Overview: Communications Tactics

you could ... end up ... drowning in an ocean of data... your KPIs that hold the key to identifying and introducing improvements ... general principles ... when selecting the right KPIs....certain common KPIs ... pageviews per user, page bounce rate or average time users spend ... keep your list short and sweet... Web analytics works best when i…

eight charts that demonstrate the ability to bias the data towards your narrative... Tweaking the y-axis zero base line and the scale is the equivalent of changing the data itself

We don't have intuition for pandemics... What if you could watch virtual epidemics unfold directly in your web browser to build that intuition ... Imagine if new pandemic plans and policies came with an interactive simulation...hands-on learning is the best way to build intuition about complex topics ... an Agent Based version of a traditiona…

why Wikipedia has been a more successful news source than Wikinews... Wikipedia’s formulaic style and continuous format are more conducive to collaborative writing projects ... writing a news story with a lead, a coherent narrative, and a deadline is very different than writing an encyclopedia article...tension between the Wikipedia community... …

when climate skeptics in government and media control the message and the channels, it becomes fact for people like councilor Allen that Australia’s fires... have “nothing” to do with climate change... Climate skepticism runs deep in Australia, origin of ... Murdoch’s media empire... long history of climate science denial and diversion... in the w…

a conservative leader in Australia and a progressive prime minister in New Zealand are ... converging toward an extraordinary goal: completely eliminating the virus from their island nations... succeeding with throwback democracy... partisanship recedes, experts lead, and quiet coordination matters more than firing up the base...the public initial…

people with low levels of formal education are much less likely to ... rely on news organisations ... more likely to rely on social media and messaging ... Argentina, South Korea, Spain, and the US, young people are much more likely to rely on social media... Germany, the UK, and the US, to rely on messaging applications groups...very high numbers…

irony ... the more successful lockdowns are in squelching the disease, the more vulnerable they will be to attack as unnecessary in the first place... They cite an estimate that the current outbreak will kill 68,000 Americans... about 60,000 people died of the flu in 2017-18. For this, they thunder, we’ve imposed huge economic and social costs on …

If you’re a User Researcher ... Baymard can probably provide you some value ... an “independent web usability research institute”... founded on the central thesis that design decisions are often made subjectively ... a more evidence-based approach is possible...Baymard sells research ... based on tens of thousands of hours of their own in-house us…

Every feature that adtech is bragging on, or working toward? Email spam had it in the 1990s... staying away from spam was the right answer... spam from a high-reputation brand doesn’t look any different from spam that any fly-by-night operation can send...The “new reality,”... is a place where you win based not on how much the audience trusts you,…

FT senior data-visualisation journalist ... explains the must-see daily graphs...See also Coronavirus tracked: the latest figures as the pandemic spreads | Free to read

The Cranky Uncle smartphone game is currently being developed... teach you to throw the arguments of even your crankiest climate-misinformed uncle back at him... let’s learn the arguments of denial to defeat them...cartoons and gameplay to interactively explain the denial techniques used to cast doubt on climate science... ‘active inoculation’ — l…

not all graphics are created equal... well-intentioned designs can mislead the public ... we asked six experts to identify the graphics that do the best job of telling an important story about coronavirus... the simpler, the better...with data being so sparse, incomplete... traditional visualizations ... may give readers a delusional impression of…

Most current definitions of engagement are bimodal – someone is either engaged or they ‘re not...a limited view that hampers our ability to manage engagement in meaningful ways...Community management is the discipline of building technical and social environments in such a way that individuals can easily organize and collaborate to achieve an obje…

Data Visualization Society... pair our members with ... public health organizations, researchers, cultural navigators making sense of information for patients, local communities, and others through data visualization

68 percent of Democrats are worried that someone in their family could catch the virus, while just 40 percent of Republicans and 45 percent of independents share that concern.... Nearly 80 percent of Democrats believe the worst is yet to come, but just 40 percent of Republicans and 57 percent of independents believe that...The partisan disconnect …

In this era... design was the product. Whatever else you might be buying, you were buying design, and all the design looked the same... Ever since modernism brought industry into design, tastes have cycled ... A forward-looking, high-tech style obsessed with mass commercial appeal ... to one that’s backward-looking, handmade, authenticity-obsessed…

The Four Horsemen of this emerging Textopia are... Roam attempts to implement a near-full conception of hypertext as originally conceived by visionaries... looks like a cross between a slightly weird wiki and ... Evernote. It’s not... block-level addressability, transclusion ... and bidirectional linking ... utterly transform the writing experienc…

"Science Storytellers" uses reporters' notebooks as a bridge between childhood curiosity and scientific expertise... give the scientists practice explaining their research without complicated jargon — and challenges them to be interesting.,..Jennifer Cutraro, founder ... felt there was value in the way journalists explore, digest an…

Great Copy Solves a Problem. Focus on solving customer problems... If you don’t know what your clients worry about, pick up the phone... Your subject line and opening paragraph should tell the full story... newsletter bait to attract your subscribers toward your website ... A good CTA will help transform engaged subscribers into active customers..…

new interactive visualisations to allow stakeholders explore and compare the detailed investment themes ... across the funds, countries and thematic objectives... provide insight starting from the original planned amounts.  The dataset with full details is open and accessible

Our scientists are publishing sophisticated data visualisations for policymakers to use. But are policymakers using them? ... I interview Annie White and Nil Tuzcu of Harvard’s Growth Lab about their use of data visualisations for policymaking... summarise the resulting guidance we’re giving Knowledge4Policy publishers.

the lean canvas... single-page template designed to distil the fundamental goals and objectives of a business, and offer a clear route to achieving them... to design a product around perceived market and consumer variables... In about 45 minutes ... journalists learned how to apply this framework to their news organisation’s editorial and business…

the high pitch of outrage, constant outrage, is exhausting and overwhelming... every story should ... tell you something new that you need to know about the world. Or ... move you and help shift the way you understand the world...How much of our best storytelling... helps us understand people, power, and the world...What could we learn from the wr…

the next generation of blogs will be shaped around the habits and conventions of today’s internet... so much communication takes place backstage, in group chats and on Slack, I’d expect new blogs to step in the same ambiguous territory as newsletters ... not everyone is looking, but privacy is neither airtight nor expected...escape hatches from th…

Most cookie consent pop-ups ... are likely to be flouting regional privacy laws... another piece of research ... also concluded a majority of ... cookie notices offer no meaningful choice to Europe’s Internet users — even though EU law requires one...if it’s configured to contain pre-ticked boxes that opt users into sharing data by default — requi…

Better Reykjavic platform ... encourage thoughtful debate for government improvement among citizens while avoiding vitriolic arguments...a new debate system with simple tweaks: Citizens must list arguments for and against ideas, and instead of replying to each other directly, they can only down-vote things ... forces users to create standalone poi…

for manipulating public opinion... automation and artificial intelligence “can quickly generate traffic and publicity much faster than people.”...If disinformation in 2016 was characterized by Macedonian spammers... Russian trolls... 2020 is shaping up to be the year communications pros for hire provide sophisticated online propaganda operations .…

The most successful audience team members have a complete understanding of how the organization works... interpret a treasure trove of data and analytics about what people are searching for, what stories they like, and what stories are missing that special something ...audience development was everyone’s job and no one’s job at the same time... Th…

The map juxtaposed pollution in northern Italy with the European Union subsidies paid to farmers in the region. The overlap was undeniable... The map was expunged from the group’s final reports... an approximation confirms ... the most heavily subsidized areas had the worst pollution...the bloc’s $65-billion-a-year agricultural subsidy program ...…