Overview: Communications Tactics

The key to Inbox Zero... “touch each email only once.”... only a well-designed underlying system can make such elegant action possible.... your annotated checklist for One-Touch Inbox Zero, in 5 EASY STEPS!...The main problem with how people use email is that they use it for everything.... Every other function is much more effectively handled by o…

Although V.R. has not been as lucrative as entertainment companies had hoped, the medium is used a lot in the military (flight and battlefield simulations), business training... health care (preoperative mapping, virtual cadavers... treat P.T.S.D. and phobias... transformed pornography... Independent creators and developers aren’t making their mon…

An op-ed from the future... In the age of cheap and accessible virtual reality, most consumers prefer to experience their narratives rather than read them... Virtual reality has given us a post-literacy landscape more grimly banal than Bradbury could ever have imagined... Books may be dead, but the stories ... the narratives that delight and disma…

Organizations must connect their causes to the personal aspirations of their audiences to transform public attitudes... having a majority is not enough... You need a majority that can’t be eroded or peeled away... in 1996... 27 percent of the US public supported legal recognition of same-sex marriages... 60 percent in 2015 ... the new normal... ac…

I started the ‘coffee club’ as a professional community of practice focused on work and learning. We have a private community space for the members, who pay $10 per month... private discussion forum ... live web video chats monthly... recorded and available for 30 days... a trusted space. As the club grows, I will offer more services.... main focu…

does researchers’ presence on Twitter influence citations to their papers?... although the relationship between tweets and citations is poor, actively participating on Twitter is a powerful way of promoting and disseminating academic outputs... an author needs three times more followers to gain only one mention more... to be or not to be on Twitte…

some practical tips on how to carry out moderated think-aloud usability testing. It’s based on what I’ve learnt from academic research and from practical experience, both inside and outside government.

More Americans have confidence in scientists, but there are political divides over the role of scientific experts in policy issues... six-in-ten Americans say scientists should play an active role in policy debates about scientific issues... but Americans are divided along party lines in terms of how they view the value and objectivity of scientis…

free online ratings are less trustworthy than those that have some cost to them... In ecology, costly signaling theory argues that displays that “cost” more — like elaborate peacock tails, or strenuous displays of hunger from baby birds — are more likely to reflect reality... making rating goods or services as easy as possible... is counterproduct…

show how the nature of diversity in our urban areas around the world has been changing over the past few decades... the use of sentences in data visualization is one of my favorite things. You’re adjusting a sentence using these dropdowns, which gives it a narrative component and tells you some really basic things... there’s no reason to not use t…

our team of researchers and policy analysts work together to analyze new data and create a platform for local stakeholders to make more informed decisions.... We arm local policy-makers with customized and data-driven insights so they can craft tailored, hyperlocal solutions.

we’ve conflated data with truth. And this has dangerous implications for our ability to understand, explain, and improve the things we care about... data is not a perfect representation of reality: It’s a fundamentally human construct... subject to biases, limitations, and other imperfections... Data doesn’t say anything. Humans say things.... Dat…

Steve Bannon and the conservative group CatholicVote used cell-phone location data for people who had been inside Roman Catholic churches ... target them with get-out-the-vote ads...“geofencing” or “ring-fencing.”... data ... is anonymized. But ... potential to reveal personal information about individual phone users... virtual fence around a geog…

Sweden plans to cut its emissions to net zero. A new digital visualization shows exactly what it’s doing to reach that goal—and is designed to help policymakers move faster to fill in gaps in the current plan and make sure it actually succeeds. It’s also fully open to the public, so anyone can hold the government accountable... A typical governmen…

Mozilla announced a new anti-tracking strategy... make it harder to track users across websites ... on by default for all users... There needs to be a profitable revenue ecosystem on the web... Our third-party cookie restrictions will allow loading of advertising ... will prevent the cookie-based tracking ... a better balance for publishers than…

Scroll gives you special ad-free versions of all your favorite news sites. From cleaner pages to handy reading tools, Scroll lets you experience great content with new focus – and pays publishers more than advertising.

the primary battle many Content Strategists fight every day... While the boarding pass was the single most important thing to the passenger... it seemed to be the least important thing to the airline. The passenger became more frustrated with the airline with each passing offer and informational screen thrust in their way... We need to shift our …

novelty and newness of these teams has worn off... growing acceptance ... that these teams are useful tool in driving new practices ... Less clear... is whether these units can enable the deeper digital transformation... ~ two key pieces of the puzzle: ... creating common platforms to power governments services is key to digital transformation o…

Jobs to be Done is a theory of consumer action. It describes the mechanisms that cause a consumer to adopt an innovation... a process: it starts, it runs, and it ends... a JTBD describes how a customer changes or wishes to change...: the process a consumer goes through whenever she aims to change her existing life-situation into a preferred one, b…

As long as you’re working on something meaningful, we could care less when you show it to us. Who knows? Maybe it’ll be better tomorrow... routine sets in and they start repeating themselves without saying anything new... You can publish seven articles a week, yet still be irrelevant... You can’t ... make the jump from good to great, by sticking t…

Systematic mapping assesses the nature of an evidence base, answering how much evidence exists on a particular topic... an interactive database of studies and their meta-data, along with visualisations of this database... an R-based tool called EviAtlas, an Open Access ... Open Source ... tool for producing interactive, attractive tables and figur…

analyzed the length and readability of privacy policies from nearly 150 popular websites and apps... Only Immanuel Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” registers a more challenging readability score than Facebook’s privacy policy... The vast majority of privacy policies exceed the college reading level... [Google's] policy became more readable at the …

Free Software for your own Search Engine, Explorer of large document collections, Media Monitoring, Text Analytics, Document Analysis & Text Mining platform based on Apache Solr or Elasticsearch ... and Open Standards for Linked Data, Semantic Web & Linked Open Data integration

Most criticisms lodged against the content creators that chose to work with the platforms are made with the benefit of hindsight... the decision many publishers made to close down their comment sections should be considered one of the industry’s worst blunders.... editors looked down into their article comments sections and did not like what they …

This article is not a UX Research manual, it ... provides a general idea of how and when UX Research is conducted ... why designers should care about it...~ Understanding brings us closer to what we are already so familiar with. And that is the inception of UX Research... user research tackles the demographical data about a product’s existing and…

open-sourcing the tools we created to do Documenting Hate... writing a guide that will let any newsroom do crowd-powered data investigations... Documenting Hate came shortly after Election Day 2016, in response to a widely reported uptick in hate incidents... we decided to ask people across the country to tell us their stories ... organized a col…

many activists working to create positive change ... seem to think that if they just get their ideas to “go viral” they will ... dominate the discourse. The great lie of this approach is that no singular discourse exists! Each community is now capable of building consensus with itself, where the like-minded talk to others like themselves while fo…

We don’t charge for hosting, we never put ads on your content or share your data, and we will only put your story behind the Medium paywall if you choose to take advantage of Medium distribution beyond your followers.... We recommend stories to millions of Medium readers every day on our personalized home page, in our email digests, and in our mob…

led prospects through the following five elements, in precisely this order: #1. Name a Big, Relevant Change in the World... the undeniable shift in the world that creates both (a) big stakes and (b) huge urgency for your prospect.... most pitch advice ... is to start with “the problem.” When you assert that your prospects have a problem, you put …

Traditional blogs might have swung out of favor, as we all discovered the benefits of social media and aggregating platforms, but we think they’re about to swing back in style, as we all discover the real costs and problems brought by such centralization... With the new take, we’re also trying to bring more of a classic SvN style back to the site.…