Overview: Social Media Strategy

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.

Facebook says it’s not worried about the level of sharing from everyday users ... concerns that people are starting to use Facebook more like they use Twitter — passively consuming content instead of creating new material... a report from The Information said there has been a 20 percent decline in “original” content from users in the past year.

Study shows political discussions are ruining Facebook and friendships... users who try to talk about politics on Facebook are often surprised by the political opinions of their acquaintances... a diverse set of opinions among a user's friends makes everyone want to speak up less...Facebook has a low threshold for “friending” ... can bridge togeth…

As we learn about the ways people use the news, what features might invite their trust and loyalty?... 32 senior strategists, designers, and developers... created prototype tools to surface the Trust Project indicators of quality, a set of fundamental journalistic principles that align with today’s news users wants and needs.

But what we are building with artificial reality is an internet of experiences... although every one of these environments was fake, the experiences I had in them were genuine... you gain authentic experiences, as authentic as in real life. People remember VR experiences not as a memory of something they saw but as something that happened to them.…

Technology is superior when humanity is woven into its DNA. I’m newly fond of saying, “Everyone is working on Artificial Intelligence, what about just, Intelligence?” Jelly sprung from the question, “What would search look like if it were created today?” We knew mobility and good old, human experience would be defining factors.... Enter your quest…

Facebook introduced new APIs for messaging through Facebook Messenger. ... bots are legitimately cool and promise to revolutionize how we interact with services. And it’s a piece of cake to get one up and running.

Video will not save your media business. Nor will bots, newsletters, a “morning briefing” app, a “lean back” iPad experience, Slack integration, a Snapchat channel, or a great partnership with Twitter. All of these things together might help, but even then, you will not be saved by the magical New Thing that everyone else in the media community is…

Very few ... are capable of regularly creating compelling videos ... as social platforms look to saturate their feeds with video... they’re essentially competing for the same limited set of good videos. So those who create the ​quality​ stuff can demand payment. In recent weeks, those payments have begun flowing. For Facebook... people are simpl…

thinking of videos as pieces that can stand on their own, not “the way to slightly better monetize an article page"... There’s usually no reason to watch an interview. It’s better in text or as a podcast.... the Vox team works like independent YouTubers.” For any given video, a single person is responsible for the entire production process, from …

gadget “blog,” Circuit Breaker, that will live primarily as a Facebook page, with posts appearing in the Instant Articles format... the best of old-school blogging together with a sophisticated, aggressive modern platform distribution strategy... It’s not (yet) possible to be an Instant Articles publisher if you don’t have a web source from which…

The potential – or, sadly more accurately, theoretical – political power of social media is to provide an important public forum in which those of diverse opinions can freely interact, rather than living in political enclaves inhabited only by those who reinforce what everyone already believes. The truth is that those entrenched political division…

redefine the opinion poll, comments sections, and metrics around social conversations, all at once... the site presents various issues across the categories of culture, politics, entertainment, and sports that have been generating online debate and offers visitors two opposing hashtags to vote for on the site or share on Twitter for a 48-hour peri…

“In five years time, I want News U.K. — The Sun and The Times — to be as well known for its video content as for its newspapers” ... 70 percent of The Sun’s articles have some video component... a main driver for the video verticals is to appeal to advertisers and brands who want to sponsor videos... It will continue posting several Live videos a…

Digital media companies are caught in the "crap trap," mass-producing trashy clickbait so they can claim huge audiences and often higher valuations... This era is getting flushed away... A content revolution is picking up speed, promising a profitable future for companies that can lock down loyal audiences, especially those built around higher-qua…

What Twitter has always been good at is allowing people to jump into any relevant conversation they want. Users can share thoughts and funny videos, but also have others engage with it in a public environment. This cocktail party aspect is where Twitter shines. Now it looks like the “cocktail party of the internet” might also be becoming the high …

What happened when I was invited to “do a Rápido” at the IABC’s conference in Rotterdam earlier this week.

Publications are hiring a point person to coordinate with new platforms like Facebook Instant Articles and Snapchat Discover... product changes of platforms happen on a daily basis. Just to track those changes and newly emerging platforms is a full-time job in itself

Last spring, the Financial Times altered its former metered access model and introduced paid trials, letting users pay £1 ($1.42) for a month’s access to content. At the same time, the newspaper also changed its policies toward social platforms and began making more content free to people coming to its site from Google, Facebook and Twitter. It la…

At The Guardian’s Media Summit in London, those publishers and others discussed what’s working for them with their platform strategies, and how sustainable off-site publishing is likely to be for media companies in the long term... Cosmo’s Snapchat Discover editions get 76 percent completion rates... 56 percent ... coming back to us five days …

BART started talking back. The tweets weren't bland or automatically generated. They were super real, and sometimes super dark... a tactical move to both acknowledge the deplorable state of San Francisco's underfunded subway system and prove to residents that their government was aware of the issue and doing everything in its power to fix it.... T…

SOMETHING REALLY DRAMATIC is happening to our media landscape, the public sphere, and our journalism ... without the level of public examination and debate it deserves. news publishers have lost control over distribution... increase in power of social media companies... a far greater concentration of power ... Networks favor economies of scale,…

Comments on our own content create real community and offer vital feedback to content creators and consumers both. And thus, we should fight for them to be better. Comments are not just a nice-to-have but a core part of a media site’s mission... Lots of broken comment systems are designed for a platonic ideal of how people ought to behave.... Can …

Civil Comments, a commenting platform ... aims to produce respectful dialogue in comment sections through a system that crowdsources comment moderation... Commenters are shown two random comments from elsewhere on the site, and must rate the comments’ quality and civility and determine whether they include harassment, abuse, or personal attacks. T…

As our online behavior becomes more complex, I’ve found the term “online community” to be an inadequate and limiting way to describe the pockets of activity that I was seeing. I started playing around with different frameworks ... decided to concentrate on the two elements that were consistently the most useful: Engagement Length and Intimacy Leve…

Snapchat on Thursday launched a new political campaign show on its “Discover” page... ‘Good Luck America’ is geared toward young viewers

Here are three ways to step your game up right now.

Email, for all the claims of it being dead, is critical for many publishers as a distribution (and marketing) channel they continue to control... Email newsletters have become an important part of publishers’ audience development strategies as a way to deepen their relationship with readers by providing an antidote to the endless stream of news in…

if all content is ranked together and swift approval is the primary metric (whether that be views, reads, or recommends), the platform will become dominated by generic bullshit. Aspirational pap is just Medium’s version of the cat meme... Publications aren’t communities. Tags aren’t communities. They are content ownership vehicles and search tools…

the way Snapchat works is much closer to how we communicate face to face than any other social network... So now that you know everything there is to know about the history of the platform, let’s get down to the most important part: how the fuck do you use this thing? ... Below are some handy guides I have put together...