Overview: Content Strategy

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. 

IN RESPONSE TO: Thanks for sharing this.  “While this makes sense it would make more sense if Medium existed in a vacuum… most authors are prepared to put up with a second-class authoring tool in return for a shot at a first-class audience. ”

Examples include using the app to cover breaking news, the annual Budget, share data snippets, new perspectives and take viewers behind-the-scenes

Editor is an experimental text editing interface that explores how collaboration between machine learning systems and journalists could afford fine-grained annotation and tagging of news articles. Our approach applies machine learning techniques interactively, as part of the writing process, rather than retroactively.

So I put together a landing page, sent a few newsletters to myself, then wrote a post on Medium. It featured 75 outstanding pieces of journalism ... my Minimum Viable Product. Naturally, nobody showed up to read the post. Then, somehow, Rand Fishkin (the CEO of Moz.com) found it and spread the word " - The Medium Viable Product — Thoughts on…

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 …

IN RESPONSE TO The Web We Have to Save... Unlike a blogger, it’s very hard to isolate and ban Facebook or Twitter. A blogger can be placed in jail, a network of people on a platform with millions of users is much harder... [BUT] these platforms have their own censorship mechanisms... Facebook is doing better now but ... many things were bloc…

"The pendulum has swung, and all of a sudden “human curation” is back in vogue vs. machine algorithm ... But there is a third category of discovery that is strangely absent from the conversation...: social curation.... My mom is a better curator than Dr. Dre. There, I said it." - Curation vs. Algorithms: Curation Wins, But Not In The Way …