Overview: Communications Tactics

"E-mail remains a significantly more effective way to acquire customers than social media—nearly 40 times that of Facebook and Twitter combined " McKinsey continues with some basic rules for email communications, with brief case studies. Particularly like the impact of customising emails, something we did with the INFSO newsroom over 10 years ago…

Social media 101 perhaps, but worth sharing: "So what can you do to improve your SMO strategy and start generating some positive social signals that will produce powerful results for your business or brand? ...: - Reputation – building a strong reputation online that will have visitors viewing you as a trusted, reliable source. - Engagement …

"Crafting the perfect pitch: Create a message, tailor it to your audience, and include a call to action. Journalists, bloggers, and other PR pros receive dozens of email pitches a day. To make your pitch stand out, take a page from movie marketers. They’re experts in capturing the audience’s attention in three minutes or less and leaving them on …

There are more good recommendations in here than can be summarised, but if I had to choose one, it's: "Integrate the developers and editors, from where they sit to whom they report to. If you’re going to do social journalism well, you’re becoming a technology platform company... Almost all the important breakthroughs in social media have come fro…

"we're expanding LinkedIn's publishing platform and testing a new feature that lets members write longer form posts about their expertise and professional interests. Posts are shared with your network and the LinkedIn community, and become a part of your LinkedIn profile. " - LinkedIn's Publishing Platform - Overview | LinkedIn Help Center A…

"data-driven journalism doesn’t simply strive to contribute to public policy and culture debates, it aims to end them with a decisive answer. ... In Actually Journalism, news and opinion aren’t needed; to understand something, all the audience needs is this fact, this piece of data, this answer... [but] if Actually Journalism can’t find a way to e…

Excellent tool for explaining "the difference between Adaptive, Responsive, Static and Liquid sites ..." - Liquidapsive (Liqui-dap-sive)

"In order for a smartwatch ad message to work, it has to be delivered at just the right time, place and location that makes sense. What's more, a user has to have opted in to receive such a message. The only way this could happen is via advanced hypertargeting."

I wonder if their EC clients know? "Since 2006, Ketchum... has billed millions of dollars to the Kremlin to advise and assist Moscow with improving its image in the West. ... one former employee says the client is probably not getting its money’s worth: “I can imagine my old Ketchum colleagues holding their heads in anguish ... This is way, way, w…

Surprise surprise... "Circa is developing two types of ads: magazine-style full-screen banners, like Flipboard, and sponsored posts... which look and feel like editorial, created by a separate staff.... One future revenue possibility would be licensing access to Circa's article data to other publishers," - News App Circa Looks to Native Ads for Fi…

Is data journalism just another opportunity to bamboozle an audience? Surely publishing the data in interrogable form would be the answer? "data give commentary a false sense of authority since data analysis is inherently prone to bias. The author’s priors, what he believes or wants to be true before looking at the data, often taint results that …

Worth a look "Meet Haiku Deck, a completely new kind of presentation software. We make telling your story simple, beautiful, and fun."

Particularly liked the approach to Search: "We wanted the search page to display in overlay on the page and that, every time we start typing something, the live search bar would return on-the-go results clustered in groups." - Redesigning IMDB — Creative, Product Design, Design Idea — Medium

"when you figure something out that's not trivial ... you're wasting it on Twitter or Facebook. ... The mission of blogging is to empower all of us to go directly to each other with our expertise. So if you know something as well as anyone else, or you learn something or know something that should be shared, then you should share it on your blog. …

Applies equally to projects, where for step 1 (quoted below) the focus should be the project's USP: "Define what exactly your company is, its motto and the sole purpose of its existence. Write down everything that you think your company/website is about. Is it about marketing tips, social media, mobile apps, etc.? Define the existence of your com…

I Just Love This: "For the love of Christ, please let the poor schmuck who is charged with the incredibly demeaning task of hitting the space bar to change the screen just do his one measly job with some dignity. He can figure out if you've finished talking about the slide or not on his own, you don’t need to manually tell him to go on each time.…

Well, plus ca change - absolutely none of the things some BloggingPortal editors said we'd do after our meeting in January have been done, apart from our own posts and what Stefan did, which is ironic given that he told us he had no time to do anything.

"a new model for digital-first audio programming ... a collective, helping to market one another, providing guidance on technical issues, and sharing lessons on growing audiences. Radiotopia will provide the framework for raising money..." - Welcome to Radiotopia, a podcast network with the aesthetics of story-driven public radio » Nieman Journal…

"Here are seven great solutions to help you quickly and cost-effectively develop a mobile version of your site."

"The way we evolved ... is really not the way we have to operate today ... this attempt at hyperproductivity is making us much less productive.'" A podcast worth every minute. I have a few of these techniques down pat, most days, as long as I can work from home, but the whole mindfulness thing is still over my horizon. - 4 Ways to Make Your …

"“Fished out of the shadows, old news coverage in China’s media can provide clues to the family connections of government officials as reporters investigate their financial dealings.”"

Nice animation about the uncertainty principle, although it’s not mentioned by name, confirmngi the theory that chemistry is what’s left when the physicists have figured everything interesting out ;)

Original linkTonight I'll be toddling along to Grilling Kippers, a UKIP-focused anti-Eurosceptic campaign from deep within the Brussels Bubble.

Damn, some of these ideas I implemented 12 years ago for the EC's thematic architecture. Nice to see them in a different context: First, the problem with current news journalism: "The column inches devoted to the new are column inches not given to the important... this stress on novelty is a holdover from when the cost of making and moving paper …

Beautiful visual online communication example from NYTimes.com - Extra Virgin Suicide

Great idea for explaining EU affairs or just wishful thinking? "A new game called Fantasy Geopolitics (think Fantasy Football meets Model United Nations) is radically changing the way high school students in Minnesota are interacting with the news." - How a High School Teacher Is 'Gamifying' World News

Good intro to the maths of virality, and why Upworthy's best friend will kill them eventually: " As a result, there’s a direct feedback loop between C and FBT [Facebook Throttle - the % of friends who will see a user's FB share]: the higher your clickbaitiness (C), the less that Facebook will throttle you, and the more likely that your articles w…

Seems Zuck's taken Filter Bubble criticisms to heart, combining human & machine curation (now where have I heard that before?) to create what Techcrunch calls “content serendipity” (wish I'd coined that one): "Each Section combines stories chosen by Facebook’s human editors and surfaced by the Paper algorithm [from] a publication, blogger, publi…

"You also can't add any site you want, as with a traditional RSS reader. Instead, Facebook has hired a team of content curators to pick stories for you in one of a dozen or so categories ranging from basic news to cute animals." - With Paper, Facebook just blew its own iPhone app out of the water | The Verge

Points 4 & 8 my favourites: "4. LinkedIn will become the most important publisher. LinkedIn will become a premium destination for industry news, and you need to take part in that ecosystem early and often. Publish original content, network among peers in groups and raise your profile now." 8. Interactive content will trump static content. Expect…