Overview: Communications Strategy

"Building kickass content strategies focused on appealing to users isn’t difficult, though, and will always yield better results and not succumb to one of Google’s future algorithm updates. "

"Do You Need a Separate Mobile Content Marketing Strategy?"

3 cheers for less warm fuzziness! "In 2014, we need to move away from measuring our content marketing with soft engagement metrics such as ‘retweets’, ‘shares’, ‘linkbacks’ and ‘Likes’, and start having adult conversations about ROI. ... whilst engagement may make your marketing team feel warm and fuzzy inside, it counts for nought if your conte…

" Content marketing is really about providing valuable information or content to current and potential customers for the purpose of building trust, branding, awareness, and positive sentiment. A successful content marketing campaign establishes you as an expert in your field, and that sets the groundwork for a long-term business relationship."

"My favorite part ... is that I’m usually wrong" Refreshing!

Basically sums up why I want a Hub, not just a stream, for my virtual presence: "If I had my way, Facebook would have a hard and fast expiration date for posts. I generally don’t want most of what I say hanging around longer than I’d keep eggs in the fridge. Sure, some links and videos are worth revisiting—but does anyone really care that I was t…

Some key points from "The Benefits of Quality Content and Genuine Social Engagement ... to create great, sharable, engaging content and become an active participant on social platforms: - Quality content is what your clients want to read, not what you want to tell them.... - Content that gets highly shared is content with heart. Real stories, re…

A good holiday break longread: "As people talk back to organizations, organizations find they have trouble telling their story and listening to their customers at the same time. The forces of change affecting content can test the conventional responsibilities of marketing and IT and customer service. "

The rapid evolution in newsmedia provides a lot of ideas for better content strategies in a less organisational, more networked society. One such concept is ideas-based, or fluid, beats for journalism: "... a way for reporters to be human-centric rather than newsroom- or bureaucracy-centric", according to the latest piece in Niemanlab's Journalis…

How nice to see the Brussels Bubble meme continue to spread ... ;) "In a damning indictment of efforts in Brussels to promote stronger public attachment to the EU through the European Year of Citizens 2013, Emily O’Reilly said the campaign was “not succeeding”. ... the new office holders needed to be courageous enough to address the union’s demo…

"I think companies such as Asana (which I love) will be the future of business consultancy. They will substitute the big consultancies leveraging big data, just like Coursera will displace traditional course providers by leveraging information on how people use training and using this information to design more effective training. Business consult…

"The idea of the stream has become so dominant that it is easy to think it is the natural state of things in a networked media environment. "Of course we have the stream: this is the Internet after all." That's why it's so important to look back at 2009 (just 2009!) and remember that the stream is a creation of particular companies and thinkers. Y…

One of the reasons I created this Tumblr was to use it as a 'first draft’ of a Content Hub (see post), an idea which crystallised after reading Sloan’s original content strategy piece on Stock and Flow.The Hub is basically my way of saying that there’s more to life than the Stream. Unsurprisingly, Alexis Madrigal’s piece in the Atlantic caugh…

Data-driven storytelling, sharable journalism in a British skunkworks. What's not to like? From NiemanLab: "Data-driven storytelling and web-native, sharable journalism are two of the biggest trends in media at the moment. If you locked the two together in a room, Ampp3d might walk out the door ... As a news site, Ampp3d keeps its output fairly …

Most stuff on my TumblrHub tagged 'content strategy' are also tagged 'content marketing', so I've been pondering the distinction for a while. Quite like this take: "Content strategy is a field of practice useful for content as marketing and content as a product or service. In other words, the practice is distinct from the purpose."

Exactly 11 years (give or take a month) after we figured out how thematic architectures on EUROPA could support online conversations with what we called the 'interested general public', the EC rediscovers it all over again: "This would give us the opportunity to reach interested audiences, and create a space for real engagement. It also means shi…

"Changes in Google’s search algorithms have twice hammered the young company in recent years, leaving its brands ... hemorrhaging traffic." Variety writes like this is a bad thing? Thank Google for rewarding quality.

This video is aimed at developers interested in combining machine translation, automatic semantic analysis, human curation, faceted and federated search, and social media to create a machine-assisted multilingual longform content curation engine.

Gratifyingly, the preview of the Hashtag Europe wireframes seemed to do the job, and allow people to understand just what this tool could do...

" Engaging employees internally has a direct impact on how the company is perceived externally. While the term employee engagement (or any of its variations) don't appear in the report, it's clear that combining social media with good management practices produces more engaged employees who have a direct impact on how the outside world views the o…

Pour le Journée Européenne du blogging multilingue, a video of one minute (waltz) length sur the bloggingportal.eu reboot, avec une "first look" à les wireframes et pas un mot dans mon accent francais de vache espagnol.

"The idea here is that when you use storytelling tricks to get your point across, people are going to be more responsive. This is true in everything from PowerPoint conversations to business deals. "

"Basically, your business blog should provide prospective customers another tool to research your industry, company, products, and services without giving them a hard sell. "

"Concept search allows users to specify a concept and documents that describe that concept to be returned as the search results. It is a technique to identify potentially relevant documents when a set of keywords are not known in advance. SearchBlox uses text clustering, which is a technology that analyzes a document collection and organizes the d…

"The rise of content marketing, despite well-publicised scepticism, continues — as illustrated by a new report ... - almost two out of five marketers (38%) still question whether content marketing can deliver measurable ROI. - 70% believe that content marketing helps drive sales leads more effectively. The metrics that are being used suggest a …

Another salvo in the "Content is (not) King" debate: "For every hour of writing a piece of content, they spend two to three hours working on the distribution of it - within their own channels and beyond. The frequency of publishing is reduced in order to spend more time on the distribution of it."

"Constellation's Connected Enterprise is the intimate innovation summit for senior business leaders successfully using disruptive technologies such as social business, cloud computing, mobile enterprise, big data and analytics, gamification, and unified communications/video to drive business value and transform business models."

Data from bloggingportal.eu, extracted by BrusselsBlogger, gives some idea of the dominance of English as a blogging language on EU policy.