Overview: Communication Strategy

many teams ... have become obsessed with ... being agile ... But agile is not a strategy — it is a capability... cannot permanently affect ... competitive position unless there’s a strategy behind it... constant cycles of optimization... offers little more than diminishing returns... not considering the opportunity costs ... A good idea is not the…

Watching Silicon Valley exercise news judgment has been like watching Walter Cronkite try to write code in Python... Four companies have created trustworthiness indicators for news websites: Facebook, Google, Twitter, and NewsGuard. Publishers have no way of learning their secret trust score from the Silicon Valley companies. NewsGuard’s journalis…

with influencer marketing en vogue and publishers hunting for ways to drive engagement on their properties, the hunt for famous, influential contributors is back on... eg Axios has two people... recruiting, managing subject matter experts to participate in Expert Voices... invite-only contributor network... Find influential people, bring them into…

we need to lock on our analytics to the people who willfully return to our work... There’s no one single metric that tells you how loyal... your audience is.... The Center for Cooperative Media ... audience explorer dashboard... plugs into Google Analytics... splits audiences into “Brand Lovers,” “Prospective Loyalists” and “Casual,”... free and e…

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 …

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 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…

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.

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…

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…

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…

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

includes translating political explainers as "part of our attempt to reach new readers who are interested in American politics — but perhaps don't speak English... "We were convinced that there is a need for translated articles, but we hadn't hit on the right formulation in terms of how to get a professionalized translation that's turned around qu…

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…

In this week’s edition, a months’ reading - some 30 posts - on social media, digital transformation, content/system design and EuroPCom2015. But first some news from me

While European media ask for EC handouts for translating their articles, US media just do it themselves: "As news organizations realize the potential of reaching international audiences with their journalism, more and more are translating their work into different tongues. BuzzFeed, Vice and The Washington Post have all made forays into the rea…

"We get what we measure and we are measuring the wrong things... old, mass-media metrics of reach and frequency — translated into their digital equivalents: unique users and pageviews — turn out to be profoundly corrupting... attention is a much more productive measure of media value than traffic.... There is a richer set of metrics that matter…

With a very nice longform, multimedia html5 presentation to boot. "In this bustling environment, there is less news and more noise. ..." More news but even more noise, rather.

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…

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