Overview: Communications Strategy

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…

Conversational UIs will also force designers to cosy up to writers, or to become more linguistically literate themselves. Information architects will be trendy again, since syntax and labels are totally their turf.

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…

"We put aside existing notions about news apps and imagined what our journalism would be if it lived natively on your iPhone. It wouldn’t be a facsimile of our website. It would be something entirely different, with original writing, new features, and a fresh interface."... The Quartz news app isn't for everybody ... the app is by design unlikely…

... manually curate 10 stories from other publishers, which will run as a daily edition. Three different articles, often with opposing viewpoints, will run on each story, representing the left, neutral and right-wing political perspectives on the same story... For example, in Wednesday’s edition, it ran a Guardian story entitled “Terrorism publ…

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.

Betts ... became the first data head to join the publisher’s board, recognizing data’s importance in growing its subscriptions and audience. Today, he heads up a 30-person team focused on customer analytics and research. Here are lessons from Betts on data maturity and driving audience engagement... While subscriptions are critical ... it’s not t…

the hallmark of a good branded podcast is that the marketing is subtle... this is something where you want to build a long-term relationship with people. It’s not about short-term conversions, or anything like that, but about having an amazing first experience with a brand.

Rather than paying to be sandwiched within ad breaks and between editorial pages, brands can communicate directly with consumers. Unfortunately, the result is often a longer form version of the same old ads. Marketers need to change their approach. Here are four questions that will help you create a viable strategy... ... done effectively, people…

The Wall Street Journal, claims it has been the Journal’s fastest-growing social channel, reaching over 2 million followers since it launched on the Japanese app 15 months ago... Publishers like The Economist, BBC and Mashable have all added Line to their social media arsenal

"It tears conversations apart, and it's really confusing when some people have been live-tweeting an event and those things get scattered all across my timeline."

Bots are to modern messaging apps what APIs were to Web 2.0; a way to build on top of other services, experiment, and create a new way of interacting with existing services... what inspiration can we draw from the past that might help us to think about designing Conversational UIs?

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.

We’re all rushing to create piles and piles of content to serve our customers, upkeep an online image, and create more brand awareness. Despite that... people targeted aren’t “taking action”. Visitors come and go and analytics aren’t great ... Content marketing cannot be all about your company and fulfilling company needs... Get rid of excessivel…

the number of marketers who consider their content marketing effective dropped by 20%... content generated by the brands increased by 78%... the number of interactions by followers FELL by 60%... “Marketers are getting better at distributing content, but are not getting better at creating content worth distributing.”... marketers are under p…

the new application is to deliver a round-up of curated news stories to readers, meant to be viewed first thing in the morning ... presented on eight different cards... the app’s content is able to be digested fairly quickly. Users can ... clicking a link to view the longer article, but they can also just use Refinery29 This AM to flip through car…

what started as a cynical in-joke has become a bad habit, and an excuse for enabling abuse across the web... The fact that we joke about it documents an acceptance of a culture of abuse online. It helps normalize online harassment campaigns and treat the empowerment of abusers as inevitable, rather than solvable... we denigrate a form that use…

The 12-person unit, called the social stories team, includes a variety of roles: writers, animators, graphics professionals, and producers, who create and package content for Instagram, Vine, Tumblr and Snapchat Discover.

Free group messagingIt's like a private chat room for your small group. Have as many as you want, and it's always free. Now, you can coordinate with coworkers, organize a game night, and keep in touch with family all in the same place.

Neat idea, if not exactly being exploited by many

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…

The media’s reaction to David Bowie‘s death from cancer early this morning demonstrates just how widely curation has become in journalism practice – and specifically, how it has become the web native version of the obituary. Below I’ve done a bit of curation of my own: 8 13 ways that different publications used curation to mark the death of a lege…

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...

Every business in the world will have a bot. It will allow any customer to talk to them in the simplest way possible, sending a message.

If we define design as the decisions that determine how something works ... then Design Thinking is simply the process to make more thoughtful decisions.... We can only knit together what we already know in new ways to get to the something that’s never existed before.... Design Thinking offers — a way to get where you’re going when you don’t kno…