Overview: Content Strategy

Our interactive graphic offers a real-time snapshot of the race, using media attention to track the fortunes of the presidential hopefuls... explore the graphic and view a running picture of how the candidates are faring on television during the election season, or drill into the numbers by network using the explorer dashboard. - Media Cover…

Something for the bloggingportal reboot, courtesy @ronpatz: "quantitative text analysis has provided useful tools to extract policy positions from text or estimate sentiment of political speech, the application of such techniques is hitherto limited to monolingual contexts. We present a possible solution to this problem by presenting a reliable…

Authenticity: one of them hot button topics.... because we crave human connection in a technology-driven world? Is it because the Internet has become so saturated with bogus people spewing bogus content and using bogus titles?... we asked our community of digital creatives. Here’s what they said:" My favourite: "Authenticity is ... about bei…

The future of the web is "push-based", meaning the web will be coming to us.... the web will disappear into the background much like our electricity or water supply.. content, products and services will find you, rather than you having to find them... What people really want is to tune into information rather than having to work to get informat…

any of our thread-connected notes that travel around the web will carry all the related notes with them. Clicking into a note lands you at the top of the thread page, where you’ll see a brief overview of the blog conversation and, pinned right below, the note you clicked to see. If other notes were published later in time, clicking on the red box …

If you already have a blog, consider posting new or old blog posts on Medium. This is what I do, and it’s helped breathe new life into old work.... - WHY MEDIUM IS GOOD FOR YOUR WRITING CAREER — Personal Growth — Medium

Good intro to WaPo's Clavis recommendation engine ... "technology that figures out what stories are about, categorizes them by topic, and assigns each a series of keywords. It runs that same process on the Post’s readers and identifies their presumed interests based on stories they’ve read. Clavis then pairs readers with stories... the Post imp…

Interesting approach to using Pinterest to curate interesting content: "Virtual Reality (and its cousin, Augmented Reality) are going to be big deals in PR and organizational communication. I'm curating articles here about the trend and the uses to which communicators can put these fast-growing technologies." - (1) Virtual and Augmented Real…

what are the characteristics of videos that engage consumers?... Depending on the expert, success is thought more likely if a video is humorous, shocking, dramatic, topical, warm, arousing, angry, scary, socially beneficial, cute, violent, sexy, uplifting, intriguing, quirky, interesting, authoritative, tear-jerking, educational, controversial…

In this edition I highlight only one post, and mention a few others. Topics: truth, authenticity & trust, but also productivity and digital transformation.

Facebook seems to be giving Notes a reboot... looks like nothing else on the website: It has a clean, white-space-filled design with extravagantly readable type. It looks, in other words, like Medium. - Facebook, Medium, and the Personal Press Release - The Atlantic

A tl;dr version of “From One Spokesperson To Millions” the brilliant 45-minute longread by @jessedee on taking one of the most successful campaigns of all time - Paul Hogan’s 1980s Tourism Australia campaign - and updating it for the age of user-generated content. Some key quotes:

"Humans are emotional creatures and they want experiences that engage them as humans. They're not eyeballs, impressions, views, likes, shares, clickthroughs, or conversions.... connect people through sharing and conversation to form communities that we can then cultivate. That takes understanding, purpose, intent and genuineness.

In response to In Search of Authentic People in The Age of Automation: "Authenticity was supposed to be what social media was about — it was social, it was supposed to be about us. And... your authenticity was the best coin you had."

People are worried they will lose their jobs to robots but if you ask me, most of us have already lost our minds to the machines. Our personalities. Our authenticity. Who are you as a human? - In Search of Authentic People in The Age of Automation — Medium

"sometimes organizations get so caught up in showing off their use of social media tools that they forget that those tools have a purpose – strengthening the relationship between an individual and your organization. A healthy social strategy includes both content created to get new folks in the engagement funnel AND to strengthen the “passion-c…

This morning I read How Europe turned its back on humanity, a damning opinion piece in Aljazeera on Europe’s hypocritical response to the refugee crisis:Of the 10 links chosen by Primal, all bar one (the last) are directly related to the original article. Pretty good performance.The same technology is also available for your browser’s toolbar: if …

In this week’s newsletter I return to the “3 Topics, 12+ links” template of week 1, but present things a little differently…

Let’s hope [Beme] catches on ... and make social media about real people again -  not their carefully edited versions, and certainly not companies, Institutions and all the others choking up my feed with their marketing as they desperately try to appear human.

A decent long read: on @medium, The Optimal Post is 7 Minutes: "Don’t feel constrained by presumed short attention spans. If you put in the effort, so will your audience." - The Optimal Post is 7 Minutes — Data Lab — Medium

"Thoughtful, longform content is king... A young, bare-bones website called Wait But Why is disproving the notion that thoughtful, long-form content and virality are mutually exclusive... monthly averages of 1.6 million uniques and 4.6 million page views... Its newsletter has over 106,000 subscribers... Its most viral article... has well ove…

"at some point, you start to crave something with more substance. Today’s readers want more than listicles and clickbait, and this is driving meaningful change across the digital publishing industry... In the maelstrom of Internet content, we are drawn to articles that make clear promises for what we will get out of them, as well as those that …

One of the best longreads re: the future of news media I've read in a while: "Websites... have been able to accumulate enormous audiences with incredible speed by harvesting referrals from social networks... Websites plausibly marketed these people as members of their audiences, rather than temporarily diverted members of a platform’s audience.…

"the internet of five or 10 or 20 years ago, is going away as surely as print media, replaced by a new internet that reimagines personal identity as something easily commodified, that plays less on the desire for information or thoughtfulness than it does the desire for a quick jolt of emotion... longform could be the steak, but it couldn't be …

What would you say to a young person considering a career in Journalism? I would advise learning programs like Final Cut Express, and thinking about following the example of the Center for Digital Storytelling's model of 2-4 minute videos that tell a tightly-focused story. - Ending a 31-Year Run at The Denver Post | Jason Salzman

"If a scientific paper's findings are surprising, there's a very, very good chance that it's wrong: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence... the solution is to check, to revisit, to reanalyze. And then there's journalism, where reporters come out with shocking and surprising stories every day, and no one ever gets to reanalyze the…

Every brand, every company, and every person has a story to tell, and visual storytelling is a very effective way of sharing your brand’s message and engaging with your customers. - The Science of Storytelling Through Facebook Images

"This is not just about great user interface design but real end-to-end digital [services]... Some things have not been smooth, not all the exemplars have been a resounding success, however Mike took the challenge, dared to be measured and held accountable and the results have certainly been positive and to the betterment of the public purse." …

the key to making it work is thinking how it can improve your journalism and what kind of stories can shine through it. Here are some recent examples from the Financial Times, Quartz, BBC, The Guardian and BuzzFeed: - How 5 news outlets are finding success with podcasts | Media news

Last week’s edition included 13 links across 3 topics. This week I go the ‘Special Edition’ route and focus on one topic: Medium.