Overview: Communications Strategy

"The following is a visual model of all the core tenets I espouse so fiercely here at The Sales Lion and with all our clients as well (To view each, just use the scrolling buttons on the site). I know each of these 12 tenets, if followed, get results– specifically by building your brand, increasing traffic and leads, and finally by generating a lo…

"without giving up their traditional skills, journalists are becoming more and more information "managers". They are behaving like human filters which ... verify and add context to what user-generated content they think to be relevant, and feed it onto Web pages or mobile applications. Thanks to the rise of new social media curation platforms, t…

As I've mentioned now and then (e.g., BloggingPortal's 3rd birthday, 2012), a desultory conversation amongst Bloggingportal editors dragged on for several years, before dying after it became clear that the lack of decision-making process made it impossible to move forward.

A useful matrix of the pros and cons of 6 different approaches to meeting the single biggest challenge in content marketing - feeding the beast consistently

"Content Marketing is about devising, producing, and using content to market your products or services. You don't start Content Marketing from the content. You devise the content strategy, from scratch, around what you are marketing, and what form or forms of content will most effectively do that." A refreshing view from a fellow grumpy old …

"But even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader's perception of a story, recent research suggests. In one study led by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Dominique Brossard, 1,183 Americans read a fake blog post on nanotechnology and revealed in survey questions how they felt about the subject (are they wary of the benef…

" Popular Science has officially shut off its comment section, pointing to research showing that disagreeable comments hurt the reading experience. Or, at least, the reading comprehension. One study out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that mean comments under an article about nanotechnology "polarized readers," taking attention away f…

"a new kind of reblogging functionality so that readers can top the articles they share with their own headlines and introductions.... “Publishing should be a collaboration between authors and their smartest readers. And at some point the distinction should become meaningless."

"Google+ is much more about learning and educating than Facebook. People tend to be more serious and want deeper and more insightful content than pictures of puppies and cats." Hooray for that!

"As content strategists, writers, and editors, we ask a lot of questions every day. It's part of our job. We ask practical questions about websites, words, and sentence structure. We ask hypothetical questions to get people thinking. We ask uncomfortable questions, and we ask questions we don't really want to know the answers to. But there's one q…

"Persona research is a science in itself, where the basic idea is identifying your audience. It is unavoidable to have a clean understanding of the audience's requirement, the discovery process, their knowledge and their interests in order to deliver appealing content, ultimately helping in your conversion process. This post focuses on how to c…

"Now that content marketing is the hot marketing buzzword, what are the critical elements your content needs to rise above the noise to drive measurable business results? To help you, we surveyed 19 top content marketing experts to get their advice and here's what they say." Good stuff here. PS. Point 1: "Stop being amazing, and start being…

Airbnb presents “Hollywood & Vines.” A first-of-its-kind short film made entirely out of six-second Vines submitted from all over the world. (via Airbnb - Hollywood & Vines)

"what is a Community Manager? Because the term takes on such a broad role, we are going to break down the best practices of Team Hüify Community Managers!"

"I'm going to curate and occasionally publish a great little list of content links."

"A comprehensive 360 view of what you can measure in Google+, including: -Measuring Activity Within Google Plus -Measuring Activity Surrounding Your Website in Google Plus -Measuring Activity On Your Website Driven by Google Plus 14 Activities You Can Measure from Google Plus 26 Metrics You Need to Pay Attention To 10 KPIs That You Can Use for Yo…

"But the strategy of marketing itself as a fast food alternative to Big Food has clearly worked well for Chipotle. Now Chipotle is betting that it can sell even more burritos by lambasting the Big Food companies that drug animals in the name of profit. That's the message of a new short film and game the company launched Thursday that takes a cu…

"The Beginner's Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is an in-depth tutorial designed to help you convert more passive website visitors into active users that engage with your content or purchase your products."

"Trello's a fantastic free app which is fun to use, and makes planning content workflows a snap. The video outlines a workflow, and you can download the Trello board shown"

A great article on preventing the data tail wagging the editorial dog. " It turns out that what loyal audiences care about is what good editorial teams care about too: great articles that capture time and attention."

"That's about 100,000 business opportunities we provide publishers every minute." - good article on how slow the newsindustry was. Interesting thoughts too on balancing algorithmic approach with human concerns. Google News at 10 - The Atlantic http://t.co/Fupf11B6

"Almost six months after RebelMouse launched, the service is finding a home in the digital journalist’s toolbox."

"what we are trying to focus on is building a site that's optimized for those people who are news curators. For people that take joy and satisfaction out of sorting through all the stuff they read and identifying the best of that." - Newsana looks good. A model for @bloggingportal or a tool for Hubs? http://t.co/plsalGq0K2 profile on @NiemanLab

"The NewsCred announcement coincides with a shifting perspective on automated news. While some feared that the arrival of robot story writers and editors would phase out journalists, the human touch now appears to be back in fashion..." - Human touch back in fashion for news #curation? http://t.co/uQqLSTw5 via @NiemanLab cc @bloggingportal

If only RM also read the article you link to, auto-tagged it (auto-translating it if necessary) and provided faceted search, it'd probably provide 70-80% of a Hub. Neat tool for group efforts like bloggingportal, too.

An update to a post first published in 2013, as I created a first version of MyHub on Tumblr.

" In the long term, extorting, selfish strategies did not work as well as more generous strategies. Players who defected instead of cooperating suffered more over time than players who recognized the value of cooperation--though extortion might provide an advantage in a single head-to-head matchup, in the context of a whole population, over time, …

Good questions on content strategy: "Is a content strategist someone who is a master of the English language, someone who can spin snappy marketing content into a flexible web design that responds to the screen real estate and capabilities of a mobile device? Or, is a content strategist someone who examines your current content lifecycle in an a…

"Content marketing is the art and science of using text and visual content to promote your business without being overtly sales-oriented. Content marketing can be in the form of articles, blog posts, white papers or eBooks as well as visual and audio content like videos, Google+ hangouts and podcasts. In contrast to newspaper writing, which repo…

we are headed into the fourth phase of social media... will see streams become primary design elements of operating systems for computing and mobile devices... all media types will be resolved in place, in the stream