Overview: Communication Strategy

One of my favourite writers (offline and online) on his personal content strategy, first taking aim at the "tawdry and mercenary" version of "“why writers should blog”... the story goes, “and build a brand ... to promote your work.” Virtually every sentence that contains the word “brand” is bullshit, and that one is no exception.&qu;…

More than 1,000 social marketers were surveyed by Sprout Social for better understanding of goals, metrics and use of social media data in business... Sixty-nine percent ... increasing brand awareness is their number one priority ... top three uses... 1. Understanding their target audience, 2. develop creative content, and 3. Assess campaign pe…

the lean canvas... single-page template designed to distil the fundamental goals and objectives of a business, and offer a clear route to achieving them... to design a product around perceived market and consumer variables... In about 45 minutes ... journalists learned how to apply this framework to their news organisation’s editorial and business…

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

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…

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

readers finished 94% of the longform pieces they started... with much faster download speeds and the advent of the tablet’s “lean back” reading experience, journalism has seen a rise in “longform” ventures... analytics offer an incomplete picture of reader behavior, and little real insight into how readers engage. Page views, entrances, ti…

"Humans are emotional creatures and they want experiences that engage them as humans. They're not eyeballs, impressions, views, likes, shares, clickthroughs, or conversions.... connect people through sharing and conversation to form communities that we can then cultivate. That takes understanding, purpose, intent and genuineness.

"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…

Because everyone needs a Hub to call their own: "its own space to follow stories at a less frenetic pace ... readers can find collections of stories on topics ... incorporate a variety of mediums. Embedded tweets, videos, and Facebook posts are mixed in with text... The website is aggregation-heavy. Some pieces are roundups; other posts allow t…

"the Internet has dismantled newspaper’s geographic monopoly & business model ... & also upended the core assumptions underlying the actual journalism ... BuzzFeed as an organization has been figuring out what works online for over eight years now, and while “The Dress” may have been unusual in its scale, its existence was no accident... BuzzFee…

"Taster is a place for the BBC to try new ways of telling stories, develop new talent, and put new technology through its paces. It also allows the BBC to showcase a range of editorial and technology projects that may have previously remained behind closed doors... Enables the BBC to ... innovating quickly, gaining valuable feedback and respond…

Came up with a winning communication strategy to promote worthy-but-heavy pdf reports from the European Commission.

"blogging is so hyped as a panacea, you'd think that simply adding a blog to your site would also help you find the perfect spouse, cure the common cold, and even turn lead into gold. ... you should always question anything that's touted as the right answer for everyone (and everything). So should you blog?... let's look at a few examples of w…

"we are kicking off the relaunch of The Lede with a three-part series on content strategy... we begin with an element of content strategy that often gets overlooked … but that is crucial to understanding your audience intimately enough to influence it." Hint: it's AUDIENCE. And it's a podcast, so grab it and give it a listen tomorrow morning on y…

New post on LinkedIn

"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.

"Persona research is a science in itself, where the basic idea is identifying your audience. It is unavoidable to have a clean understanding of the audience's requirement, the discovery process, their knowledge and their interests in order to deliver appealing content, ultimately helping in your conversion process. This post focuses on how to c…

"Now that content marketing is the hot marketing buzzword, what are the critical elements your content needs to rise above the noise to drive measurable business results? To help you, we surveyed 19 top content marketing experts to get their advice and here's what they say." Good stuff here. PS. Point 1: "Stop being amazing, and start being…

Project manager and architect of a successful pilot to reorganise EUROPA along thematic lines, so people could figure out What the EC did, Why and How, in areas of interest to them, without studying its labyrinthine internal structure.

The comm strategy for DG Information Society revoled around a segmentation of the target audience based on their level of interest in - and hence understanding of and motivation to visit/read/learn/share - the work of the DG.