Overview: Communications Tactics

"Facebook is ... aiming to be the Internet equivalent of a broadband provider — providing the means by which all media is published and accessed. Here’s what brands and publishers need to know ... - Facebook urging publishers to post their articles and videos directly to Facebook... - For publishers that use Facebook for their comments sections,…

Nice infographic on the science behind storytelling, and how to apply it to presentations: "A story doesn’t spark agreement or disagreement but rather participation… igniting 7 parts of the brain… testament to why as humans we love stories…"

A typically good piece of data journalism from Guardian's Datablog: "The number of people employed on zero-hours contracts reached 697,000 in the fourth quarter of 2014. See the characteristics of people employed on zero-hours contracts in four charts " - Zero-hours contracts in four charts | News | The Guardian

Good case study, concluding with observations on the role of journalists which also apply to government communicators: "An engaged journalist's role in the 21st century is not only to inform but to bring readers directly into the conversation through... real-time coverage, alternative story forms, crowdsourcing, beat blogging, user-generated co…

"This interactive project lets you step into the shoes of the president of Azerbaijan and assess how the decisions you make influence your popularity in the country" - President for a day, via https://www.journalism.co.uk/news/online-storytelling-ideas-from-hackastory-hackathon/s2/a564037

"While we've always loved a good chart and map at Vox, appreciating a chart or map does not data journalism make. Data journalism is not just data visualization... ... the explosion in data sources readily available on the web... can both aid in telling important and necessary stories, but can also be easily misunderstood and potentially manipula…

Good overview of Circa's approach: "A new model for online journalism is emerging, focusing on the atomization of news stories into “bite-sized chunks” of information aimed at mobile audiences."

~"Sleek and graphics-focused, the re-skinned Fusion will feature coverage of pop culture and tech, while also highlighting social-justice causes through verticals like “Justice” and “Voices.”... Part of our overall mission is to be a lab for experimentation and innovation for our parent company. Univision and ABC ... to reach this incredibly dyna…

"build[ing] our brand in the places [the audience] is spending time”—as opposed to publishing everything on a single website and hoping it spreads from there—is not strange in the context of television companies. They’re used to filling channels that they don’t totally control. ... Vox is now publishing directly to social networks and apps; BuzzF…

"Scheduling Technology Leaves Low-Income Parents With Hours of Chaos" Within 24 hours of this article's publication, Starbucks changed their scheduling policy. - Working Anything but 9 to 5 - NYTimes.com

"Uprising: Winner of the 2013 AAAS Kavli award for online science journalism." - The Environmental Scandal That's Happening Right Beneath Your Feet - The Matter Archive - Medium

"Since Taylor launched an earlier version of the site at The Boston Globe in 2007, In Focus has known for longform photo storytelling, featuring huge, high-quality images.... If you’re pandering to social media, if you’re going for clickbait, it cuts away at any sort of storytelling." - Q&A: How Alan Taylor, online photography pioneer, is rethin…

Came up with a winning communication strategy to promote worthy-but-heavy pdf reports from the European Commission.

"Our hope with adaptive content is to tailor content to a customer’s experience, behavior, and desires... a culmination of ... experience maps, storyboarding, empathy maps — and what we’ve been saying for so long about creating an experience... ... we all believe that our experiences should be more interactive. Why? Smartphones." - 16 Stats That…

"Here is the science around storytelling and how we can use it to make better decisions every day:"

"An image is the gateway to your emotional memory... And on the visual web an image is the gateway to accessing almost all content and information... we are adapting to a different kind of a web, one that will be increasingly visual... [but] the only available methods to surface and categorize photos are beyond basic; we need something intuitive…

How much more could Google News be? See "... a presentation that a German designer came up with that involved a wholesale redesign and re-thinking of what Google News is and does." Lots of good stuff here. Particularly like how 'smart personalisation' is used to help penetrate the filter bubble: "automatically suggest related stories on a news t…

"Hughes will be establishing a health and science desk that will consist of approximately five reporters, according to an email from BuzzFeed. A science staff of that size will catapult BuzzFeed News into the top tier of science news sites by sheer size alone. It won't have the largest staff of science reporters, but it will be among the largest. …

(FT paywall) "Serial’s success is the most visible example of a renaissance in podcasting – a format that has been around for a decade but which has received a recent surge of interest from consumers, investors and advertisers." Massively underused medium for EU comms, IMHO. - Podcasting poised to go from niche to mainstream - FT.com

"Politico has redesigned its website for the first time in its seven year history, and The Guardian's U.S. recent refresh marks the first time it's redesigned almost entirely in public, with its readers' input. Here's a look at the thinking behind the redesigns, and what the publishers were able to pull off." - Politico, HBR, The Guardian: W…

"The latest trend in storytelling is not driven by super-innovative technology. It requires no expensive accessories and is accessible to all ages and backgrounds. It’s called LISTENING." Gotta love an article which starts like that! Apart from the practical guidelines promised, I liked its observation "about the temporal nature of sound - unable…

"blogging is so hyped as a panacea, you'd think that simply adding a blog to your site would also help you find the perfect spouse, cure the common cold, and even turn lead into gold. ... you should always question anything that's touted as the right answer for everyone (and everything). So should you blog?... let's look at a few examples of w…

"we are kicking off the relaunch of The Lede with a three-part series on content strategy... we begin with an element of content strategy that often gets overlooked … but that is crucial to understanding your audience intimately enough to influence it." Hint: it's AUDIENCE. And it's a podcast, so grab it and give it a listen tomorrow morning on y…

"Google Stories and ... Hangouts on Air will both play a role in initial experiments ... "Say the council is shutting down the swimming pool," she said of how Hangouts on Air may be used, "we can get a member of the community to talk to the chief executive of the council, what their plans are, why they're doing it. Then we can take that, repackag…

While possibly a bit naive regarding Facebook's motivation for crucifying organic reach, some good points here: "- Talking doesn’t equal connecting: It seems that many brands take their audience for granted. Liking a page doesn’t always imply interest. ... - Paid reach won’t substitute for great storytelling: While paid reach might get more visib…

"... envisions a Yahoo that’s as ubiquitous as computers seem destined to be. Phones, watches, public terminals, brain implants — Yahoo wants to be able to deliver content to all of them... Yahoo Labs’ biggest focus appears to be on machine learning... a dedicated machine learning group based in New York; ... “hardcore science and some theory,…

"There has been a lot of discussion lately about long-form content and how it is changing the content marketing playbook.... Is long-form content really worth the extra effort? It seems that way. SERPIQ recently completed an analysis of the top 10 search results for more than 20,000 keywords and revealed a surprising pattern. The length of cont…

At last, someone else using gardening metaphors when discussing content strategy & information architecture: "The stream—that great glut of ideas, opinions, updates, and ephemera that pours through us every day—is the dominant way we organize content.... Problem is, the stream’s emphasis on the new above all else imposes a short lifespan on conte…

These figures need to be compared with other research shows that people seem happy to consume long articles on their mobiles. "Ad Age looked at ... Tumblr, WordPress, Blogger to see how their traffic has changed over the last year and what effect [mobile] has had on the time people spend with each service...." On the one hand we read about the …

"The original converted 7.6% better than the new variation... The leads from the long form version of the page were better in quality ... in most cases long form copy doesn't just boost your conversions, but it also increases your rankings too." Indepth and (inevitably) long analysis. Huge feedback. - How Content Length Affects Rankings and…