Overview: Communications Strategy

Something for the bloggingportal reboot, courtesy @ronpatz: "quantitative text analysis has provided useful tools to extract policy positions from text or estimate sentiment of political speech, the application of such techniques is hitherto limited to monolingual contexts. We present a possible solution to this problem by presenting a reliable…

Authenticity: one of them hot button topics.... because we crave human connection in a technology-driven world? Is it because the Internet has become so saturated with bogus people spewing bogus content and using bogus titles?... we asked our community of digital creatives. Here’s what they said:" My favourite: "Authenticity is ... about bei…

The future of the web is "push-based", meaning the web will be coming to us.... the web will disappear into the background much like our electricity or water supply.. content, products and services will find you, rather than you having to find them... What people really want is to tune into information rather than having to work to get informat…

You really have two types of people you can leverage to aid your target marketing and social strategy efforts: - Influencers: Popular, well-respected, quasi-celebrities in your industry/space that share and engage in relevant content, and have a large audience and an engaged following. - Advocates: Vocal evangelists who are already a big fan o…

Job Stories are great because it makes you think about motivation and context and de-emphasizes adding any particular implementation. Often, because people are so focused on the who and how, they totally miss the why. When you start to understand the why, your mind is then open to think of creative and original ways to solve the problem. - Repl…

Any decent Communication Strategy will integrate offline, online, internal and external communications. But what about your organisation's Innovation Strategy?

Interesting approach to using Pinterest to curate interesting content: "Virtual Reality (and its cousin, Augmented Reality) are going to be big deals in PR and organizational communication. I'm curating articles here about the trend and the uses to which communicators can put these fast-growing technologies." - (1) Virtual and Augmented Real…

a few sacred cows have emerged about the nature and promise of content marketing – these are the white lies marketers tell themselves. Here are a few myths marketers need to dispel if they want to really reach prospects with their content... The goal of content marketing isn’t to create content, it’s to create educated buyers who are ready to h…

In this edition I highlight only one post, and mention a few others. Topics: truth, authenticity & trust, but also productivity and digital transformation.

Daily I now see posts published authors on LinkedIn that praise the value of finding out your "SSI". . .. while at the same time gently but not so quietly promoting what their score is... I believe the "one percenters" tag is entirely relative since each of have a completely different network from anyone else in the world. - Did LinkedIn go …

A tl;dr version of “From One Spokesperson To Millions” the brilliant 45-minute longread by @jessedee on taking one of the most successful campaigns of all time - Paul Hogan’s 1980s Tourism Australia campaign - and updating it for the age of user-generated content. Some key quotes:

"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.

If you don’t want comments on your website, that’s fine, don’t have them. But don’t act like comments are some sort of intractable problem that can’t be realistically addressed by mortals. They’re not... you could fix this, but your priorities are elsewhere.... Having threads that close, having moderators that redirect entrenched disagreements,…

In response to In Search of Authentic People in The Age of Automation: "Authenticity was supposed to be what social media was about — it was social, it was supposed to be about us. And... your authenticity was the best coin you had."

People are worried they will lose their jobs to robots but if you ask me, most of us have already lost our minds to the machines. Our personalities. Our authenticity. Who are you as a human? - In Search of Authentic People in The Age of Automation — Medium

"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…

In this week’s newsletter I return to the “3 Topics, 12+ links” template of week 1, but present things a little differently…

Let’s hope [Beme] catches on ... and make social media about real people again -  not their carefully edited versions, and certainly not companies, Institutions and all the others choking up my feed with their marketing as they desperately try to appear human.

A decent long read: on @medium, The Optimal Post is 7 Minutes: "Don’t feel constrained by presumed short attention spans. If you put in the effort, so will your audience." - The Optimal Post is 7 Minutes — Data Lab — Medium

"Thoughtful, longform content is king... A young, bare-bones website called Wait But Why is disproving the notion that thoughtful, long-form content and virality are mutually exclusive... monthly averages of 1.6 million uniques and 4.6 million page views... Its newsletter has over 106,000 subscribers... Its most viral article... has well ove…

"at some point, you start to crave something with more substance. Today’s readers want more than listicles and clickbait, and this is driving meaningful change across the digital publishing industry... In the maelstrom of Internet content, we are drawn to articles that make clear promises for what we will get out of them, as well as those that …

One of the best longreads re: the future of news media I've read in a while: "Websites... have been able to accumulate enormous audiences with incredible speed by harvesting referrals from social networks... Websites plausibly marketed these people as members of their audiences, rather than temporarily diverted members of a platform’s audience.…

So I put together a landing page, sent a few newsletters to myself, then wrote a post on Medium. It featured 75 outstanding pieces of journalism ... my Minimum Viable Product. Naturally, nobody showed up to read the post. Then, somehow, Rand Fishkin (the CEO of Moz.com) found it and spread the word " - The Medium Viable Product — Thoughts on…

"The pendulum has swung, and all of a sudden “human curation” is back in vogue vs. machine algorithm ... But there is a third category of discovery that is strangely absent from the conversation...: social curation.... My mom is a better curator than Dr. Dre. There, I said it." - Curation vs. Algorithms: Curation Wins, But Not In The Way …

The rich, diverse, free web that I loved - and spent years in an Iranian jail for - is dying.Why is nobody stopping it?... The hyperlink was my currency six years ago... represented the open, interconnected spirit of the world wide web ... a way to abandon centralization ... and replace them with something more distributed, a system of nodes an…

I’ve created an email newsletter that features one fantastic piece of journalism each day....So far 3,000+ awesome people are subscribed to the newsletter and the daily emails average open rates around 50% (that’s double the industry average)... What I really want to build is a community for people to find, share, and discuss great, in-depth jo…

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…

So many memories…

"When starting a new [internal] communication project, asking the right questions of your customer sounds like a no-brainer. But are your questions right? ... Richard shares his method of developing the right questions to deliver the best results –  to start your IC projects right." - The power of critical thinking: How asking the right questio…

"@NASA is the 104th most popular Twitter account in the world... and 3.5 million on Instagram. The Department of the Interior, whose stunning wildlife and nature pictures make it the only government agency with cool visual content to rival NASA’s, has just 654,000 ... John Yembrick and Jason Townsend are veterans of other government agencies...…