Overview: Content Strategy

"I still catch myself thinking I know better than the wealth of data at my fingertips. That’s not to say your intuition and savvy as a marketer aren’t valuable. You need both. ... take a holistic look back at what worked well, what didn’t, and what you can double down on in the year to come." - Year End Analysis: How to Plan Your Content Based o…

"whole new publishing and technology system ... continually iterate on the site and take advantage of new technology trends ... instead of seeing major redesigns in the future, users will see more incremental changes" Key question: are the native ads clearly ads? - New York Times redesign points to future of online publishing - Jan. 8, 2014

Landfillharmonic. Watch. Share.

One guy, a camera and a whiteboard (and millions of views and a book and lots more). Sigh. I miss my super huge whiteboard.

"ScribbleLive is an important tool for covering events and breaking news as well as for live chats. Journalists should get adept at using Scribble (or other liveblogging tools such as CoverItLive, Liveblogpro or Superdesk). But be sure to use it in tandem with Twitter. You don’t have to choose between them." - Using ScribbleLive, you can livetwee…

"we essentially write new content that we then throw away at the end of the day. Content shouldn’t die by design... topical contexualization... means guiding readers through large, convoluted news topics. ProPublica’s topic pages get us closer to contextualizing huge topics. For every major series that they cover over time, there’s a landing page…

"The process is called "seeding." While an old-hat to online advertising pros, it may come as something of a revelation to the rest of us who often wonder just how some YouTube videos blow up with tens of millions of views, while others languish in the humble thousands. "Every viral video that is very successful like this needs to have a good see…

"Too many companies make the mistake of assuming their global audience speaks English. I hear it all the time. “We don’t need to translate. All of our customers can read English.” And “English is the language of the world. Everyone speaks English.”" - Rule #2. Everyone Speaks English, Right? | Content Rules, Inc.

"As your company’s content strategy becomes more sophisticated, it’s important to consider different types of media for your outreach efforts. The internet has changed the paradigm from “please tell my story” to finding platforms that allow you to tell your own tale. A content strategy helps you identify needs, prioritize projects, and invest limi…

"Building kickass content strategies focused on appealing to users isn’t difficult, though, and will always yield better results and not succumb to one of Google’s future algorithm updates. "

"Do You Need a Separate Mobile Content Marketing Strategy?"

Remind me to buy this guy's books: "There is no way by which events can be directly recorded in our brains; they are experienced and constructed in a highly subjective way, different in every individual, differently reinterpreted or reexperienced whenever recollected. . . . Frequently, our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each…

Starting to see the point of 1secondeveryday.com

Basically sums up why I want a Hub, not just a stream, for my virtual presence: "If I had my way, Facebook would have a hard and fast expiration date for posts. I generally don’t want most of what I say hanging around longer than I’d keep eggs in the fridge. Sure, some links and videos are worth revisiting—but does anyone really care that I was t…

The focus here is on business, but why not government? "By using communities, businesses can look beyond their four walls to access a global talent pool ... Communities allow businesses to accelerate and scale innovation by widening the funnel of what they can evaluate, by filling in missing skills and talent, and flattening the distance between …

"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

"At Menlo Innovations, structure and multiple keyboards allows you to split the difference between chaos and bureaucracy". - How One Company Replaced Meetings and Bureaucracy With Pairs, Ceremonies, and Storytelling, from Fast Company

NYTimes' collection: "the common thread is the form of storytelling — an integration of text, video, photography and graphics ... From a ship in the South China Sea to the cost of health care..."

An unfortunately accurate corrective to the recent "Facebook is dying" meme. 2013 truly was the year everyone just couldnt be arsed checking the facts: "A British academic studying social media found that young people use lots of new-fangled services, such as Instagram, because their parents are on Facebook. “What we’ve learned from working with …

Nothing new, but then it's 2013 review time: "this was the year someone isolated the DNA of the viral story, and the world ... saw for the first time the awesome potential of viral content ... Upworthy had about seventy-five thousand [Facebook] likes per article, twelve times more than fourth-place BuzzFeed. Among them were posts like the one wh…

Some key points from "The Benefits of Quality Content and Genuine Social Engagement ... to create great, sharable, engaging content and become an active participant on social platforms: - Quality content is what your clients want to read, not what you want to tell them.... - Content that gets highly shared is content with heart. Real stories, re…

Maybe EU hoax stories can be useful ... An interesting take from Nieman Journalism Lab on the value viral hoax stories can bring to conversations on complex topics. The point being that the hoax would not have gone viral in the first place if it did not touch upon a complex, important topic in some way: "Yet at the same time, these strings of …

"For those of you not familiar with native advertising, it refers to a publication serving up paid stories and editorial content the same way. You’ll hear this technique also referred to as sponsored content and branded journalism. With no one clicking on banner ads, publications hope to find economic salvation in native advertising. But here’s …

"Semantic web, social network analysis, entity extraction, and news-as-API ... nerd stuff, but it will become important — a few news projects are already working on it. If they can prove these ideas can be good for business, others will follow." Nieman Journalism Lab with a few trenchant views on reinvigorating news in S. America, of which only o…

A good holiday break longread: "As people talk back to organizations, organizations find they have trouble telling their story and listening to their customers at the same time. The forces of change affecting content can test the conventional responsibilities of marketing and IT and customer service. "

The rapid evolution in newsmedia provides a lot of ideas for better content strategies in a less organisational, more networked society. One such concept is ideas-based, or fluid, beats for journalism: "... a way for reporters to be human-centric rather than newsroom- or bureaucracy-centric", according to the latest piece in Niemanlab's Journalis…

#Context emerging as 2014 theme: "...newsrooms are going to reframe our understanding of “responsive design.” We’re going to see content move beyond simply responding to screen size and instead respond to reader context, adapting to behavior." - Nieman Journalism Lab

Neat use of Twitter and Storify storytelling, used by 2 different people to tell the same underlying (and inspiring) story in different ways.

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…

Today's online news environment is ideal for spreading bullshit. As someone like HuffPo's Washington bureau chief puts it: “If you throw something up without fact-checking it, and you’re the first one to put it up, and you get millions and millions of views, and later it’s proved false, you still got those views. That’s a problem. The incentive…