Overview: Communications Strategy

many teams ... have become obsessed with ... being agile ... But agile is not a strategy — it is a capability... cannot permanently affect ... competitive position unless there’s a strategy behind it... constant cycles of optimization... offers little more than diminishing returns... not considering the opportunity costs ... A good idea is not the…

Instead of ... a winner/loser framework, think about your next argument as an opportunity to work toward resolution...change your point of view from I to us. Then, listen carefully... When possible, plan ahead...best persuaders “didn’t rely on the legitimate merits ... the psychological frame ... can carry equal or greater weight... ideas and fine…

Our scientists are publishing sophisticated data visualisations for policymakers to use. But are policymakers using them? ... I interview Annie White and Nil Tuzcu of Harvard’s Growth Lab about their use of data visualisations for policymaking... summarise the resulting guidance we’re giving Knowledge4Policy publishers.

Watching Silicon Valley exercise news judgment has been like watching Walter Cronkite try to write code in Python... Four companies have created trustworthiness indicators for news websites: Facebook, Google, Twitter, and NewsGuard. Publishers have no way of learning their secret trust score from the Silicon Valley companies. NewsGuard’s journalis…

to make participatory democracy a reality, it is essential to avoid only paying lip-service to the idea of participation — and give citizens a real say...European federalists are hoping to gain momentum for treaty change. Many member states are afraid of that very outcome...Citizens’ participation is being tested out far more commonly across Europ…

the lean canvas... single-page template designed to distil the fundamental goals and objectives of a business, and offer a clear route to achieving them... to design a product around perceived market and consumer variables... In about 45 minutes ... journalists learned how to apply this framework to their news organisation’s editorial and business…

The challenge of knowledge is not acquiring it... The challenge is knowing which knowledge is worth acquiring. And then building a system to forward bits of it through time, to the future ... challenge where it is most ... needed...when you’re applying that knowledge directly to a real-world challenge, you won’t have to worry about memorizing it..…

managers often confuse a strategy’s design with its execution. Recognizing the difference between these two will have a major and positive impact... Strategy design involves detailing positions to take on ... strategic factors... decision criteria used by key stakeholders... the position that, for instance, Ford or Toyota as a company takes to woo…

for manipulating public opinion... automation and artificial intelligence “can quickly generate traffic and publicity much faster than people.”...If disinformation in 2016 was characterized by Macedonian spammers... Russian trolls... 2020 is shaping up to be the year communications pros for hire provide sophisticated online propaganda operations .…

the same person who spends 127 hours per year on Instagram... has “no time” for reading... the ability to read is becoming a source of competitive advantage... the physical, emotional, attentional, and mental capability to sit quietly and direct focused attention for sustained periods of time...terms ADD and ADHD are falling out of use ... the ent…

The most successful audience team members have a complete understanding of how the organization works... interpret a treasure trove of data and analytics about what people are searching for, what stories they like, and what stories are missing that special something ...audience development was everyone’s job and no one’s job at the same time... Th…

It was 2010 and techno-optimism was surging... Pew Research Center ... asking 895 leading technologists, researchers, and critics for predictions of what the internet-connected world of 2020 would look like... 85 percent of respondents agreed that the “social benefits of internet use will far outweigh the negatives over the next decade,”...Flaws e…

as social media expands its cultural dominance, the people who can steer the online conversation will have an upper hand in whatever niche they occupy ... media, politics, business...the lessons they learned from performing on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok will stick... regardless of where they end up... 21st century ... business moguls, politici…

a workplace that is perpetually teetering on the brink of chaos... people develop severe anxiety in training... struggle with trauma long after they leave... conspiracy videos ... gradually lead them to embrace fringe views... By the end of 2018... more than 30,000 employees working on safety and security — about half of whom were content modera…

Some sites are a victim of their own initial success. A decade after launching, an EC community platform was struggling to remain relevant. Over the intervening years it had offered a flexible, powerful publishing solution to many different parts of the EC...

IPBooster is the ‘launch project’ for META’s research exploitation platform, which is one of the three externally-facing platforms we’re building for META Group (context).

Organizations must connect their causes to the personal aspirations of their audiences to transform public attitudes... having a majority is not enough... You need a majority that can’t be eroded or peeled away... in 1996... 27 percent of the US public supported legal recognition of same-sex marriages... 60 percent in 2015 ... the new normal... ac…

I started the ‘coffee club’ as a professional community of practice focused on work and learning. We have a private community space for the members, who pay $10 per month... private discussion forum ... live web video chats monthly... recorded and available for 30 days... a trusted space. As the club grows, I will offer more services.... main focu…

A brief summary of my experience in building company structures and supporting processes, role definitions, etc.

Informing Knowledge4Policy with an Understanding of our Political Nature - exploring on Medium what “Understanding our Political Nature”, a recent EU study into knowledge, reason and policymaking, has to say about how the Knowledge4Policy platform could (should?) evolve.

some practical tips on how to carry out moderated think-aloud usability testing. It’s based on what I’ve learnt from academic research and from practical experience, both inside and outside government.

free online ratings are less trustworthy than those that have some cost to them... In ecology, costly signaling theory argues that displays that “cost” more — like elaborate peacock tails, or strenuous displays of hunger from baby birds — are more likely to reflect reality... making rating goods or services as easy as possible... is counterproduct…

We’re about to start testing new online designs to make scientific evidence more accessible to policymakers. Volunteers needed! - recruiting wireframe testers via K4P

Quora has around 300 million active monthly users... The overall number of topics discussed on Quora comes to around 400,000...content relevancy on Quora is almost evergreen... be looked upon as an authority in your field... Before answering a question... When was it asked? recent questions are best ... How many answers ... Aim to be among the …

the primary battle many Content Strategists fight every day... While the boarding pass was the single most important thing to the passenger... it seemed to be the least important thing to the airline. The passenger became more frustrated with the airline with each passing offer and informational screen thrust in their way... We need to shift our …

Jobs to be Done is a theory of consumer action. It describes the mechanisms that cause a consumer to adopt an innovation... a process: it starts, it runs, and it ends... a JTBD describes how a customer changes or wishes to change...: the process a consumer goes through whenever she aims to change her existing life-situation into a preferred one, b…

A privacy focused extension to annotate, search and organize what you've seen online.

Facebook needs to engage its users in more substantive acts of participation. ... mistakenly assumes that locally respected fact-checking NGOs can supply the trust Facebook itself is lacking. But NGOs lack standing... In a liberal democracy, NGOs can legitimately elevate arguments and offer counterarguments to government positions... we assume arg…

we’ve grown wary of the so-called attention econom... But we also benefit from social media and hesitate to disengage from it completely... a loose collective of developers and techno-utopians ... the IndieWeb ... developing their own social-media platforms... preserve what’s good about social media while jettisoning what’s bad... Facebook and I…

It’s taken me over ten years to move from enthusiasm, through frustration into a Zen-like state where I no longer blog about EU comms. But when the Eurobloggers called, I had to answer ;)- my link in the #EU09vs19 blog chain …