Overview: Communications Strategy

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…

An introduction to the Content Strategy Glossary project, collaborative challenges, and a case example using one term that touches everybody in User Experience.

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…

Comments on our own content create real community and offer vital feedback to content creators and consumers both. And thus, we should fight for them to be better. Comments are not just a nice-to-have but a core part of a media site’s mission... Lots of broken comment systems are designed for a platonic ideal of how people ought to behave.... Can …

Civil Comments, a commenting platform ... aims to produce respectful dialogue in comment sections through a system that crowdsources comment moderation... Commenters are shown two random comments from elsewhere on the site, and must rate the comments’ quality and civility and determine whether they include harassment, abuse, or personal attacks. T…

As our online behavior becomes more complex, I’ve found the term “online community” to be an inadequate and limiting way to describe the pockets of activity that I was seeing. I started playing around with different frameworks ... decided to concentrate on the two elements that were consistently the most useful: Engagement Length and Intimacy Leve…

The module formerly known as Watching is linking out less than it used to, but the Times says it still believes in curating... we are just trying to figure out the right balance between New York Times stories and outside sources; how to offer smart, meaningful curation to our readers.

But how did Belgium find itself at the center of a burgeoning terrorist network? Here are a few sources of reading to help you get a clearer picture.

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

if all content is ranked together and swift approval is the primary metric (whether that be views, reads, or recommends), the platform will become dominated by generic bullshit. Aspirational pap is just Medium’s version of the cat meme... Publications aren’t communities. Tags aren’t communities. They are content ownership vehicles and search tools…

Berners-Lee suggested a simple rethink in how social networks and human nature work together could help curtail negative behaviour... "we have responsibility to think how to build systems that tend to produce constructive criticism and harmony as opposed to negativity and bullying."

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...

I've been invited to prepare a "Technology Buyer Challenge" on Hashtag Platform for the Language Technology Industry Summit this May. (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 wit…

we analyzed over 1 billion posts from 30m brand pages on Facebook.

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.

We still write stories for the web as if they were fixed and transitory, but they’re not... people have expected that something like 70 per cent of traffic would be to “new” content, and the rest to the “archive”. The reality usually proves to be exactly the other way around... we’re over-weight in publishing “news” and significantly under-weight …

if news content focuses on the ‘Who, What, When, and Where,’ explainer journalism looks to inform the reader of the ‘How and Why’... give the reader background information about a story to ensure that they are able to properly understand events as they unfold... Explainer journalism enables the media provider to at least show some intelligence an…

... using Viber and WhatsApp to publish documentaries... Whereas Viber can only be used to send messages to users, the upside of WhatsApp is that it allows for back-and-forth communication. The downside to the platform is that the process is more manual for the publisher. WhatsApp only lets publishers have 256 people per broadcast channel... the …

building community means intentionally creating a culture, every step of the way... It’s hard to overstate the importance of community guidelines... members ... didn’t want to be a part of a community where people were fighting all the time, but had been afraid to speak up in the discussion, lest they get dragged into the fray. with every post, e…

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…

My sadly underwhelmed response to @sidewireinc’s gr8 “Today’s Internet is Optimized for Noise”

What’s the difference between customization and personalization? - Customization: The visitor deliberately chooses between options designed to make the user experience more personal.- Personalization: The visitor is automatically shown personalized pages based on anticipated needs / wants.

Axel Springer, wary of being overly dependent on third-party platforms for traffic... fighting back by launching its own news aggregator platform... now has around 1,200 publishers on board ... Digiday spoke with Würtenberger, CEO of Upday, about using humans and algorithms for news sourcing, creating a platform for publishers and banning ad block…

Social activity on a website can increase users’ commitment to the site and willingness to pay for its services... social engagement could solve the conversion challenge ... users enjoy free content that the website provides but are unwilling to contribute to the site monetarily. The bad news is that it’s not enough to just add participatory optio…

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…