Overview: Communications Strategy

On one hand, consumers have short attention spans, and on the other, studies have shown that longer video can perform better... first consider the goal of the campaign.... Determining performance on marketing-based goals can be a bit complicated to pin down... If site perusal is your goal, short video is best... Why produce a long video when you…

reddit community called Change My View ... a ready-made natural experiment ... feed it into programs ... to understand the back-and-forth between human beings ... discovered two things: what kind of arguments are most likely to change people’s minds, and what kinds of minds are most likely to be changed. https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/ : po…

naive realism, the tendency to believe that the other side is wrong because they are misinformed, that if they knew what you knew, they would change their minds to match yours... maybe WE are the ones who are wrong. We never go into the debate hoping to be enlightened, only to crush our opponents... When confronted with people who disagree, you te…

This year, we are ... focusing on the strategic impact communities are having and how they are supporting key business goals.... three key findings: Communities are change agents... impact multiple functions, stakeholders, and departments ... agents of change by efficiently dispersing knowledge and information across organizations and their market…

One of the most effective ways to change people’s minds is to put your argument into ... a story — but not just any story. The most persuasive narratives are those that transport us. Once departed from normal reality into the imagined world of a story, we become highly susceptible to belief and attitude change.... learn from psychologist Melanie C…

Celebrating a small milestone for the K4P project on Medium.

Latest on the K4P Medium Publication

A rallying cry creates the emotional shorthand that sticks in our heads and builds strong positive associations. Those are powerful elements that help a brand rise above competitors and help turn customers into advocates. Think about doing that for our organizations. That’s important work. Too important for a mere tagline. It’s time for a rallying…

A fairly simple, free routine that’s enabled me to market myself on LinkedIn with surprisingly good results. It worked for me, it might work for you.

Technology has altered the foundations of news and media, and as trust in media continues to decline, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and algorithms have come to play a critical role not only as threats to the integrity and quality of media, but also as a source of potential solutions. The core threats to information quality associated …

If Facebook is to thrive ... it’ll need to evolve. Here’s where we think it’s heading… developers and platforms ... will be unable to post content on behalf of personal Facebook profiles... can only post to business profiles and pages on both Facebook and Instagram... Facebook might be hoping that more unique content shared by users, reaching mor…

We’ve spent 18 months training an AI editor... shadow the curation performed by professional journalists on a gigantic range of topics... it now works independently.... your own personal journalist on hand at all times, ready to explain what’s going on in the world... real-time updates on important headlines, explained in the most succinct way po…

"Our day in Strasbourg buttonholing passing MEPs could not have been more different than the two hour focus group we held with scientists a couple of weeks earlier. Which is entirely appropriate" - second report from K4P audience research."a dozen diverse “vignettes” of audience needs and user stories... helped answer a lot of our questions: what …

The endless search for rewards of the tribe, and the variability that often comes with it, are key components of ... Stack Overflow... over 5,000 questions are posted and answered daily... Many of these answers take hours to complete and require a high degree of technical expertise.... the site’s creators ... put usage limitations ... fear of crea…

undoing radicalization is not as simple as filling people’s heads with “accurate” facts. A radicalized person will not — cannot — accept them... you need to first make the radicalized person... capable of not feeling threatened, unsafe, and wounded ... It’s very, very hard. It takes social bonds to be restored somehow — oft through therapy, educat…

"“Policymakers seem to need answers yesterday,” reflected the young scientist from Italy. “That’s the direct opposite of how science works.”" - first report from the K4P audience research.The key finding from me was that scientists want to see their work taken up by policy, but seem at a loss on how. A platform which was explicitly built around ma…

Managing a Medium Publication to share our the journey as we build Knowledge4Policy: "share our experiences … as transparently as possible, and invite ideas and perspectives from experts in evidence-based policymaking around the world"

there’s an appetite for ... the Smarticle ... story format designed for mobile ... meet readers where they are in their knowledge of a developing story by only presenting them with the elements that are most useful to them

The metric our intuition tells us we should maximize is known in statistics as recall... number of true positives divided by the number of true positives plus the number of false negatives. ... true positives are correctly identified terrorists, and false negatives ... labels as not terrorists that actually were terrorists... a model’s ability to …

What if “persuadability” isn’t the right metric to look at? ... Information warfare expert Molly McKew, who specializes in U.S.–Russia relations... "There aren’t good tools to evaluate the impact of shadow campaigns... Information and psychological operations ... are not just about information, but about changing behavior... of more than 36,000 …

most forms of political persuasion seem to have little effect at all... Field experiments testing the effects of online ads on political candidates and issues have also found null effects... Here’s what you should look for in evaluating claims about vast persuasion effects from dubious online content: How many people actually saw the questionable…

Which did the ad industry choose?... It tried to ignore technology and automation... when that didn’t work, it bought the machines.... It didn’t invest in research, development, innovation... develop new services, new ways, new formats, new ideas, whole new ways of helping institutions and people relate, connect, and bond... So the broken relatio…

the solution to both crises facing journalism may come from the same technological root: blockchain... An ecosystem of micropayments... as the holy grail for online journalism... Blockchain technology can create both chains of authenticity and a level of security... Sludge is one of the “first fleet” of around 20 newsrooms ... on a new blockchai…

The “forgetting curve,” ... is steepest during the first 24 hours after you learn something... unless you review the material, much of it slips down the drain ... leaving you with a fraction of what you took in... those who binge-watched TV shows forgot the content of them much more quickly than people who watched one episode a week... most common…

The vote marked the culmination of a targeted, 11-day information operation that was amplified by computational propaganda techniques and aimed to change both public perceptions and the behavior of American lawmakers...Computational propaganda... the use of [ICTs] to manipulate perceptions, affect cognition, and influence behavior”... #releaset…

time to deliberately focus on design for interconnectedness and relationships ... customer (user) centric design created a narrative of isolation: the customer is ... someone that is provided with a solution ... to get the job done... [but] research ... explained that customers (users) may often look to engage more deeply with products... relat…

One of the applications of The News Quality Scoring platform I’m currently working at the John S. Knight Fellowship at Stanford is to foster curation processes, using a feature I call “Smart Curation.”... relies on current machine learning techniques... like Word2vec or, GloVe ... used in the development of the News Quality Scoring Project

Fake News is suddenly on the boil in the Brussels Bubble. Here are some ideas I brainstormed earlier this week. Comments welcome.

Wales wants to bring the power of the Wiki community and the wisdom of crowds to bear on the media business by creating a hybrid model... local community members can help direct the work of WikiTribune journalists when such events occur, suggesting avenues to explore and co-creating a more permanent news resource that will serve a longer-term comm…

How do we convert users playing the game into users who would complete the survey?... take our readers on a visual journey around the world so they could explore where a news story happened. As a payoff, for every correct answer, the user would collect a stamp in their virtual passport... opted to follow an interesting take on the minimal viable p…