Overview: Communications Tactics

Howdy, a bot company devoted to automating common workplace tasks. Its product lives in Slack ... operates in the background, listening for the keywords and questions that will activate its powers. ... automates meetings, asking what people are working on, collating their answers, and distributing them to the team ... take your lunch order ... AI…

Mobile requires a different set of UI/UX and needs different forms of content and advertising, too. That's easy to write, but very hard to implement, especially if you have a newsroom full of experienced people who have learned their trade with a different paradigm in mind. Media startups like vox.com, Buzzfeed, Huffington Post and others... adapt…

“How data is generating green lights to keep you moving on the road” is a piece of native advertising paid for by Siemens and written by Quartz’s marketing team. It’s also a perfect example of how Quartz is bringing compelling storytelling and design to sponsored content... Quartz uses an in-house creative team to extract relevant stories and ta…

The news organisation has mostly been focusing on revamping its mobile apps, but the next step is bringing some of the learnings back to the homepage... third in a series looking at how news organisations are now approaching the homepage, after it was pronounced dead by many in 2014... our real challenge everyday is to come in and say 'ok, who…

Therein lies the trouble with virtual reality. The hardware is incredible, but the content has been slow to catch up. Shooting 360 degree video and audio in a way that isn’t jarring and tells a coherent story is difficult and expensive... any brand that deals with physical products and experiences should start thinking about what the ultimate VR …

If we define design as the decisions that determine how something works ... then Design Thinking is simply the process to make more thoughtful decisions.... We can only knit together what we already know in new ways to get to the something that’s never existed before.... Design Thinking offers — a way to get where you’re going when you don’t kno…

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…

2015 MARKED PROPUBLICA’S most ambitious year to date in visual and interactive storytelling...here are some highlights from the year that was.

Publishers like the New York Times should be having an existential crisis over Facebook’s instant articles. Instead they’re embracing them.. digital content is being divided between a lucrative high-end entertainment world,... and a low-end publishing world where content is expected to be “free,” ... a model that... might work to BuzzFeed’s adv…

2015 is the Year of the Card. Screen-size cards are everywhere, from websites to native apps and are designed to look like their physical counterparts. It’s an easy way for you to shuffle through a series of digital containers with the flick of a thumb...cards are a style that seems just made for apps.

we want to create use cases for people with limited time available to explore news stories on the mobile ... challenge is to provide the news in a quick, snappy format while also providing the opportunity to deepen their understanding when needed. As well as providing summaries and deeper information we feel this approach could lead to news bec…

full rollout in those markets, and elsewhere in Europe, is slated for “early 2016”.) Upday sounds as if it will be aggregating a variety of editorial content based on contextual signals available via mobile — such as user location and interests. UPDAY will offer Samsung customers access to a range of news content that combines ‘Need to Know’ in…

In the last post, we saw 15 different ways you can instantly boost your email open and read rates today.We looked at how you can be play ethical, use hypnotic words, create a stellar autoresponder list and a personalized welcome message, among other things.Here are 16 more ways to make sure your emails are opened and to boost your click-through ra…

Google Spotlight Stories is a new form of storytelling made specifically for mobile and VR. In these 360-degree, interactive stories, your phone becomes a window to a world all around you. The sensors on your phone allow the story to be interactive; when you move your phone to various scenes, you are able to unlock mini-stories within the story.

We have read a lot of awesome articles from the community this year. We picked up for you the best of what we came through in 2015.

we’ve curated and categorized 62 of Medium’s best design posts from the past year. Enjoy!

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.

for an actual brand, developer or publisher wondering if they should do an app or a website, I generally answer that the calculation is much simpler and less technical: Do people want to put your icon on their home screen? ... If you don't have that relationship, then all the clever things ... are irrelevant and your strategy should focus on the w…

By 2016, most content will be consumed ... on other people’s platforms... Snapchat Discover, Facebook Instant Articles, and Apple News... Google AMP is coming soon, and it will provide an Instant-like experience for not only Google users but also those using Twitter, Pinterest, and other platforms

In recent years, a core group of commenters have helped to transform The New York Times for the digital era. Their voices have enhanced our journalism, offering new information, insight and analysis on many of the day’s most pressing issues.These frequent commenters have also become a community, one that has its own luminaries.But who are they? We…

for anyone outside Facebook’s Partner Publisher network, the new feature can be somewhat confusing.

I went back and looked at all the stats of past UX Design Weekly issues ... and pulled out the most popular user experience design articles, tools, resources and media from the past year based on clicks and shares

it’s now perfectly clear that mobile is the future of technology and of the internet. But within that, there's a huge range of different themes and issues, many of which are still pretty unsettled.  I outline what I think are the 16 topics to think about within the current generation, and then link to the things I’ve written about them.

we’ve developed mobile apps and online platforms for over half a decade... After working on over 300 such projects, we’ve learned a ton of lessons. Now we’d like to share 6 important insights to help you take your user experience to the next level.

We are a growing community of tens of thousands of creators with tens of millions of readers. Among us are world-class publications like The Daily Dot and The California Sunday Magazine, professionals, educators, and people with stories or ideas worth shaping. We believe digital storytelling is a craft. The ability to design and share your idea yo…

My prediction for 2016 is that distributed platforms and native environments will be more valuable than the traditional homepage.... Apple News and Apple TV, Facebook Instant Articles, Google AMP, Twitter Moments, Snapchat Discover, 360º video and VR, over-the-top TV, chat apps — these are all products, platforms, and programs developed (ish — G…

Our first attempt devoted much of the homepage to a continually updated news briefing. We are dispensing with that briefing today to try something else. Homepages, it turns out, aren’t dead so much as reborn.

The development of the VR industry is not solely based on wearable devices launched by major hardware vendors... growth drive also comes from independent developers ... making apps does not have a high entry barrier