Overview: Online Strategy

Should you blog on dedicated blogging platforms like Medium, or on your Hub? It's not an either/or.

Our scientists are publishing sophisticated data visualisations for policymakers to use. But are policymakers using them? ... I interview Annie White and Nil Tuzcu of Harvard’s Growth Lab about their use of data visualisations for policymaking... summarise the resulting guidance we’re giving Knowledge4Policy publishers.

Some sites are a victim of their own initial success. A decade after launching, an EC community platform was struggling to remain relevant. Over the intervening years it had offered a flexible, powerful publishing solution to many different parts of the EC...

We’re about to start testing new online designs to make scientific evidence more accessible to policymakers. Volunteers needed! - recruiting wireframe testers via K4P

Celebrating a small milestone for the K4P project on Medium.

If Facebook is to thrive ... it’ll need to evolve. Here’s where we think it’s heading… developers and platforms ... will be unable to post content on behalf of personal Facebook profiles... can only post to business profiles and pages on both Facebook and Instagram... Facebook might be hoping that more unique content shared by users, reaching mor…

Managing a Medium Publication to share our the journey as we build Knowledge4Policy: "share our experiences … as transparently as possible, and invite ideas and perspectives from experts in evidence-based policymaking around the world"

the Facebook Pages seeing the biggest average engagements per post across news, interests, politics, and more

The main Topics this time are language technology, mobile innovation and EU communications, with a few extras to catch-up since the last edition.

the big media institutions knew that they really couldn’t leave their business models, they were locked in... there really is an open question to whether digital journalism will replace the profit margins of traditional journalism... one huge issue in journalism today is how a couple places, particularly Facebook, are becoming a major source of…

Facebook and Apple... have chosen to focus on a future that takes the shape of an article... largely developed in response to the constraints of print ... a great opportunity for news organizations themselves to rethink those assumptions... considering the time scales of our reporting in much more innovative ways. Information should accumulate …

publications, where people are carefully curating great content around particular topics, themes, and ideas Here are eleven great publications that you might want to follow today:

Garnish your post with a photo of a cute little kitten and animal-lovers will flock to your button like zombies to a brain smorgasbord... good writing ... does not presently guarantee an audience on Medium... risks becoming a click-bait factory, a lame production line pumping out articles around the same limited themes...it needs to radically i…

Here’s how BuzzFeed, The Economist, The New York Times, Quartz, Vox, and Yahoo News slim down a day’s worth of news into manageable forms. Every day, readers are faced with a firehose of news online. News organizations realize this, and they’re trying a bunch of different ways to make the news more manageable — creating chatty summaries of thei…

it’s been recommended over 6,500 times... the problem is this: the article is… crushingly insubstantial... there are dozens of similar pieces churning around Medium at any time: how to listicles, life-hack guides, autodidactic treatises on ‘personal growth’ etc etc... in the spirit of “if you can’t beat them join them”, here is my hastily co…

"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…

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

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.…

"We’re very excited to announce the launch of a new feature for Publications. We’re calling it Letters. ... It’s a way of connecting with your followers and starting a conversation. It’s delivered to the inboxes of all your followers. It’s also a post, so it can be recommended, highlighted, built upon, and have a life of its own." - Introd…

"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,…

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

~"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…

"trying to game the algorithm doesn’t work, and that the only real secret to getting lots of interaction from Facebook for your content is to create and post great content (this was always Google’s argument as well). But what is great content? ... is it clickbait that drives people to share, or is it in-depth analysis of important topics?... by g…

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…

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 …

We wanted to see where Americans think Ukraine is and to learn if this knowledge (or lack thereof) is related to their foreign policy views

And not just journalists. New generation news sites are redefining news and, by consequence, rethinking information architecture, content strategy and CMS. I only hope the results filter through to everyone else, and sooner rather than later. "... a moment when young talent began demanding superior technology as the key to producing superior jour…

A new generation of companies, like CIRCA, are redefining the structure of how information is treated, and building new CMS to support it. Their approach will inevitably feed into a new generation of CMS for whom the 'article' and 'page' are, if not meaningless, at least optional. And I for one can't wait. "what we’re really doing at Circa is a…

Good intro to the maths of virality, and why Upworthy's best friend will kill them eventually: " As a result, there’s a direct feedback loop between C and FBT [Facebook Throttle - the % of friends who will see a user's FB share]: the higher your clickbaitiness (C), the less that Facebook will throttle you, and the more likely that your articles w…