Overview: Content Creation & Marketing

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…

Conventional marketing techniques teach us to frame customers by attributes... ultimately create products and entire categories too focused on what companies want to sell, rather than on what customers actually need... Customers rarely make buying decisions around what the “average” customer in their category may do—but they often buy things becau…

When people ask me how to build an audience, what they really want to know is, how do they get an audience to just come to them. You don’t. No audience just magically appears.... write up an entire profile of who your ideal customers/readers/viewers are ... go find them ... get your content in front of them

As young people flock to Snapchat, news outlets are trying to showcase news on the platform both as live stories and in Discover, where nearly 20 outlets... publish unique content exclusive to Snapchat.... set to launch a redesign of its Discover section to try and boost the number of users who use Discover... While Snapchat’s core function is a m…

Vox Sentences, the explainer site's bullet-pointed digest of the day's most important headlines, has seen huge gains... prompted Vox to create a position for its first-ever email editor... launch additional newsletters that will bring the site's explainer content on a variety of subjects to readers' inboxes... Vox adopts a distributed approach to …

Two-thirds of Facebook users (66%) get news on the site, nearly six-in-ten Twitter users (59%)... seven-in-ten Reddit users ... Tumblr 31% for the other five social networking sites about one-fifth or less ... Facebook ... reaching 67% of U.S. adults. The two-thirds of Facebook users who get news there, then, amount to 44% of the general populati…

The heart of differentiation therefore is your company’s ability to develop and promote distinctive products, services, and branded experiences on a consistent basis.  It’s not the output that sets you apart, but the way that everything you do supports the product and gives it context... set apart your company as a whole, instead of staking your f…

This isn’t the first time I’ve covered the impact of social media on news; technologies like augmented reality; and the impact of both on society. It is the first time these Top3ics have meshed so perfectly in one month.

“Trump leveraged a perfect storm... social media (big following), brand (celebrity figure), creativity (pithy tweets), speed/timeliness (dominating news cycles)"... Combining modern-day fame and an age-old demagogy, he bypassed the ossified gatekeepers and appealed directly to voters through a constant Twitter stream that seemed interrupted only b…

A year ago today, Facebook introduced Instant Articles... people are 20 percent more likely to read Instant Articles, which are accompanied by a lighting bolt icon in the feed, and 30 percent more likely to share them with friends...70 percent less likely to bounce... 30 percent more likely to share ...tests with some publishers where we help them…

Why not take some inspiration from the best headlines of the best headline writers? The blueprints exist to get your tweets, emails, updates, and articles clicked.

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…

by using social media curation, news organisations can remove the need for readers to look elsewhere, by automatically pulling in relevant social content from around the internet onto their websites... produce a quick breaking-news social stream related to a subject, or social content specifically focused to highlight the ideas and arguments withi…

I was taking work as it came in. Hustling, squabbling over rates, and trying to collect on long past-due invoices. I can feel the knots in my stomach to this day.I had no platform. My personal blog had 30 email subscribers, mostly composed of family and friends. I was burned out. My muchness was gone. I needed to get it back.