Overview: Content Creation & Marketing

"Facebook is ... aiming to be the Internet equivalent of a broadband provider — providing the means by which all media is published and accessed. Here’s what brands and publishers need to know ... - Facebook urging publishers to post their articles and videos directly to Facebook... - For publishers that use Facebook for their comments sections,…

"the Internet has dismantled newspaper’s geographic monopoly & business model ... & also upended the core assumptions underlying the actual journalism ... BuzzFeed as an organization has been figuring out what works online for over eight years now, and while “The Dress” may have been unusual in its scale, its existence was no accident... BuzzFee…

A typically good piece of data journalism from Guardian's Datablog: "The number of people employed on zero-hours contracts reached 697,000 in the fourth quarter of 2014. See the characteristics of people employed on zero-hours contracts in four charts " - Zero-hours contracts in four charts | News | The Guardian

Good case study, concluding with observations on the role of journalists which also apply to government communicators: "An engaged journalist's role in the 21st century is not only to inform but to bring readers directly into the conversation through... real-time coverage, alternative story forms, crowdsourcing, beat blogging, user-generated co…

"This interactive project lets you step into the shoes of the president of Azerbaijan and assess how the decisions you make influence your popularity in the country" - President for a day, via https://www.journalism.co.uk/news/online-storytelling-ideas-from-hackastory-hackathon/s2/a564037

Good overview of Circa's approach: "A new model for online journalism is emerging, focusing on the atomization of news stories into “bite-sized chunks” of information aimed at mobile audiences."

"many brands even ignore the importance of curation in their streams and instead continually talk about themselves.... Content Curation is the act of discovering, aggregating and posting online content that was produced by others... typically focused on a specific topic or small number of topics that are considered relevant to the audience you’re…

"Scheduling Technology Leaves Low-Income Parents With Hours of Chaos" Within 24 hours of this article's publication, Starbucks changed their scheduling policy. - Working Anything but 9 to 5 - NYTimes.com

"Uprising: Winner of the 2013 AAAS Kavli award for online science journalism." - The Environmental Scandal That's Happening Right Beneath Your Feet - The Matter Archive - Medium

Came up with a winning communication strategy to promote worthy-but-heavy pdf reports from the European Commission.

"Our hope with adaptive content is to tailor content to a customer’s experience, behavior, and desires... a culmination of ... experience maps, storyboarding, empathy maps — and what we’ve been saying for so long about creating an experience... ... we all believe that our experiences should be more interactive. Why? Smartphones." - 16 Stats That…

"Here is the science around storytelling and how we can use it to make better decisions every day:"

"An image is the gateway to your emotional memory... And on the visual web an image is the gateway to accessing almost all content and information... we are adapting to a different kind of a web, one that will be increasingly visual... [but] the only available methods to surface and categorize photos are beyond basic; we need something intuitive…

How much more could Google News be? See "... a presentation that a German designer came up with that involved a wholesale redesign and re-thinking of what Google News is and does." Lots of good stuff here. Particularly like how 'smart personalisation' is used to help penetrate the filter bubble: "automatically suggest related stories on a news t…

"Hughes will be establishing a health and science desk that will consist of approximately five reporters, according to an email from BuzzFeed. A science staff of that size will catapult BuzzFeed News into the top tier of science news sites by sheer size alone. It won't have the largest staff of science reporters, but it will be among the largest. …

"So, don't worry TOO much about your editorial calendar. The key is posting consistently (which is definitely helped by actually using one). Don't be a slave to it. If you have a great idea — run with it, and worry about cleaning up your calendar later." This is common sense, of course, but something to keep in mind when working on projects, whic…

"blogging is so hyped as a panacea, you'd think that simply adding a blog to your site would also help you find the perfect spouse, cure the common cold, and even turn lead into gold. ... you should always question anything that's touted as the right answer for everyone (and everything). So should you blog?... let's look at a few examples of w…

" the basic news story was invented in a different time –when story telling was limited by platform — and it has inherent limitations that you can overcome when trying to tell stories digitally." Don't just assume that what you should be doing is creating 'articles'. Some really useful tricks to free your mind when developing a content strategy h…

"we are kicking off the relaunch of The Lede with a three-part series on content strategy... we begin with an element of content strategy that often gets overlooked … but that is crucial to understanding your audience intimately enough to influence it." Hint: it's AUDIENCE. And it's a podcast, so grab it and give it a listen tomorrow morning on y…

"Marketers and PR professionals are hard-wired to put the product/company first. Journalists put the consumer first.... journalists should be in the box seat when it comes to running a newsroom - be it for the media or a brand." plus 5 or 6 more reasons, spelt out here - Why a journalist should run your brand newsroom | LinkedIn

While possibly a bit naive regarding Facebook's motivation for crucifying organic reach, some good points here: "- Talking doesn’t equal connecting: It seems that many brands take their audience for granted. Liking a page doesn’t always imply interest. ... - Paid reach won’t substitute for great storytelling: While paid reach might get more visib…

These figures need to be compared with other research shows that people seem happy to consume long articles on their mobiles. "Ad Age looked at ... Tumblr, WordPress, Blogger to see how their traffic has changed over the last year and what effect [mobile] has had on the time people spend with each service...." On the one hand we read about the …

"there is a hierarchy of information consumers are looking for.... consumers seem much less concerned with how they receive it than with whether the content itself is well conceived, well executed, useful and honest." - Survey: What Types of Content Consumers Do Want From Brands | FleishmanHillard

"Could “all you need to know” be the most insidious, reductive, and lame story formula currently conquering our reading life? Everywhere you turn there’s another purported ne plus ultra explainer purporting to tell us “absolutely everything we could possibly need to know” about some current event, some curiosity of history, some deep mystery of li…

"blogs are ... just one specific kind of publishing format, with posts that appear in reverse chronological order.... this is a little like saying that a sonnet is just a specific way of ordering text, featuring iambic pentameter and an offset rhyming scheme. Obviously not every blog post is a poem, but there is something inherent in the practice …

As if blogs were just a question of conversational tone and reverse-chronology ... "We’re going to continue to provide bloggy content with a more conversational tone ... We’re just not going to do them as much in standard reverse-chronological blogs.” " - ‘Almost half’ of the NYT’s blogs will close or merge | Poynter.

@baekdal explores "a complete and total blind spot in the newspaper industry ... based on a business model that used to work in the old days of media, but was as a result of scarcity." Newspapers, he argues, are "the supermarket of news ... [but] upermarkets only work when visiting the individual brands is too hard to do... But on the internet, e…

Particularly like reason 1: "1. Content curation provides a variety of perspectives. Offering diverse points of view enhances your credibility. This is particularly important on social media platforms where participants get annoyed with businesses that just shout me, me, me. " Remind you of anyone you know? - The Top 10 Reasons You Need Content…

"The empowered consumer will bypass or ignore communications that aren’t relevant and don’t add value ... brands that want to be invited into the conversation will have to say something that’s worthy of their audience’s time and attention... there are some guiding principles behind great brand storytelling. Call them the 10 Commandments of Conten…

"a team of 13 social-media and advertising specialists up to 45 days to plan, create, approve, and publish a corporate social-media post." Which did f*all online. It's when I see tweets like that - 45 days, 2 Faves, no RTs - that I'm thankful I'm not 'communicating' cars, 'engaging' consumers on soap powder or even tweeting about cheese. - Huge …