percentage of article completed.”

With independent journalism increasingly looking like an endangered species, a EU communication strategy that helped European media build the European Public Sphere would be a smarter longterm move than propaganda and brochureware

benefit of building a brand that audiences recognize ... allow us to build a strong revenue model and a strong connection to an audience. If they see us on Snapchat and Snapchat has a very large audience, then they get to know and trust Vox and see it as a source that they care about... think about your brand as an interconnected ethos that should…

Great use of a TV show to explore how bad metrics can kill you: "In the police organization as it is set up, politics are king and results can be gamed. Everyone is looking for the next promotion, and no one is focused on improving lives for the citizens in the city they serve.... People figure out ways to game shitty metrics."

The DMC is a practical guide to develop a strategy to accelerate business growth. It's made for anyone in the company to get around the table. Marketers, Entrepreneurs, Developers, Designers, Sales,... It's a tool of co-creation. Brainstorming as a starting point, the digital strategy is the finish line. As you go to through the process you'll lea…

For 20 years, the media and marketing world has been beholden to the pageview, a deeply flawed metric that only captures the most superficial impression of how people behave on the Web.... proxy metrics such as shares and likes have proved inadequate as well...

A brand is a unique set of associations in the mind of a customer... Mention a luxury brand like Rolex and the associations that spring to mind are likely to include wealth, prestige, status, craftsmanship, heritage, exploration. Whatever your take on someone who sports a $30,000 Daytona, it’s probably going to be different from what you think whe…

society had a pretty straightforward system of rewards: you give us something of value, and we’ll heap praise on you. It’s a fair trade ... that most social media gurus ... are unwilling to make ... insist on trying to “hack” the system... sheer laziness... shortcuts to notoriety rather than slowly, painstakingly, lovingly crafting something of va…