Overview: Communications Strategy

"1. Expert credibility comes from having knowledge others do not. People want experts they can understand and trust, especially when trying to understand complex or ambiguous topics like new technology, engineering, advanced science, or law... 2. Harness hierarchical credibility 3. Seek referent credibility 4. Take advantage of associative credib…

New data supporting old news: "According to Gallup ... of 18,000 consumers surveyed, 62 percent said social media had no influence on their buying decisions. Among millennials, 48 percent said social media didn't make a difference... Many social media advertisers have ... neglected the essence, and potential, of social media: people talking to …

'Innovation' threaded its way through a lot of the resources added to my TumblrHub last week: from innovation-friendly management through to innovative Content Management Systems for tomorrow's newsmedia business models and personal productivity tools.

@digitaltonto on "Cargo Cult Marketers", who - despite the complexity of modern marketing - "offer a false solution ... a simple formula that explains everything." Greg goes into the psychology of this particular breed of marketers with great insight, charting how they come up with and fall in love with their own idea and then, subconsciously, on…

@baekdal explores "a complete and total blind spot in the newspaper industry ... based on a business model that used to work in the old days of media, but was as a result of scarcity." Newspapers, he argues, are "the supermarket of news ... [but] upermarkets only work when visiting the individual brands is too hard to do... But on the internet, e…

"an interesting glimpse at the technology responsible for publishing 700 articles, 600 images, 14 slideshows, and 50 videos on a daily basis." I find the article fascinating because of what the CMS is not - it: "does not render our website or provide community tools to our readers. Rather, it is a system for managing content and publishing d…

If you're involved in developing strategy, you need to read 'Why Smart People Struggle with Strategy'. Personally I recognise a lot of this, including in myself, although I don't consider myself particularly smart. The key recommendation? "strategy should not be a monoculture ... of high-IQ analytical wizards. Great strategy is aided by diver…

"These numbers are even more striking when you consider engagement is significantly down even though brands are almost certainly spending more money to promote their posts to combat plummeting organic reach. Facebook’s ad revenue reached $2.27 billion in Q1 2014, up 82 percent from Q1 2013" - New Report Reveals Just How Drastically Brand Engageme…

"the Insights module will show you several metrics relating to your competition’s Facebook activity, including the number of posts by page admins, number of fan interactions and a leaderboard of the five top-performing posts across all watched pages." - How 'Pages to Watch' from Facebook Can be a Source of Competitive Insight | Social Media Exami…

Jeff Bullas reminds me why I do EU communications - so I don’t waste my life producing this sort of sh*t, for these sorts of companies.

"Influencers come in many forms — celebrities, connectors, thought leaders, aggregators, CEOs and journalists — and need to be identified and targeted based on your vertical market. The following tools are avenues to help you define who you should target as an influencer through 2014 and beyond." - Influencer Marketing Tools That Will Power Yo…

"With the launch of new site after new site in 2014, it's been a fascinating time to watch digital media try to figure itself out. Amid the turmoil of disruption, buffeted by tech companies' control over information distribution, but aware of new fields of possibility, the past few years were filled with defending legacy brands. So this new round…

Particularly like reason 1: "1. Content curation provides a variety of perspectives. Offering diverse points of view enhances your credibility. This is particularly important on social media platforms where participants get annoyed with businesses that just shout me, me, me. " Remind you of anyone you know? - The Top 10 Reasons You Need Content…

Good insights on combining editorial, programming and visual experts from NPR: "The multimedia crew wanted to make pictures and video that were truly web-native, which required web makers. And our news apps lacked empathy — something we’re so great at on the radio. It’s hard to make people care with a chart. Pictures were the obvious missing piec…

"The empowered consumer will bypass or ignore communications that aren’t relevant and don’t add value ... brands that want to be invited into the conversation will have to say something that’s worthy of their audience’s time and attention... there are some guiding principles behind great brand storytelling. Call them the 10 Commandments of Conten…

"The only kind of moderation that scales with the community is the community. ... Through the trust system, Discourse communities develop a natural immune system that repels the trolls, spam, and hate that eventually tear apart communities on other forum software. - Stack Overflow Founder's Next Big Thing: Reinventing Online Communities – ReadWri…

Useful trick to document your website's evolution: "Head on over to the Wayback machine and choose the Save Page Now option. It doesn't work on all sites, but if you want to capture content that might change, you can add a page directly to the archive and get a custom URL for it. If the link is a PDF, it will capture that as well." I just archiv…

"a team of 13 social-media and advertising specialists up to 45 days to plan, create, approve, and publish a corporate social-media post." Which did f*all online. It's when I see tweets like that - 45 days, 2 Faves, no RTs - that I'm thankful I'm not 'communicating' cars, 'engaging' consumers on soap powder or even tweeting about cheese. - Huge …

oor-er, they animated it. That makes it better.

"The experience of talking about race, ethnicity and culture on the Internet is nearly always deeply disenchanting. People don't even talk past each other; they talk right through each other. Prejudices harden. We find ourselves confirming our worst stereotypes of one another. And that's before the slurs fly." Some great lessons for making it wor…

As Michael Silverman puts it, "a brilliant online community has more potential than your current social networking strategy", and he isn't even talking about EU communications. The only downside, not mentioned, is that convening a community requires: - web publishing technologies which do not date from the previous millennium - real online commu…

"We explain the European court of justice ruling saying that Google will have to delete some information from its index – and why it has divided opinion" Good example of explainer journalism, and of how answering the comments often looks like more work than writing the thing in the first place (if you don't believe me, scan the comments): - Expl…

The Horror! The Horror! - Enquête de la Commission européenne Survey

"The New York Times lost 80 million homepage visitors—half the traffic to the nytimes.com page—in two years.... this will make the news more about readers ...[because] homepages reflect the values of institutions, and Facebook and Twitter reflect the interest of individual readers [who] aren't interested in hard news, but rather entertainment, se…

Content shock defined - a lot of content to consume triggered by this post, which is ironic: "the volume of free content is exploding at a ridiculous rate... our ability to consume that content is finite. There are only so many hours in a day... This intersection of finite content consumption and rising content availability will create a tremor …

"Has the art of bookmarking has died or got renamed or repurposed as curation? Did bookmarking became blogging. Did bookmarks become shared embeddable content?" - While Content Lay in Shock, Did Bookmarks Die? | UGC list creation, content curation & crowdsourcing.

Interesting approach to covering a story from a site known for long-form, no-click content: short-form, multi-click content: "Content is broken into small parts, and many of the main points are expandable ... This is mostly quick-hit aggregation ... a stream of posts that don’t require clicking to separate pages. " - Quartz launches Glass, a “no…

Deadtree media to do more with legacy content than paper birdcages! The latest high-profile move into explanatory journalism is New York Times' The Upshot: "offer a combination of data journalism and explanatory reporting ... head-to-head with Ezra Klein’s Vox and Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight ... a kind of internal aggregator and explainer for…

Pin this on your wall: "some answers for the ideal lengths of tweets and titles and everything in between..." ... including title tags, email subjects, blog post lengths and a dozen other critical pieces of content.

There'll be different answers from different organisations, but most of the time it is, but shouldn't be, 'reach' (pageviews, shares, etc.). Lot of useful thoughts and links here: "Sites like Upworthy ... choose to focus on metrics that measure something approaching “engagement” — so not only whether a page was loaded but how long the reader sp…