Overview: Online Strategy

Think about platforms as fishing places where you can find large, engaged audiences and build a relationship with them by providing content. Then offer these users some other services off-platform... Never outsource the future... a great primer for news organizations just starting to tackle the distributed world and a good checklist for those mor…

Very few ... are capable of regularly creating compelling videos ... as social platforms look to saturate their feeds with video... they’re essentially competing for the same limited set of good videos. So those who create the ​quality​ stuff can demand payment. In recent weeks, those payments have begun flowing. For Facebook... people are simpl…

The potential – or, sadly more accurately, theoretical – political power of social media is to provide an important public forum in which those of diverse opinions can freely interact, rather than living in political enclaves inhabited only by those who reinforce what everyone already believes. The truth is that those entrenched political division…

Last spring, the Financial Times altered its former metered access model and introduced paid trials, letting users pay £1 ($1.42) for a month’s access to content. At the same time, the newspaper also changed its policies toward social platforms and began making more content free to people coming to its site from Google, Facebook and Twitter. It la…

At The Guardian’s Media Summit in London, those publishers and others discussed what’s working for them with their platform strategies, and how sustainable off-site publishing is likely to be for media companies in the long term... Cosmo’s Snapchat Discover editions get 76 percent completion rates... 56 percent ... coming back to us five days …

the fear is that the platform will change without warning, and teams will have ended up wasting precious time and effort before they get a chance to get it right or reap the benefits if they do.

ThinkUp analyzes your Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook activity to give you fun and surprising insights, then emails them to you (or tweets at you if it's super interesting).

Publishers are placing big bets on social platforms like Facebook and Snapchat, praying that fishing for audiences outside their owned sites will eventually pay off in new readers and advertising... it’s still a gamble... payoff in audience and ad dollars is uncertain. Plus, fishing expeditions are hardly free. Hiring more staff is just part of t…

I’ve just spent a few days running the Discovery phase of a new project to further develop the communication strategy of an EU Institution, with a particular focus on retooling its online, social media and publications tactics. Apart from focusing on developing a new information architecture, I’m running the overall project. This means not only en…

bringing new technology into the newsroom to change how the outlet commissions and publishes opinion pieces ... expand the coverage beyond just text, into visual story formats that can be accessed and shared across different platforms.... the FT's comment section is a "huge source of strength and a very valuable asset".... a new Facebook commu…

the Instagram experience, with its constant flow of images and text boxes, presented an alternative story geometry that demanded from me new things. Shorter stories... a deeper consideration of photographs and the rich, nuanced ways that words and pictures work together. ... a powerful, unexpected, and mostly underutilized storytelling tool...…

We'll probably never get a true "dislike" button on Facebook, but the social network just started to roll out the closest thing we've seen yet. Reactions, a new feature for Facebook's ubiquitous Like button that allows you to respond to posts with emoji...: "like," followed by "love," "haha," "yay," "wow," "sad" and "anger." - Facebook React…

"Why don't we just build our community on Facebook?" Some thoughts after a month playing with Knowledge Hub

I spoke to seven news organizations - Recode, The Verge, Reuters, Mic, Popular Science, The Week, and USA Today's FTW - about their decision to suspend comments, the results of that change, and how they manage reader engagement now... Here's how they're all using social media to encourage reader discussion. - What happened after 7 news site…

What does the rise of digital distributors mean for the Open Web?... is there a point at which distributors create enough value for publishers to stop having their own websites? If distributors are capturing market share because of a superior user experience, is there a future technology that could disrupt them? And the ultimate question: who will…

Social and mobile have fundamentally altered attention. Platforms for self-expression and communication are the largest and most important media companies of the millennial age, dominating share of attention and engagement for young people. And the behavior of the young is predictive of the future. - May I Have Your Attention, Please? — 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…

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.…

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 rich, diverse, free web that I loved - and spent years in an Iranian jail for - is dying.Why is nobody stopping it?... The hyperlink was my currency six years ago... represented the open, interconnected spirit of the world wide web ... a way to abandon centralization ... and replace them with something more distributed, a system of nodes an…

The reasons are simple but powerful: you can’t control the communication. Despite it being a communication channel/social network (emphasis on network)/community (very debatable), it points into the other direction: filtering information, needing to pay for content to be seen, very distracting by other things like games, Ads (which used to be cont…

I've broken down all of the major algorithm changes that have occurred over the past 2 years... - The Ultimate Guide to Facebook News Feed Changes... and How They Impact YOU!

"...after this Spring’s most recent NewsFeed algorithm updates is that Facebook Pages—the ones used by businesses—are generating appalling user engagement rates... work-arounds ... mostly involve investing even more resources into Facebook ... more money devoted to advertising to fans brands have already paid to acquire in the first place." …

the social network will share analytics, and Instant Articles is compatible with audience measurement and attribution tools... won't receive preferential treatment from Facebook's News Feed sorting algorithm... Facebook will parse HTML and RSS to display articles with fonts, layouts, and formats ... also providing vivid media options like embe…

"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."

"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...

Good overview of the year+ - long debate about comments, trolls & social media, "from the baby-and-the-bathwater dept ... This sudden disdain for traditional comments raises the question: is Facebook somehow immune to stupid comments? Is forcing all news conversation on to Facebook's terms really an improvement in meaningful dialogue?... It's lik…

"we’re collecting all the Facebook algorithm factors, updates, and changes that we can find and placing them here in this post for easy reference." - Inside the Facebook News Feed: A List of Algorithm Factors

"Starting in January, in another blow to organic reach, users will see fewer posts that are solely focused on sales or sweepstakes or reuse ad copy.... hundreds of thousands of people said they wanted to see more stories from friends and Pages they care about, and less promotional content.” Well, duh. Who actually WANTS to see promo junk? Be use…