Overview: Social Web

Google, eight major publishers across Europe, and a couple of trade organizations are forming a partnership ... an alliance born out of desperation on the part of publishers and opportunity on the part of technology companies... the largest news and information companies in the world will be formed out of a hybrid of these current entities... …

"Google announced a new partnership with several publishers on Tuesday. ...The Digital News Initiative.... I’m a huge fan of this idea. Contributoria (an open journalism network) and Swarmize (a data journalism platform) wouldn’t exist today without it.

Google promised a €150 million fund to promote platform and product digital news innovation, working with eight top European publishers... Europe is the squeaky wheel that Google decided to grease, with a sum that sounds large to cash-starved news publishers but is a pittance to Mountain View. It's 0.001% of Google's $14.4 billion profit in 201…

Business-focused, but a lot of clear thinking for government communicators as well. Particularly like: "Certainly we have more conversations with more people but is that a sign of success? ... Until social media marketers get over themselves, and businesses start to integrate online conversations – and the tools and people that manage them …

"Now Sandberg is skewing younger. On Friday, Facebook announced a partnership with LinkedIn, LeanIn.org and the Anita Borg Institute to form Circles aimed at women studying computer science or engineering."

"Les Echos 360 is separate from our flagship site LesEchos.fr, the digital version of the French business daily Les Echos... it is an aggregation and filtering system ... the kernel from which many digital products and extensions we have in mind will spring... we need to be the very core of business information... Readers trust the content we pro…

"3M – the company that makes Ace bandages, Scotchgard, and Post-it notes... is succeeding on Twitter.... This is not Beyonce or Lady Gaga. 3M is not political. There are no professional NBA employees employed by the company... And yet 121,000 people follow it. " - Boring Brands Can Crush Social Media...And 5 Other Things You Can Learn From 3M -…

"the most crucial element of Facebook’s new power: the right to chose between the free expression of ideas or to instead impose censorship when it deems content unworthy... How will its algorithms handle stories posted directly to Facebook that question Facebook’s monopoly status? ... If the Washington Post posted its PRISM story about collusion …

"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

"... suggests articles to its users ... and then lets users schedule and share those links across LinkedIn and Twitter... [aimed at] marketing professionals... with story suggestions letting them stay active even when they have no links of their own to share, and analytics ... create specific topic areas to track ... also coopting a company’s la…

"In an increasingly crowded news feed, Facebook’s algorithm updates can make it tough for brands to get much notice.... We’ve been scouring the web to find ... all the tactics, new additions and post types you need to know today."

"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,…

"Interested in checking EU content on Twitter, Facebook and the rest? Use this search tool to find social media accounts with EU input." - EUROPA – Social networks and the EU

"Skeptics are howling that this is a Faustian bargain—that the media are mortgaging their long-term futures for short-term gain... Facebook has presented the news media with a collective-action problem. News sites aren’t blind.... if they could all get together and decide, as a group, what to do about Facebook, no doubt they’d think long and hard…

"The problem is that Facebook controls what you see and when. If it becomes the primary way to consume news and watch videos, what happens when a news story is controversial about the company itself? Or isn’t within its content guidelines (like pornography)? You’ll be receiving a filtered version of the internet that’s controlled by one company."

"The New York Times is preparing to plant a taproot right inside the highly walled garden that is Facebook." - Memo To Publishers: Watch Where You Put That Taproot… — Medium

"the idea of distributed content argues that publishers should be more comfortable putting their content on platforms they don’t control. But Facebook isn’t just another platform. It’s dominant in a way no other platform is... the sort of decision that one might look back on in a few years as the moment you got swindled" - Facebook wants to be t…

"A Content Marketing Roadmap (CMR) is a strategy and game plan for content production and publication, usually for a three-month period. Its purpose is to take the guesswork out of blogging and lead generation and to, with every piece of content written and published, be working toward a goal." - What is a Content Marketing Roadmap? | Amanda Shaw…

"Images with text over them ... do make a post more enticing to your followers or friends... Buffer's Pablo, which creates these images, out of beta." - Buffer Officially Launches its Image Creation Tool Pablo

"Startups are notorious for this: You’ll have two or three people who are true hustlers, wearing multiple hats, pushing themselves and others to get shit done, while the rest of the group sort of ‘tags along’ and waits for shit to happen. " - The Truth About Collaboration — Medium

"the Internet has dismantled newspaper’s geographic monopoly & business model ... & also upended the core assumptions underlying the actual journalism ... BuzzFeed as an organization has been figuring out what works online for over eight years now, and while “The Dress” may have been unusual in its scale, its existence was no accident... BuzzFee…

An article aimed at companies, so just substitute "government communicators" for "corporate marketers", and "citizens" for "consumers", as you read: "Technology changes fast ... but consumer behavior changes more slowly. As a result, people tend to overhype new technologies and misallocate resources, especially marketers. "posts from top brands …

"we wanted an easy way to create and share social cards with our readers... Vox Media’s ‘meme’, an open source social card making tool. A few hours of tinkering later, and we had our own version set up with some simple functionality, along with a new name: CardKit.... a simple and easy to use tool for everyone to quickly and dynamically create im…

"Crowdsourcing is not about work. Crowdsourcing is about community. Without a solid community, you get not-solid results from your crowdsourcing endeavor.... The goal of many of these tactics is not to stop assholes from being assholes, just to slow them down and demotivate them from destroying your community." - Crowdsourcing isn’t broken — Bac…

"Taboola isn’t the only company trying ... Outbrain, Gravity ... Google and Facebook have their sights set on the same goal... Google Now... will start recommending content from specific partners like The Guardian. The Facebook newsfeed algorithm is designed to do the same." - Taboola gets $117M in funding to build a Google Now for content — Tech…

Sound familiar? "All it takes is the retirement of one blogger ... and the social web explodes with a mixture of praise, recriminations, eulogies for the death of blogging..." Good piece on how blogging has evolved, in the process pushing forward the evolution of the online world. "bloggers stopped thinking as much about being part of a larger …

"Twitter video allows users to post up to 30-seconds of video clips directly to Twitter... expect to see videos from live events and breaking news coverage ... also presents an opportunity for marketers to create unique content in a variety of ways..." Most intriguing suggestion: "Crowd-Sourcing Video Content" - Twitter Launching Video and Grou…

"people keep asking about how to start a personal brand... without having a clear understanding of what comes before that, which is actually knowing something about something... To position yourself as an expert is difficult, but most people aren’t asking the first important question, which is: expert in what? ... You have to earn the privilege…

"Starbucks’ first-ever brand campaign, Meet Me at Starbucks ... showcases stories of how people use Starbucks as a meeting point, with an emphasis on the idea that technology brings us together, but there’s nothing quite as authentic as an in-person cup of joe. ... an incredible job of striking an emotional connection with people by associating t…

"reach is an easy-to-see vanity metric and not what you should be focusing on.... Facebook Insights provides some handy numbers, but the most useful ones are somewhat hidden." - 6 tips on Facebook analytics and going beyond...