Overview: Content Creation & Marketing

Two convergent trends are making populism a potent negative force. First, democracies have morphed into unrepresentative plutocracies that lead growing numbers of people to feel shut out and voiceless... Media ... business model is now based on social media and clicks, not facts. Clicks depend on theatrical performance, stunts, celebrity, ent…

Segregated social universes, an industry moving from red states to the coasts, and mass media’s revenue decline: The disconnect between two realities shows no sign of abating... American political discourse in 2016 seemed to be running on two self-contained, never-overlapping sets of information... today’s media ecosystem encourage that separatio…

This principle of science writing... teaches the writer to lead the reader, step by step, from knowing nothing about a subject to understanding enough to grow enchanted with its broader significance.... Imagine science writing as an upside-down pyramid. Start at the bottom with the one fact a reader must know before he can learn any more. The sec…

I finally vlogged my first event. Some first impressions.

One of the vlogs I did at the EU Week of Regions & Cities with the winners of the #EUinmyRegion blogging competition I ran for the EC. All vlogs can be found in this Moment.

This updates both my earlier Taming the Firehose and Where is social media taking you in 2016? posts, and better aligns my productivity process with my personal content strategy.

A content marketing framework... allows you to develop a process that can be duplicated... repeatable framework for any type of content to be better utilized... incorporate goal setting at the beginning... an understanding from goal setting to how you’re going to put that into a strategy ... Once you publish ... get feedback and optimize the conte…

two products, Springboard and Time Inc. Connect to help editors source content from contributors, some for traditional editorial content and some for native or branded content... a way for editors to create more content around specific topics or events rather than just getting content on the cheap... gathering ... people with some degree of social…

over 30 news organizations ... and tech companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to share best practices on how to verify true news stories and stop the spread of fake ones.

“a monopoly of content distribution that will be mainly driven by user-generated content, and by professional content by commercially interested players.... pretty traumatic scenario of information or propaganda. It will be very painful for democracies.”

with newsrooms reeling... a weakening of the stable platforms threatens to cause general informational impoverishment, a degradation of the entire information ecosystem. Adding to the worry, people today are exposed to news ... through a single platform—mainly social networks, which tend toward a clustering of like-minded individuals. Together,…

I’m not saying that these are the only principles that work on Twitter. But I think they’ve worked for me, and for my purposes.

Had a great time setting up and running a blogging competition for the EU Commission’s Regional Policy department. It’s not over yet, though: the three winners announced today are coming to Brussels this October as fully accredited journalists to European Week of Regions and Cities. 

This new tool shows users what Facebook determines are their interests... has provided a glance into the deep flaws of Facebook’s interest targeting. Advertisers should be concerned about where their dollars are going... Here are the main flaws I came across:... I would just recommend approaching targeting differently:

as news outlets tailor their content to addictive platforms to pump up traffic, the distinction between consuming journalism and being wedded to “emails, constant notifications, and social media” is increasingly meaningless... if we are what and how we read, then our thinking will mirror the scattered and shallow tendencies of Web browsing.... …

a research paper ... found depressing proof that the web is fuelling segregation.... matched the attitudes of those who did and did not have broadband with data on partisan hostility... Greater use of the web ensured that an admirer of Jon Stewart would think that conservatives were not just mistaken but stupid, or a viewer of Fox News would wor…

Content creators everywhere ... are all suffering from the results of peak content... the information age is arriving at its natural conclusion and we’re all drowning in it... most content under-performing, it’s also getting harder for people who produce really good content to get attention. Engagement... is steadily dropping ... what happens to e…

image... apparently shows the spread of radiation from the Fukushima nuclear accident... being shared widely ... despite the fact that it... shows the wave height of the tsunami... you might want to doublecheck before hitting Share... here’s how

So for the sake of simplicity we can break up content marketing into 3 types.A: Traffic Generation Content — Tempt people to click through to your website, blog or landing page and share.B: Engagement Content- The strategic use of educational, informative, entertaining and inspiring content that builds credibility, trust and linkingC: Conversion C…

For the purposes of this post, let’s narrow landing pages down to those connected to content marketing or email marketing campaigns, and meant to generate conversions, bearing in mind those conversions may not necessarily be revenue-generating sales.

You may not care about social media now, but if you read a newspaper, listen to the radio or watch TV, then it’s shaping your world already... The real game is hardening your own support in ways dramatic enough to be picked up by the mass media ... the easiest way of doing that is to pick a rollicking fight... Lacking an established political mac…

some advice on how to best approach analytics in the newsroom, helping journalists improve the quality of their content, and a build larger, more engaged readership. Here are five key takeaways

How can you stand out among the other 95 million photos posted each day? How can non-designers and amateur photographers create beautiful content for Instagram?These are all questions we’d love to help you answer in this guide.

Brexit, as experienced by a British-Australian comms guy in Brussels.

News Feed Changes Mean Brands Should Invest in Facebook People More Than Pages... The News Feed algorithm is a lagging indicator, not a leading one. It now properly reflects what study after study shows the public truly values: relationships... No organization will ever be on the same footing as peers... Invest in Facebook people, more so than p…

“Four years later, this Tweet probably best illustrates, in a single image, the mistaken assumption underlying the failed UK Remain campaign…” - a post-Brexit update of my January 2012 post on BlogActiv, over on Medium.

Allen tucked favorable mentions of prominent “Playbook” sponsors into his editorial offerings... a State Department official essentially ghost-wrote an item for “Playbook.”The skinny: Mike Allen ran a press-release mill for vested interests in Washington... a weekly sponsorship for the newsletter falls somewhere between $50,000 and $60,000... Ev…

If you handle the marketing for your company, you will find that the below resources are either excellent starting points or perfect as-is solutions

Post’s website and mobile apps are a pleasure to use; the apps have been designed to serve different audiences depending on whether they are traditional Post readers or are instead interested in a more viral product offered at a lower price and that omits local news.... Bandito allows editors to publish articles with up to five different headlines…