Overview: Communications Tactics

the use of Tumblr by the U.S. Department of State, which is quite active on the platform, shows a keen interest mostly in infographics and videos, but uses less GIFs, or animated GIF images, then the previous administration... why GIFs can be key in the storytelling process: contextualize a quote or event; condense information, time, or process; c…

Vaccine denial is dangerous... you might think it would be of the utmost importance to try to talk some sense into these people. But there's a problem: According to a major new study in the journal Pediatrics, trying to do so may actually make the problem worse.

use it only to compare stats about two different topics over time

Now feels like the right time to take a step back, look at the landscape of VR and AR, and share a bit on how we think about the space: where we are, where we’re going, why it matters to Google, and why it matters to the world... VR can put you anywhere, and AR can bring anything to you... in time, these points on the spectrum will blur... let’s c…

reactive storytelling... quickly, nimbly, be part of the cultural conversation in a meaningful way... When you don’t have budget to put behind your campaigns, real-time or reactive storytelling is a really powerful tool to intercept consumers where they are and get them to believe in you...

confidential document prepared by Facebook that revealed the company had offered advertisers the opportunity to target 6.4 million younger users, some only 14 years old, during moments of psychological vulnerability... the big fear isn’t just what Facebook knows about its users but whether that knowledge can be weaponized in ways those users canno…

I’ve been meaning to blog about the ‘backfire effect’ cognitive bias since first coming across it last December. It went to the top of my ToBlog list thanks to a little serendipity...

We went to Antarctica to understand how changes to its vast ice sheet might affect the world.

someone that saw a Facebook native video had a higher likelihood of clicking on a link post in the near future ... we look at top performing articles and then see if we can turn them into short form videos for Facebook... we strive to be original storytellers... We understand what the mission is. It’s not just to get views... it’s always to be tel…

Mobile First should not be taken as an opportunity to over-simplify and, by the same token, Desktop First should not be taken as an opportunity to pile on complexity.

there are more than 1.97 million blog posts published online every single day... four (specific) ways that marketers can fix their broken content marketing and social media programs...

combat fake news by combining professional journalism with volunteer fact checking... professional journalists will be paid to write “global news stories,” while volunteer contributors will “vet the facts, helps make sure the language is factual and neutral... transparent about the source of news, posting full transcripts, video, and audio of in…

every individual picks their idea, we vet it ourselves and make sure the data’s there, that it’s interesting, and we just go off and do it... We specifically seek out stories that aren’t news related, because we don’t want to compete in that space

The main advantage of starting with mobile first is that it forces you to pare down your experience to the nuts and bolts... Once you commmit to scrollytelling, you have two mobile choices: keep it scrolly, or stack it... preserve the scroll is if the transitions are truly meaningful, and not just something to make it pop. Seeing change over time…

“Scrollytelling” is when content (e.g., a graphic) is revealed or changed as the user scrolls... creating a scroll-driven story is hardly a standardized practice, and there are many libraries out there

Interactive and participatory media allows viewers to get involved, to become expressive, and give voice. It is inviting and contagious for those who share views—seeing enough notes and posters in public makes it more welcoming to add your own... civic action... moves from digital support to public support only when it is clear that such actions h…

the number of content moderators scrubbing the world’s social media sites, mobile apps, and cloud storage services runs to “well over 100,000”—that is, about twice the total head count of Google and nearly 14 times that of Facebook.

a list of wireframes made by some of the best UX designers, in the hope that they might inspire you

if everyone has the same information, the crowd is no smarter than a single individual... a diverse collection of opinions, especially including minority views, is crucial for creating a smart group... we have an innate desire to imitate our peers... it may also be because of a rational, profit-seeking motivation... The more complex the situation…

Storytelling and EU projects - some guidelines I wrote for the 2017 “EU in my Region” blogging competition, which I’m managing for the EC’s DG REGIO.

Brilliant piece of data journalism

Every great company story must be anchored in a human story and told through a personal human lens.

Federated Learning enables mobile phones to collaboratively learn a shared prediction model while keeping all the training data on device, decoupling the ability to do machine learning from the need to store the data in the cloud.

What distinguishes Pulitzer Prize-winning stories is not only painstaking journalistic work ... but also the use of emotional storytelling... because objectivity tends to be seen as emotionless, emotional storytelling tends to be viewed as anathema to good journalism. The winning stories... show that it’s possible to retain objectivity and also st…

the international artists and technologists creating our popular ideas of the future do so in contexts shaped by the pursuit of profit or power. If you can render the future in advance, after all, maybe you can also control it.

there’s plenty of reasons why negativity abounds online... Incivility is a basic human instinct that’s encouraged by anonymity and exacerbated by inequality... anger helps drive participation... anyone who benefits from trolling — whether it’s platforms themselves or populist politicians — have little reason to improve the tone of online chatting…

pulling psychological levers may eventually become the reigning approach to managing workers...By mastering their workers’ mental circuitry, Uber and the like may be taking the economy back toward a pre-New Deal era when businesses had enormous power over workers and few checks on their ability to exploit it... Some of the most addictive games ...…

Instagram, Facebook, virtually all news sites… their MO is to keep you on their website for as long as possible... advertisers love  eyeballs.... The scrolling keeps us going... a gravitational force field... takes a lot of energy to escape...premium Medium isn’t an endless feed... It isn’t about keeping us on the website or the app as long as pos…

readers could only remember where they saw a piece of news from, 56 percent of the time... how can you make your content stand out?... an actively engaged community is key. Content that disrupts a user scrolling through the newsfeed, and compels that person to comment, is a far more memorable experience.

Bot Studio... will focus on two main areas: How bots and artificial intelligence can help journalists do their jobs better and how news consumers can use them to access news and information... conference bot, a Twitter bot — @newsnerdbot. We scraped the conference website ... fed that into a database, and then wired that up to a natural-language …