Overview: Communications Tactics

Scientists often speak of the “general public” as a group that is far removed from the academic circles that they belong to.... Scientists have “othered” the general public... there is no such thing ... except for in very specific contexts (i.e. vaccine developers are not the general public vs those who do not develop vaccines when one is speaking…

Yet another variation on the Top3ics format: exploring three facets of one topic, highlighting one outstanding resource (plus a few extra links) for each.  Today’s theme... psychology

Leadership is the art of inspiring others to make a story come true. Therefore, if you’re leading people, you’re telling them a story ... great storytellers ... are going to recruit better... darlings in the press... raise money more easily ... close amazing business developer partnerships... have a strong and cohesive corporate culture ... core…

Marketplace wants to reach a more diverse audience... to raise the economic intelligence of the country... podcast... to approach explainer journalism ... through a group conversation... Our attempt to get the answer is going to be transparent... audience, can you help me with this?

Hidden Figures serves as a sort of blueprint as to exactly how STEM stories can also be financially viable crowd pleasers

EU money flows from Brussels into thousands of projects and ideas. Why does nobody notice?... some of the worst storytellers happen to be located in Brussels ... majorities in society and the media believe that the European Union belongs in the dustbin of history... eternal Brussels congresses where elitist Eurocrats engage in nothing but myopic …

Building a good CuratorBot required no coding skills. But a great CuratorBot needs faceted search. Can it be done without programming? - second instalment of Adventures of a non-Coder in the World of Chatbots…

a way for publishers to combine multiple Instant Articles into one post.

Publishers are using Facebook’s latest Instant Articles update, which lets publishers post multiple articles within one post, to publish regular editions of must-read content straight to the platform.... akin to receiving a daily email with the day’s top stories, but readers won’t have to leave Facebook to get it... option to subscribe to get aler…

For content curators, adding a CuratorBot on Facebook Messenger is a no-brainer. The alpha testing launched in late December was useful, resulting in a whole bunch of tweaks, as described in this post for Chatbot Magazine.

what more than 12,000 people[i] told us about comment sections on 20 different news sites.... 81% ... would like it if journalists clarified factual questions in the comment section... 73% ... would like it if experts on the topic of the article responded... 58%, would like it if journalists actively contributed to comment sections...

BBC’s Reality Check team will focus on content that is clearly fabricated and attempting to mislead the public into thinking it has been produced by a reputable news organisation... part of the BBC’s attempt to do more “slow news”, using in-depth analysis and expertise in a bid to help the public understand an especially tumultuous period in the …

In addition to ... income inequality and the shrinking middle class, these 10 infographics... also explain our energy, financial, and shipping systems, the global population boom, our diets, and when your job will be taken by a robot. Couple those with a series of maps that will reframe how you think about geopolitics and you have the start of an …

Find influencers, and partner with them to create Youtility content that helps people make better decisions about their home, auto, boat, motorcycle, etc. But at the operational level, this kind of program creates a number of questions, starting with, “What influencers do we want to work with, and why?”

thousands of activists have started to push companies to take a stand on ... “hate news” ... Sleeping Giants ... and their followers have communicated with more than 1,000 companies and nonprofit groups whose ads appeared on Breitbart, and about 400 of those organizations have promised to remove the site from future ad buys... In the old normal,…

battles for both livestreaming and 360 video are underway ... YouTube is leading the way, as anyone can currently live stream in 360, but only if they have special encoder software ... Facebook ... aiming to allow normal profiles to easily broadcast from a 360 mobile device without desktop software.

the 'Try Before You Fly' scheme ... generated flights and hotel bookings of over $17,000 and a 40% return on investment... a 190% uplift in New York excursions proving how this technology captures the imagination of travelers.

thoughtfully designed user interfaces can make us a freer, more humane, and more just society, just as poorly designed ones seem to have made many of us less compassionate, less informed, and more antagonistic... for a case study, we only need to look ... online forum Nextdoor.com originally ... a way of fostering community through neighborhood-s…

cognitive psychologist Ronald T. Kellogg explores how work schedules, behavioral rituals, and writing environments affect the amount of time invested in trying to write and the degree to which that time is spent in a state of boredom, anxiety, or creative flow... High-intensity noise that exceeds 95 decibels disrupts performance on complex tasks b…

Most people in the news industry hate comments.... yet audience engagement ... is so worth the investment ... trust in media and journalists has sunk to a new low. Talking to each other can help build relationships and therefore trust. What business leader out there doesn’t want to earn more per user? And what journalist doesn’t want to have the b…

Major enterprise stories — stories that take deep dives and attempt to inform readers in substantive ways or to elicit impact... require considerable resources... the potential audience is limited... how can journalists get readers to complete these long pieces?use multiple elements and platforms to tell the story... the parts that pull your reade…

We have ideas for sponsored Codas, that are of interest to specific groups.

my research team’s analysis of data from Columbia University’s Emergent rumor tracker suggests that this misinformation is just as likely to go viral as reliable information... limiting news fakers’ ability to sell ads... a step in the right direction. But it will not curb abuses driven by political motives... Using BotOrNot, our colleagues found…

Today, the newsletter is a petri dish, where audience-development teams tinker .... Publishers that treated email as its own animal saw benefits including massive boosts in traffic and upticks in digital subscribers... subscribers are disproportionately loyal ... an ideal group to test ideas on

what we were doing was akin to “curation”: picking the best gems of news and analysis, and constructing a narrative around them for time-pressed readers drowning in the information overload of the web. And we were forging a direct relationship with our readers. That led me to talk with colleagues in other media organizations... understand the tre…

We talk to a digital journalist from the Euronews about the rise of ‘immersive’ videos like 360° and VR. ... VR (or 360° video) is a very social medium. Some of the earlier comments we received complained the shots were too static, too empty... one of the videos we are the most proud of, and which performed the best... more a feature-style piece, …

This principle of science writing... teaches the writer to lead the reader, step by step, from knowing nothing about a subject to understanding enough to grow enchanted with its broader significance.... Imagine science writing as an upside-down pyramid. Start at the bottom with the one fact a reader must know before he can learn any more. The sec…

Fernando Pereira, who leads Google’s projects in natural language understanding, is less excited about his company’s shiny new devices than he is about what will happen when people use them... how can a machine truly understand phrases... machine learning; specifically... neural networks... use sophisticated algorithms and tons of data to train t…

the next greatest advancement in casual technology and User Experience... a set of glasses known as Spectacles pair up with Snapchat via Wi-fi or Bluetooth ... and enable their users to record 10 seconds of video... in a circle with 115 degrees of view... mimic human vision, so users can record what they see and play it back as if it came from the…

After you read this, you should be able to throw together a logo without hiring a designer in about five minutes.