Overview: Communications Tactics

Here's a conundrum for you. And a probably quite dangerous post for me.

"In this gallery are our favorite graphics of the year. " The Best Science Visualizations of the Year | WIRED

"We are currently witnessing a re-architecture of the web, away from pages and destinations, towards completely personalised experiences built on an aggregation of many individual pieces of content ... the result of the rise of mobile technologies... from many pages of content linked together, towards individual pieces of content aggregated togeth…

"Google Analytics lets you create custom segments, dashboards and reports to find the information that’s most relevant ..." - How to Use Google Analytics Custom Segments, Reports and Dashboards | Social Media Examiner

"Here is the science around storytelling and how we can use it to make better decisions every day:"

"With 95% confidence we conclude that an increase in ranking “the intranet search helps me find the information I need” results in a higher valuation of the respondents intranet as a whole. The impact for the same question related to menus was statistically insignificant." Not quite the deathknell for information architects and resellers of stic…

"handing over a key component of your relationship with readers to Twitter and Facebook is a mistake... suggests to readers that their comments and interaction aren’t worth the trouble" [If] "Comments are broken ... that’s not the fault of readers — it’s the fault of publishers for not seeing their relationship with their readers as being of valu…

"If your schedule is filled with Time Debts, then it doesn't matter how hard you work. Your choices will constantly put you in a productivity hole. ... Email is a time debt that most people participate in each day. If you send an email now, you are committing to reading the reply or responding with an additional message later. Every email you sen…

"information consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently ... instead of reaping the benefits of the digital revolution we are intellectually deprived by our inability to filter out sensory junk... we are collectively wiser... but individu…

"At the moment, it looks like the feature is experimental " Just in case the world didn't have enough cat gifs... - YouTube Now Lets You Make GIFs From Videos

"An image is the gateway to your emotional memory... And on the visual web an image is the gateway to accessing almost all content and information... we are adapting to a different kind of a web, one that will be increasingly visual... [but] the only available methods to surface and categorize photos are beyond basic; we need something intuitive…

Interesting research: "Seventy different political posts were randomly either left to their own wild devices, engaged by an unidentified staffer from the station, or engaged by a prominent political reporter. When the reporter showed up, “incivility decreased by 17 percent and people were 15 percent more likely to use evidence in their comments on…

"With Hive, a developer can create assignments for users, define what they need to do, and keep track of their progress in helping to solve problems. " - The New York Times R&D Lab releases Hive, an open-source crowdsourcing tool » Nieman Journalism Lab

Great article on improving intranet UX, and useful inspiration for any website manager: "During the online cardsorting sessions I covered over 1000 content items and got nearly 36,000 individual responses. The first batch ... designed to elicit our main navigation labels. Subsequent tests then checked that the chosen names would suit all the intr…

"we’ve applied econometric principles to the results of over 200 intranet surveys and… statistically pinpointed which intranet attributes most impact a user’s perception of their intranet. This first post... showing what employees prefer to look and find when they view their company’s intranet." Some surprising results, For example, although I'…

" What was simply needed was to tweak the ‘rules of the game’ and to incentivize the right people so as to drive the right behaviors. In other words, by turning a predictable work process that had always led to the corresponding predictable sub-optimal outcomes into something fresh that talked to people’s EQ, we managed to make ‘work as natural as…

"There’s no learning without mistakes." Pin this one on the wall. Seriously! - The 5 Most Common Mistakes in Design — The Year of the Looking Glass — Medium

How much more could Google News be? See "... a presentation that a German designer came up with that involved a wholesale redesign and re-thinking of what Google News is and does." Lots of good stuff here. Particularly like how 'smart personalisation' is used to help penetrate the filter bubble: "automatically suggest related stories on a news t…

A fun interactive setting out the 'ideal team & process' required for building interactives. Rarely seen in real life, sadly. - One Approach Leading Interactive Expeditions: Eric Cade Schoenborn | Creative Director | Knight Foundation

Is primetime TV advertising the right way to connect citizens to the EU?

"companies that subscribe to the Plus plan will be able to request every message that employees have sent on the service from that point forward, including direct messages to coworkers and a history of any changes you made to your messages." - Slack alters privacy policy to let bosses read your messages | The Verge

"Hughes will be establishing a health and science desk that will consist of approximately five reporters, according to an email from BuzzFeed. A science staff of that size will catapult BuzzFeed News into the top tier of science news sites by sheer size alone. It won't have the largest staff of science reporters, but it will be among the largest. …

"Metaphors can help by tapping what learning theorists call prior knowledge to make a connection between what people already understand through experience and what they have yet to discover." Some good brainstorming techniques here. - Finding the Right Metaphor for Your Presentation

"Here is the science around storytelling and how we can use it to make better decisions every day" - The Science of Storytelling: Why Telling a Story is the Most Powerful Way to Activate Our Brains

"On the surface, no single factor seems to set Slack apart from a plethora of other collaboration tools. However, a closer look using the model described the book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Product, reveals the user psychology behind the company's success." - The Psychology of a Billion-Dollar Enterprise App: Why Is Slack So Habit-Formi…

"“People who download our app visit much more frequently and consume 10 times more articles than people coming from the mobile Web.... [BUT] Here are the common mistakes publishers with apps make — and, in some cases, how they’ve been addressed." A must-read next time someone asks fir a mobile app and/or a responsive site. Which is best? When i…

what it says in the box - How to Create Amazing Infographics - Design School

"an interactive mission, with all other elements of the campaign designed to direct people to experience it.... a range of media including TV, online rich video takeovers and a 30-second You Tube trailer." That doesn't scratch the surface of what I reckon is probably the best thing I've seen online all year. A must see.

"Although Serial’s audience has broken records, it  is far from the only podcast that enjoys serious listener engagement —successful podcasts often have that ability to move audiences... “It’s on-demand, so people are actively choosing what they want to listen to, stories are delivered with a human voice and personality. The intimacy of radio i…

"Charted automatically visualizes data. Give it the link to a data file and Charted returns a beautiful, shareable visualization of that data... open-sourced and available for anyone to use at charted.co... it adjusts to any screen, automatically updates itself" - Introducing Charted - Data Lab - Medium