Overview: Communications Strategy

News Quality Scoring Project ... humans and algorithm to separate “commodity news” from “value-added news” ... based on quantifiable and qualitative signals — like word count, freshness versus evergreen material, quote density, contextualization, and the presence of a byline... human/machine, subjective/objective hybrid as the still-under-constru…

I have an obvious incentive to get claps: pretty decent money. ... I can write more polarized headlines... on polarizing topics. I can piggy back on the hot news of the day... write things I don’t actually believe using incendiary language ... Medium has safeguards ... a team of curators ... a policy against abuse that it actually enforces... a t…

Resources and first thoughts from my recent ‘EU communities & policy participation’ workshop at the European Week of Regions and Cities (EWRC).

Did participants in the ‘Future of Europe’ process influence President Juncker’s State of the European Union speech, as promised? Of course not. Rightly.- 2nd post in preparation for my EWRC 2017 workshop on online communities and public participation in policy

Although curation can save very significant time to those who benefit from it, it positively does not save any time at all to the curators who exercise it. It does to those who benefit from it... it requires the author to find, vet/verify, organize high quality information from multiple sources, and to add value and perspective ... What follows is…

This is a heavily updated repost of my latest Top3ics newsletter. It’s not a copy/paste repost, because Before you Repost it, ReThink It.

A Mathematical Journey Into How Medium Payment [Probably] Works for Premium Authors

"lead magnets” or “freebies” or “opt-in incentives,” and they are insanely effective for growing your email list. And not only that, they can be excellent for growing trust with your audience as well... In this post you’ll learn: What makes a GOOD freebie What’s working for others (9 examples) How to design the right freebie for your business

Whether you read, curate or create, you need to manage the content that matters to you if you want to extract maximum benefit from it.

6th Scenario – More EuropeanismDemocracy needs an identity foundation that binds individuals into the demos... Europe does not have that. The proof?... There are no successful pro-European populists!The local and particular cannot be based on the general and universal.... There has to be something more ...

Design Thinking is indeed a buzzword, and it’s also a useful starting point for deeper understanding... The tension is clear: serious, critical expert designers versus amateur design thinkers with their babbling buzzwords and bubbling positivity... A little bit of Design Thinking can over-inflate egos and self-perceptions of creative greatness, bu…

Financial incentive is key to Silverman’s understanding of fake news, which he defines as online misinformation that is completely false, created to deceive and economically motivated. If online misinformation is being created for ideological reasons it’s propaganda... delegitimising legitimate journalism... through delegitimising organisations t…

The next stage of the web is the Curated Web... create massive opportunities for entrepreneurs who see the trend... characterized by a fundamentally different value to users than the social web... Web 1.0 was characterized by content published from one-to-many and social media was about easily creating and sharing content, from many-to-many, the c…

embracing and sharing the power of communication strategy much more broadly to help drive results and performance... supporting practitioners and clients to rediscover communication strategy as a source of real advantage.... the opportunities available to use targeted, intelligent approaches to getting the right people talking with the right info…

Content management is about to undergo a foundational shift as artificial intelligence and machine learning bring long-sought order to enterprise content... the more content you collected, the harder it was to manage... machine learning algorithms actually work better with more data, and that has the potential to fundamentally alter how we think …

Be wary of using expert judgement as your only source of data... by all means apply your expertise to make judgments about a design, but be sure to validate these judgements with data... Hick’s Law ... states that the time taken to make a decision increases as the number of choices is expanded... Fitts’ law... the time required to rapidly move to…

New tools are needed to help organizations leverage on the power of ecosystems and enable participation of external entities in the business process. That’s what the Platform Design Toolkit is for: design systems that create much more value than they capture and motivate everybody to join.

Communities for Newsroom - Guides on: Manage ModerationUse Smart MetricsBuild Newsroom Skills

with a group, I as a community editor will have much more control and freedom over managing the discussion.... Here are some of the more interesting ways that publishers are using this feature:

Every time you open your phone or your computer, your brain is walking onto a battleground... Your captive attention is worth billions ... This has actually changed how you see the world... walls of code have turned you into a predictable asset — a user that can be mined for attention... by focusing on one over-simplified metric, one that suppor…

“The website and the apps are based on the rhythm and structure of the newsletter now.”... daily briefing... published as an email newsletter, in Føljeton’s app, and on its website...features a mix of original reporting that focuses on a single topic each week ... cultural writing, an editorial, and curated links... (USD $7.55) per month... When …

We need to strike a healthy balance between striving to reach more readers across platforms over which we have zero control, with bringing them back to... our apps and website... here’s how we’ve changed our approach over the past year:... an over-reliance on social media can leave us particularly vulnerable to sudden changes by platforms. Ultim…

Instead of having to look at what weird things other people are interested in... Google shows me the weird things I’m interested in... a fundamental shift in content consumption from curation based on our explicit choices to curation based on our implicit preferences mined from past behavior.

EUrope’s success in eliminating mobile roaming charges may be the first “data4policy” case study where the data was website traffic, and illustrates the rewards of allowing innovation to flourish at the edges of large organisations.

Welcome to GAME — a four step process to improve the quality of your communications — and storylining, the step that comes before storytelling... moving straight to storytelling without first crafting strong, logical, persuasive key messages ... results in a ‘failure to communicate’ … when we don’t take the time to think from our audiences’ perspe…

We may see ‘creativity’ as an individual trait... but real creativity depends on a community of likeminded people... what we call creativity is not the product of single individuals, but of social systems making judgements about individual’s products.... Brian Eno calls this community a ‘scenius’—a group of creative individuals who make up an ‘eco…

Fighting people with facts only makes them cling to their beliefs more strongly, further polarising our damaged societies. Different tactics are needed, and they start closer to home than you think.

summary of the literature that offers practical guidelines on the most effective ways of reducing the influence of myths. The Debunking Handbook boils the research down into a short, simple summary, intended as a guide for communicators

Relevancy is one of the best practices for influencer marketing. The second thing is that it’s useful.... have influencers participate in programs that create something useful for potential customers... Co-creation makes it a lot more interesting for the influencer... more likely that they will participate... it was human.... about people, not ne…

the best gift the publishing industry could hope for... digital advertising technology that will be most frozen by limitations - and that is good news for content makers... collection and processing of the kind of data essential to ad targeting must now be explicitly consented to by readers. Furthermore, consumers will have the right to erase data…