Overview: Communications Tactics

publishers are afraid that while the AMP project is nominally open-source, Google is using it to shape how the mobile web works, and in particular, to ensure a steady stream of advertising revenue

my view of the many different types of visualizations available to us when we encode and present data... We’ve plotted nearly 90 different graphics across five main categories: Distribution, Time, Comparing Categories, Geospatial, Part-to-Whole, and Relationships. The space does not include every type of graphic, nor does it display every link bet…

The Guardian joins the Financial Times and the Economist in billing ads by time.... have found, unsurprisingly, that ads perform better when people spend more engaged time with them.... click-through rate as an industry benchmark for performance;. However a metric of 0.0 something percent should not be seen as a succes

IT’S been just over four months since The New York Times started producing live video for Facebook... a lot should never have made the team... many that are either plagued by technical malfunctions, feel contrived, drone on too long, ignore audience questions or are simply boring... For The Times the goal is twofold... to develop video that appea…

Deepstream makes it easy to remix one or more livestreams by adding context and background... by introducing a new role into the livestreaming ecosystem: the curator... easily embed live video into a player that includes context cards... set up with just a few clicks to feature news stories, polls, maps, tweets, free text and more to help you expl…

covering trials can be tricky... trials don’t always unfold in orderly narratives. Instead, they develop in fits and starts, depending on which witnesses are called and which exhibits the prosecution and defense choose to enter.... attorneys don't actually build narrative... The challenge... to create a way to track those arguments as they're made…

summary of Kevin Kelly’s Seminar “The Next 30 Digital Years”, ... part of The Long Now Foundation’s Seminars About Long-term Thinking. a dozen “inevitable” trends will drive the next 30 years of digital progress...

No matter what the original post was about, a handful of the loudest — or most committed — voices in the room hijacked the comments thread to push their own agendas. Anyone trying to urge the conversation back to the topic at hand ...was shouted down and shamed... comments sections aren't fostering conversation, they are killing it. A very small…

the company's newest tweak to its membership program is one that puts listeners in direct conversation with the company's staffers. The idea: Give Gimlet's members access to the company's Slack team

The New York Times is acquiring a marketing agency... Fake Love, an agency that specializes in live experiences, virtual and augmented reality... to grow its revenue in part by offering more ad agency services,.. I’m getting daily requests for [augmented reality]... chatbots. And VR, the market is already hot.

David and Petros were there to conduct the FT’s first experiment with livestreaming 360-degree video... we failed to produce a watchable live stream... we learnt eight specific lessons for next time:

A couple of months ago I included augmented and virtual reality in Top3ics, my occasional newsletter, adding “Consider these as first notes towards a future post.” I then forgot about it. Thanks, Newt Gingrich!

The public is no longer uninformed. They are misinformed, and that requires an entirely different editorial focus ... just reporting the news doesn't actually solve the public's needs. Now your focus must be on explaining the news instead.... the newspaper is stuck in an existential crisis ... stop being a newspaper and start being something el…

For the purposes of this post, let’s narrow landing pages down to those connected to content marketing or email marketing campaigns, and meant to generate conversions, bearing in mind those conversions may not necessarily be revenue-generating sales.

enterprise software helps the user answer one or more of the following questions:What’s important? (Surface relevant information)What do I do next? (Support decision making)How do I do it? (Facilitate action)... the conversational interface answers all three of the above questions better than the software tools we have today... Dashboards today …

f our e-mail inboxes can be kept relatively spam-free, why can’t machines automatically purge abusive messages from tweets or comments?... a way of representing the meaning of words as vectors with many dimensions... “word embedding,” allows semantics to be processed in a sophisticated way. For instance, even if a comment contains a string of word…

Vox wants to move beyond the web page to tell compelling stories... That Clinton package was the first public product of the Vox Storytelling Studio... launching on the premise of hypercharging the concept of the story, using all resources available to transform the story into a experiential entity... publications and media companies must continue…

"If you're too metrics-driven, you're only going to be focused on what moves a particular metric, and you will use any hack or any trick or any deceptive technique to get there.".. many of the worst dark patterns are pushed by businesses, not by designers

some advice on how to best approach analytics in the newsroom, helping journalists improve the quality of their content, and a build larger, more engaged readership. Here are five key takeaways

the first article in a series on “The Mobile Publisher,” a look at how publishers are tackling challenges in the shift to mobile, from design to content to monetization... People may spend most of their mobile screen time on apps, but the vast majority of that time is spent on just five apps. Meantime, publishers that haven’t invested in mobile a…

Even for brands associated with hard news…their top or second videos in terms of Facebook engagement numbers turned out to be animal videos... interest in video news does increase significantly when there is a big breaking news story. But the rest of the time? Online video news is less of a force than publishers might hope... 97.5 percent of time…

Slack, already an indispensable tool within newsrooms, is becoming a surprisingly effective community tool for publishers as well... quickly become a source of stories, with members providing inspiration or even direct contributions.

Brexit, as experienced by a British-Australian comms guy in Brussels.

Facebook Live videos will appear on many more News Feeds — regardless of whether users Like, Wow or Haha the content. Posts linking out of Facebook will need a lot more user interaction to get the extra eyeballs.

Executive leaders are involved more than ever before in using online communities to solve important business issues ... But budgets are not keeping up with demand, and measuring value isn't getting much help from platform vendors... The majority of organizations have now deployed some form of community platform to help workers, typically in the f…

Gawker built a tool that pulls in the top 10 comment threads from its network of sites and displays them at the end of its Facebook Instant Articles... [and] Accelerated Mobile Pages... It’s not possible to comment straight on the Instant Article; people who want to add to the discussion have to log in on Gawker’s own sites. Disqus supports Googl…

an organization dedicated to "ever closer union" has never faced a setback as profound as the looming departure from the UK, and it’s natural to wonder if this doesn’t mark the beginning of a larger unraveling.... Rather than a prediction or a hot take, here’s a way to think through the different alternatives.

thank you for raising the awareness of my half of the population on the extra challenges women face in business presentation contexts... co-created conferences may offer a partial solution... I may suggest ensuring Personal Profiles do not include photos or any gender information

“Four years later, this Tweet probably best illustrates, in a single image, the mistaken assumption underlying the failed UK Remain campaign…” - a post-Brexit update of my January 2012 post on BlogActiv, over on Medium.

TL;DR: My Osmo is awesome, but I need better audio kit.Don’t watch this if you expect to see award-winning journalism - this is just me doing my thinking in public, and I think I love my Osmo, even if I definitely need more kit to manage the audiovisual better in noisy places (and get a real journalist to ask intelligent questions):