Overview: Content Creation & Marketing

I don’t post on my website anymore, at least not with the goal of getting any traction. Instead, I post almost entirely on Medium... the success I’ve see on Medium is in direct correlation to my commitment to sharing my voice .. create and share, not for the sake of getting anything in return, but do so because you are choosing to be generous…

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…

I’ve created an email newsletter that features one fantastic piece of journalism each day....So far 3,000+ awesome people are subscribed to the newsletter and the daily emails average open rates around 50% (that’s double the industry average)... What I really want to build is a community for people to find, share, and discuss great, in-depth jo…

Breaking Smart is a technology analysis site... binge-worthy collection of essays approximately once every 2 years. Season 1, comprising 20 essays...written by Venkatesh Rao and illustrated by Grace Witherell...an in-depth exploration of Marc Andreessen’s observation that “software is eating the world... subscribe to our email list, featuring a…

Instead of a link to the signup page of our daily email — where you’d have to enter your information, wait to get a confirmation email, then click a link inside it — you get a supersimple one-click interface.

Publishers may be able to get more value out of their tweets thanks to a new design change on Twitter... on the platform’s iOS or Android apps... stories will get some extra room, complete with lead art and the first few words of a story... part of the company’s plans for bringing more media into your home feed. - Twitter’s new article prev…

TheSkimm is a roundup of daily news aimed at busy professional women in the tone of your “smart friend”... 1.5 million subscribers, ... celebrity fans ... has attracted five presidential candidates to act as guest curators... 40 percent open rate... high engagement and a focused audience. One of the secrets of its growth: a referral program tha…

"@NASA is the 104th most popular Twitter account in the world... and 3.5 million on Instagram. The Department of the Interior, whose stunning wildlife and nature pictures make it the only government agency with cool visual content to rival NASA’s, has just 654,000 ... John Yembrick and Jason Townsend are veterans of other government agencies...…

So I’ve been building a little calculator that is a bit more user friendly than my Google spreadsheet. - Calculating the production of high-quality content - GatherContent: A blog about content strategy and development

"How the Islamic State is leaving tech companies torn between free speech and security is a labyrinthine topic... Today’s 8,000-word-plus story on the subject, part of The Washington Post’s “Confronting the Caliphate” series, comes with the background knowledge and context right in the story itself... Knowledge Map, appears as highlighted links…

The last couple of years has seen a revival of the Art of the eNewsletter. I have found myself paying much more attention to enewsletters in my Inbox... than to the marketing junk gushing from social media

Great in-depth look at an email marketing success story. Resonating point: "Don't assume you know who your customers are until they've had a chance to show you." - What Startups Can Learn from Watsi’s Wildly Successful Email Campaign - First Round Review

The secret to improvement is to realize that all successful presentations have 3 components, the relative proportion of which differs according to what the presentation's goal is. - 3 Components All Successful Presentations Have | Andras Baneth | LinkedIn

Great example of how to cover a social media trending topic via video: "A video featuring a beauty blogger with adult acne has been watched almost seven million times.... shows some of the comments that Em Ford received online after posting images of her face with and without make-up... she wanted to point out the "unrealistic expectations" soc…

Quite enjoyed helping put together a press campaign for the ECC-Net, one of the Commission’s under-appreciated projects. 

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…

The real story might have been that data played a more important role than social media... reports that smart campaigns used data intelligently to target the right voters with the right messages... This combination of data and social media, with more traditional campaigning techniques will surely develop still further in the next few years. …

"the rise of suggested content tools has shifted the balance between conversation and link-sharing, and in so doing has diminished the value of the links that get shared... a tweeted link no longer reflects any curation or judgment on their part; it may well be something that was found for them rather than by them. Nor is it a sign that they’ve…

We are thinking about how to optimize our content from its very conception... we obviously want to grow traffic... The second prong of the strategy is to change how we produce and distribute our content and optimize it for reach... optimizing some of our content for different distribution platforms, integrating visual and interactive content fr…

Twitter’s editorial team (made of real, live humans) will define the big stories of the day, and will package tweets, images, and video to explain what’s going on. Those packages will be the primary unit of Twitter, and will be embeddable all over the Internet.... With this change, Twitter doesn’t have to look like an endlessly flowing, context…

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!

Clever. To build an app, Buzzfeed first built an enewsletter and tested that: "Designing and building an email newsletter takes a lot of work. But compared with launching a native app, a newsletter requires a much smaller investment of time and technology. As a lower-stakes product, we could launch it much more quickly than we could an app and …

While it most obviously appears to carry on in the tradition of blogs, it always seemed to me as something more nostalgic ...  an attempt to modernize early internet communities ... It is trickier to form a community like that on Medium now. Interface elements do not encourage discovery... We will know Medium is on to something when there ar…

"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…

Got some time to kill and want to read a meandering essay by an algorithm with a short attention span? Tell us how many minutes you want to spend reading and a starting topic, and we'll whip something up.

"The Influencer Identification Worksheet is a blogger outreach brainstorming tool [to] build a list of bloggers." - A 4-Step Blogger Outreach Tool for Identifying Influencers | Convince and Convert: Social Media Strategy and Content Marketing Strategy

If the market can express more directly which content is in high demand, more of that content will be created. But there is missing a simple and convenient way for the consumer to value the everyday content they consume

arranging for others to tout your expertise before you make your case can increase the likelihood of people paying attention and acting on your advice... Despite the experience deficit, the candidate who had scored highly on the leadership potential test was rated as more likely to be a successful hire, even though they were objectively much le…

If your enewsletter is basically an RSS feed from your site's newsroom, you might want to think again. At the very least, we always advocate including an email-only editorial in enewsletters published every week or less frequently. "Publishers are ... already treating email newsletters ... as designed to be read entirely in email without reader…

"A successful happening online is more than just a scheduled live stream, live blog, live chat, launch or other moment on the web. While happenings are typically short (60 seconds to 60 minutes), their stories can start long beforetime, which means they arc in realtime and resonate aftertime. So the lifespan of a happening can unfold over weeks, m…