Overview: Communications Tactics

A repost of one of my experiments with the massive.wiki team, where we "developed an approach ... which simultaneously enriches blogging by adding some of the best aspects of wikis, and allows wikis to better host something resembling blogs."

"the underlying problem is stubbornly intractable"Great piece, although I'm unsure that "a great proportion of the variance in “knowledge management” effectiveness across individuals is genetic", it is true that:productivity geeks exist, develop their system and then try to sell it.speaking from experience, it is really, r…

"more than 200 studies that show the positive effect of writing on mental health... but researchers don’t completely agree on why or how".One idea: "safe, confidential way to disclose emotions that were previously bottled up". But "recent studies show an increase in self-awareness ... could be the key". Turn your att…

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…

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.

the most recommended stories on Medium have either to do with startups, life or productivity. Sometimes, all three topics are squeezed in a single story — How to be super productive in your startup and change your life… If we can undo the follower bias, I think everybody becomes a writer and nobody really becomes a celebrity.

Find influencers, and partner with them to create Youtility content that helps people make better decisions about their home, auto, boat, motorcycle, etc. But at the operational level, this kind of program creates a number of questions, starting with, “What influencers do we want to work with, and why?”

One of the vlogs I did at the EU Week of Regions & Cities with the winners of the #EUinmyRegion blogging competition I ran for the EC. All vlogs can be found in this Moment.

Had a great time setting up and running a blogging competition for the EU Commission’s Regional Policy department. It’s not over yet, though: the three winners announced today are coming to Brussels this October as fully accredited journalists to European Week of Regions and Cities. 

It’s tempting to merely argue that the recent crop of newsletters are what came to replace the independent blogosphere of the mid-aughts.... take a look at the subject lines for several of the newsletters ... Any web editor who plugged these as headlines into a CMS would be summarily fired... why are readers responding so well when they fly in th…

The EC set up Drop’pin to help young people find training, apprenticeship and intern opportunities across Europe. I did some content marketing (blogging, enewsletter, social media support) and developed a global CRM strategy.

While the platform has long been a bastion of visual storytelling, it has also been historically lax with its limitations on gratuitous writing and hashtagging. That all changed today... An epidemic of hashtag fatigue is coming... The first step was de-prioritizing the hashtag in discovery feeds. The next step is burying it in yours... To e…

Blogging has never been easier but getting read has never been harder... The problem isn't freedom or openness but distribution... you might post it on Facebook or Google Plus. Your friends might see it ... (though this is largely random) and they might share it ... You might post it on LinkedIn and your network might see it ... and LinkedIn migh…

it’s been recommended over 6,500 times... the problem is this: the article is… crushingly insubstantial... there are dozens of similar pieces churning around Medium at any time: how to listicles, life-hack guides, autodidactic treatises on ‘personal growth’ etc etc... in the spirit of “if you can’t beat them join them”, here is my hastily co…

only when people are tempted to write gushing praise about a product they secretly despise that I think you have thrown away everything that you supposedly stand for... quite depressing to think that after all these years, we are still trying to put a price tag on everything that moves.,, However, there is something quite refreshing and excitin…

While most the activity on LinkedIn occurred within the first 24 hours after posting, Medium was more of a slow burn... led to shares from outside networks. Of the 1,500 views of my article, 500 came from Facebook, 400 from email, and nearly 300 from Twitter... For years, we’ve been warned away from such tactics... in a world in which Facebook …

The rich, diverse, free web that I loved - and spent years in an Iranian jail for - is dying.Why is nobody stopping it?... The hyperlink was my currency six years ago... represented the open, interconnected spirit of the world wide web ... a way to abandon centralization ... and replace them with something more distributed, a system of nodes an…

"The Influencer Identification Worksheet is a blogger outreach brainstorming tool [to] build a list of bloggers." - A 4-Step Blogger Outreach Tool for Identifying Influencers | Convince and Convert: Social Media Strategy and Content Marketing Strategy

A thoughtful addition to the neverending "is blogging dead?" debate: "According to the definition, blogging is "regularly adding or updating a blog". But that definition was created in 1997 and no one has bothered to change it. I propose the following: "Blogging is the act of sharing ones ideas, likes, opinions, and/or experiences, via pro…

"Bloggers aren’t journalists or employees – they’re independent souls who have built a following by keeping their readers interested, amused and engaged. They don’t like to be controlled or deceived, and they definitely don’t like you to waste their time. Forgetting this will get you into trouble" - 6 Do's And Don'ts Of Blogger Outreach

"3 main talking points of why your B2C clients should want to work with bloggers."

Thoughtful longread on the past (and future?) of longreads - i.e., blogging. Plus a hint that Vox's Chorus CMS may be getting wider use in the future... "Today everyone in the media world is launching email newsletters... Great. But what I miss from emails is the sense of community, the shared experience... Obviously Twitter replaced parts of t…

"Getting the bloggers to review and publish content about you is not going to be a walk in the park. It is not about you, it is about them. So you need to offer something of value to them." - 3 Social Media Tools to Identify Influential Bloggers - Jeffbullas's Blog

LinkedIn posts are open to the public, even those not in your LinkedIn network, so you end up with a public blog page, over which you have no control.

"She was presenting on Blogger Relations – Why and How to Get Started. A perfect topic for her since she knows the issue from both sides. I asked her what was an important takeaway from her talk. Here is what she shared." - from the @Steveology blog

One of the reasons I created this Tumblr was to use it as a 'first draft’ of a Content Hub (see post), an idea which crystallised after reading Sloan’s original content strategy piece on Stock and Flow.The Hub is basically my way of saying that there’s more to life than the Stream. Unsurprisingly, Alexis Madrigal’s piece in the Atlantic caugh…

When I came to Brussels in 1991 it was as a science writer. It remained my profession for many years, so when scienceblogs.com was launched in 2006 I checked it out ... but never really had the time to follow it. Now via another (ex?)science writer, I hear news of scienceblog's sudden implosion following a tragic loss of ethical compass.