Overview: Content Creation & Marketing

When you’re pitching a luxury product, one rule of thumb is to surround it with other luxury items. ... “A Gentleman’s Wager,” ... a fun, classy-looking short... none of it has the icky feel of a sales pitch.

Great Copy Solves a Problem. Focus on solving customer problems... If you don’t know what your clients worry about, pick up the phone... Your subject line and opening paragraph should tell the full story... newsletter bait to attract your subscribers toward your website ... A good CTA will help transform engaged subscribers into active customers..…

Watching Silicon Valley exercise news judgment has been like watching Walter Cronkite try to write code in Python... Four companies have created trustworthiness indicators for news websites: Facebook, Google, Twitter, and NewsGuard. Publishers have no way of learning their secret trust score from the Silicon Valley companies. NewsGuard’s journalis…

Much of modern economic theory is based around a simple idea: Human beings maximize utility... To an economist, utility simply means how much people want something... tend to assume that utility is good... But what if the things people desire don’t bring them happiness?...People seem to reliably seek out a few things that make them unhappy... peop…

Scroll, scroll, scroll... it’s got a name: zombie scrolling syndrome... Consider parasites... some have the power of mind control. Or... zombification... the jewel wasp... grabs a cockroach twice her size... injecting nonlethal venom... dopamine... alters the roach’s behavior... cleaning itself instead of running for its life...zombifying parasite…

is that true?... first thing ... is click the link... most students don’t ... second ... see whether the article actually supports that summary... How? ... zero people are going to [fully read the article] ... too long ... [so] ... the Yeats Effect (“The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity”). The reckless p…

echo chambers and filter bubbles are slightly different... echo chambers could be a result of filtering or ... other processes, but filter bubbles have to be the result of algorithmic filtering...people main source of news roughly equal ... online and television... TV is more likely... people over 45. People under 45 are more likely to get their n…

the lean canvas... single-page template designed to distil the fundamental goals and objectives of a business, and offer a clear route to achieving them... to design a product around perceived market and consumer variables... In about 45 minutes ... journalists learned how to apply this framework to their news organisation’s editorial and business…

the next generation of blogs will be shaped around the habits and conventions of today’s internet... so much communication takes place backstage, in group chats and on Slack, I’d expect new blogs to step in the same ambiguous territory as newsletters ... not everyone is looking, but privacy is neither airtight nor expected...escape hatches from th…

for manipulating public opinion... automation and artificial intelligence “can quickly generate traffic and publicity much faster than people.”...If disinformation in 2016 was characterized by Macedonian spammers... Russian trolls... 2020 is shaping up to be the year communications pros for hire provide sophisticated online propaganda operations .…

The most successful audience team members have a complete understanding of how the organization works... interpret a treasure trove of data and analytics about what people are searching for, what stories they like, and what stories are missing that special something ...audience development was everyone’s job and no one’s job at the same time... Th…

as social media expands its cultural dominance, the people who can steer the online conversation will have an upper hand in whatever niche they occupy ... media, politics, business...the lessons they learned from performing on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok will stick... regardless of where they end up... 21st century ... business moguls, politici…

The key to Inbox Zero... “touch each email only once.”... only a well-designed underlying system can make such elegant action possible.... your annotated checklist for One-Touch Inbox Zero, in 5 EASY STEPS!...The main problem with how people use email is that they use it for everything.... Every other function is much more effectively handled by o…

In the US, radio began as a free-market free-for-all. More than five hundred radio stations sprang up in less than a decade to explore the possibilities... 40 percent were noncommercial... network of interlinked stations playing local and national content supported by local and national advertising, became dominant players...Soviet Union... ideolo…

does researchers’ presence on Twitter influence citations to their papers?... although the relationship between tweets and citations is poor, actively participating on Twitter is a powerful way of promoting and disseminating academic outputs... an author needs three times more followers to gain only one mention more... to be or not to be on Twitte…

More Americans have confidence in scientists, but there are political divides over the role of scientific experts in policy issues... six-in-ten Americans say scientists should play an active role in policy debates about scientific issues... but Americans are divided along party lines in terms of how they view the value and objectivity of scientis…

For those who have grown up with social media... childhood, an era that was fruitfully mysterious for the rest of us, is surprisingly accessible. ... this is certain to have some kind of profound effect on the development of identity... children and teen-agers have gained a level of control that they didn’t have before... Humans have always tried …

Quora has around 300 million active monthly users... The overall number of topics discussed on Quora comes to around 400,000...content relevancy on Quora is almost evergreen... be looked upon as an authority in your field... Before answering a question... When was it asked? recent questions are best ... How many answers ... Aim to be among the …

As long as you’re working on something meaningful, we could care less when you show it to us. Who knows? Maybe it’ll be better tomorrow... routine sets in and they start repeating themselves without saying anything new... You can publish seven articles a week, yet still be irrelevant... You can’t ... make the jump from good to great, by sticking t…

proposal ... for a U.S. government agency to regulate online speech... on all social media.... fails to make the case... the idea that a government agency would necessarily do better is naive... think about exactly who would appoint that agency’s leader, and to what political ends they might seek to put it...

we’ve grown wary of the so-called attention econom... But we also benefit from social media and hesitate to disengage from it completely... a loose collective of developers and techno-utopians ... the IndieWeb ... developing their own social-media platforms... preserve what’s good about social media while jettisoning what’s bad... Facebook and I…

It’s taken me over ten years to move from enthusiasm, through frustration into a Zen-like state where I no longer blog about EU comms. But when the Eurobloggers called, I had to answer ;)- my link in the #EU09vs19 blog chain …

"Most criticisms lodged against the content creators that chose to work with the platforms are made with the benefit of hindsight... the decision many publishers made to close down their comment sections should be considered one of the industry’s worst blunders.... editors looked down into their article comments sections and did not like what…

Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes laid out an argument for dismantling the social media behemoth... via antitrust legislation... a new age of innovation and competition... maybe not... competition  demands more data... engagement ... efforts to increase competition risk simply aggravating these problems.... We could simply choose not to have socia…

with influencer marketing en vogue and publishers hunting for ways to drive engagement on their properties, the hunt for famous, influential contributors is back on... eg Axios has two people... recruiting, managing subject matter experts to participate in Expert Voices... invite-only contributor network... Find influential people, bring them into…

Medium was never something that we would get to define. Instead, it’s turned out to be an endless thought experiment into what publishing on the internet could look like.

open-sourcing the tools we created to do Documenting Hate... writing a guide that will let any newsroom do crowd-powered data investigations... Documenting Hate came shortly after Election Day 2016, in response to a widely reported uptick in hate incidents... we decided to ask people across the country to tell us their stories ... organized a col…

The systems in the brain that light up when we access our beliefs are the same systems that help us understand stories... the same brain systems involved when people think about who they are and about the beliefs that are most important to them... the default mode network, a set of interconnected areas of the brain associated with identity and sel…

The web was designed to bring people together and make knowledge freely available. Everyone has a role to play to ensure the web serves humanity. By committing to the following principles, governments, companies and citizens around the world can help protect the open web as a public good and a basic right for everyone.

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