Overview: Communications Strategy

I’ve just spent a few days running the Discovery phase of a new project to further develop the communication strategy of an EU Institution, with a particular focus on retooling its online, social media and publications tactics. Apart from focusing on developing a new information architecture, I’m running the overall project. This means not only en…

The 12-person unit, called the social stories team, includes a variety of roles: writers, animators, graphics professionals, and producers, who create and package content for Instagram, Vine, Tumblr and Snapchat Discover.

benefit of building a brand that audiences recognize ... allow us to build a strong revenue model and a strong connection to an audience. If they see us on Snapchat and Snapchat has a very large audience, then they get to know and trust Vox and see it as a source that they care about... think about your brand as an interconnected ethos that should…

On Tuesday, the American people will see a multi-platform streaming and social broadcast of the State of the Union that reflects the ways people experience live events in 2016. We’ll be reaching people where they are — and making it possible for them to engage, respond, and share the President’s speech themselves in new and different ways... vide…

bringing new technology into the newsroom to change how the outlet commissions and publishes opinion pieces ... expand the coverage beyond just text, into visual story formats that can be accessed and shared across different platforms.... the FT's comment section is a "huge source of strength and a very valuable asset".... a new Facebook commu…

The EC set up Drop’pin to help young people find training, apprenticeship and intern opportunities across Europe. I did some content marketing (blogging, enewsletter, social media support) and developed a global CRM strategy.

blogs and Twitter drive two-thirds of content flow. Mainstream media has become a catalyst that blogs and Twitter drive. Responsive Experience Tops Responsive Design: ... preparing for 10 types of customers ... you know who they are via their search terms ... content changes to meet their needs. We must know who they are and start building…

In this week’s edition, a months’ reading - some 30 posts - on social media, digital transformation, content/system design and EuroPCom2015. But first some news from me

We are fascinated with Essena O’Neill because she reveals things we could live our whole lives hiding from. In the span of a few years, she rocketed into Instagram fame, made hundreds of thousands of dollars and then decided to chase a life of meaning... We have always sold the dream and faked it to our neighbors. We’re just upset that now the …

Whether it be for managing Facebook ads, CRM, podcasting, webinars or my website, people are curious about the software behind this business. - 44 Powerful Marketing Tools for Facebook Ads, Websites, CRM and More - Jon Loomer Digital

So, how did this local come by his expertise? Years of work in developing, implementing and managing integrated offline/online marketing strategies... Far-ranging, diverse experience in marketing? Extensive education in social media technologies and how/when/why to use them? Nope. He’s an expert because he has a popular Facebook page, which is …

With the release of its new Polls feature... you can now create super-simple polls directly on Twitter with just the click or a button or a tap on your phone... the ins and outs of Twitter polls, how to set them up, and nine engaging ways you can use polls today. - The Complete Guide to New Twitter Polls: What They Are, How They Work and 9 …

Social media marketing software team admits they’re failing at social media marketing...The bottom seems to be falling out across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+... The Buffer team is running some experiments to try to determine the cause of this huge loss in social referral traffic, but I have a few ideas of my own ... - OMG. Buffer…

the value of curation combined with a second, algorithmic step: personalization. Fill a barrel with the best of the best. Now when I walk in, based on insights about my taste and what I’ve selected in the past, choose *for me* from the barrel. Wow! Thanks! - Why I Unfollowed You on Instagram — Medium

you don’t have to be overwhelmed by social media change, espcially if you can get your head around some fundamental truths about how the web works... if you’re spending all your time learning the shiny new thing, are you taking energy and resources away from the stuff that is really impacting your business? - Five ways to calm down and not …

Do people really want to have a conversation with brands, or their government?

"Why don't we just build our community on Facebook?" Some thoughts after a month playing with Knowledge Hub

an app that combs through your Twitter or Facebook feeds, identifying the links being shared the most by your friends... a very efficient way to use the curation you’ve already done of your Twitter followers to curate news... what we’re not doing is semantic analysis, and scanning keywords in articles. Nor are we using human editors ... If …

I spoke to seven news organizations - Recode, The Verge, Reuters, Mic, Popular Science, The Week, and USA Today's FTW - about their decision to suspend comments, the results of that change, and how they manage reader engagement now... Here's how they're all using social media to encourage reader discussion. - What happened after 7 news site…

nothing about Federman’s job responsibilities at Fortune are traditional for a Time Inc. employee. He works closely with colleagues in editorial, public relations and marketing. He mines analytics for data about the best times to post stories and what’s connecting with readers. He identifies trending stories and occasionally writes one ... helps d…

If you stop to think about it, you might get appalled at how much time, money, and effort are meaningless for brand social marketing.... Get back to basics... It comes down to two simple mentalities. They want compelling content and they want a connection that makes sense for them, not you. - There Are Only Two Things People Want from Your B…

I have been under the impression for quite a while that eventually one of the large content marketing platforms...  will develop social media capabilities ... that content marketing would be the parent, and social marketing would fit underneath it. What Sprinklr is trying to do is flip the script on that, where social media becomes the parent a…

You really have two types of people you can leverage to aid your target marketing and social strategy efforts: - Influencers: Popular, well-respected, quasi-celebrities in your industry/space that share and engage in relevant content, and have a large audience and an engaged following. - Advocates: Vocal evangelists who are already a big fan o…

A tl;dr version of “From One Spokesperson To Millions” the brilliant 45-minute longread by @jessedee on taking one of the most successful campaigns of all time - Paul Hogan’s 1980s Tourism Australia campaign - and updating it for the age of user-generated content. Some key quotes:

"sometimes organizations get so caught up in showing off their use of social media tools that they forget that those tools have a purpose – strengthening the relationship between an individual and your organization. A healthy social strategy includes both content created to get new folks in the engagement funnel AND to strengthen the “passion-c…

Let’s hope [Beme] catches on ... and make social media about real people again -  not their carefully edited versions, and certainly not companies, Institutions and all the others choking up my feed with their marketing as they desperately try to appear human.

One of the best longreads re: the future of news media I've read in a while: "Websites... have been able to accumulate enormous audiences with incredible speed by harvesting referrals from social networks... Websites plausibly marketed these people as members of their audiences, rather than temporarily diverted members of a platform’s audience.…

The rich, diverse, free web that I loved - and spent years in an Iranian jail for - is dying.Why is nobody stopping it?... The hyperlink was my currency six years ago... represented the open, interconnected spirit of the world wide web ... a way to abandon centralization ... and replace them with something more distributed, a system of nodes an…

"@NASA is the 104th most popular Twitter account in the world... and 3.5 million on Instagram. The Department of the Interior, whose stunning wildlife and nature pictures make it the only government agency with cool visual content to rival NASA’s, has just 654,000 ... John Yembrick and Jason Townsend are veterans of other government agencies...…

"the rise of suggested content tools has shifted the balance between conversation and link-sharing, and in so doing has diminished the value of the links that get shared... a tweeted link no longer reflects any curation or judgment on their part; it may well be something that was found for them rather than by them. Nor is it a sign that they’ve…