Overview: Communications Tactics

some advice on how to best approach analytics in the newsroom, helping journalists improve the quality of their content, and a build larger, more engaged readership. Here are five key takeaways

the first article in a series on “The Mobile Publisher,” a look at how publishers are tackling challenges in the shift to mobile, from design to content to monetization... People may spend most of their mobile screen time on apps, but the vast majority of that time is spent on just five apps. Meantime, publishers that haven’t invested in mobile a…

Even for brands associated with hard news…their top or second videos in terms of Facebook engagement numbers turned out to be animal videos... interest in video news does increase significantly when there is a big breaking news story. But the rest of the time? Online video news is less of a force than publishers might hope... 97.5 percent of time…

Slack, already an indispensable tool within newsrooms, is becoming a surprisingly effective community tool for publishers as well... quickly become a source of stories, with members providing inspiration or even direct contributions.

Brexit, as experienced by a British-Australian comms guy in Brussels.

Facebook Live videos will appear on many more News Feeds — regardless of whether users Like, Wow or Haha the content. Posts linking out of Facebook will need a lot more user interaction to get the extra eyeballs.

Executive leaders are involved more than ever before in using online communities to solve important business issues ... But budgets are not keeping up with demand, and measuring value isn't getting much help from platform vendors... The majority of organizations have now deployed some form of community platform to help workers, typically in the f…

Gawker built a tool that pulls in the top 10 comment threads from its network of sites and displays them at the end of its Facebook Instant Articles... [and] Accelerated Mobile Pages... It’s not possible to comment straight on the Instant Article; people who want to add to the discussion have to log in on Gawker’s own sites. Disqus supports Googl…

an organization dedicated to "ever closer union" has never faced a setback as profound as the looming departure from the UK, and it’s natural to wonder if this doesn’t mark the beginning of a larger unraveling.... Rather than a prediction or a hot take, here’s a way to think through the different alternatives.

thank you for raising the awareness of my half of the population on the extra challenges women face in business presentation contexts... co-created conferences may offer a partial solution... I may suggest ensuring Personal Profiles do not include photos or any gender information

“Four years later, this Tweet probably best illustrates, in a single image, the mistaken assumption underlying the failed UK Remain campaign…” - a post-Brexit update of my January 2012 post on BlogActiv, over on Medium.

TL;DR: My Osmo is awesome, but I need better audio kit.Don’t watch this if you expect to see award-winning journalism - this is just me doing my thinking in public, and I think I love my Osmo, even if I definitely need more kit to manage the audiovisual better in noisy places (and get a real journalist to ask intelligent questions):

Read the same documents our reporters gathered. Watch the video out-takes of an interview, or take a 360-degree virtual reality adventure. Test your knowledge about complex issues with a quiz. Sound off about issues, interacting through polls and emoticons or by leaving a comment. We’ll give you the tools and access to become involved, either in d…

Allen tucked favorable mentions of prominent “Playbook” sponsors into his editorial offerings... a State Department official essentially ghost-wrote an item for “Playbook.”The skinny: Mike Allen ran a press-release mill for vested interests in Washington... a weekly sponsorship for the newsletter falls somewhere between $50,000 and $60,000... Ev…

If you handle the marketing for your company, you will find that the below resources are either excellent starting points or perfect as-is solutions

How do you make analytics interesting and useful for a newsroom?... When the Missourian was able to integrate the new digital analytics platform Parse.ly into its analytics reporting, we saw an opportunity to make significant changes to the report going to the newsroom every week.

Post’s website and mobile apps are a pleasure to use; the apps have been designed to serve different audiences depending on whether they are traditional Post readers or are instead interested in a more viral product offered at a lower price and that omits local news.... Bandito allows editors to publish articles with up to five different headlines…

Some 63% of marketers plan to increase their native advertising budgets this year... The Times launched its "T Brand Studio".. in 2014... has created more than 100 campaigns for more than 50 brands.. generated around $35.7 million. Meanwhile, BuzzFeed, which only sells native ads, generated revenue of $100 million in 2014, while Media Week estima…

The Atlantic expects native campaigns to drive 70 percent of its ad revenue this year, up from 60 percent in 2015... the NYTimes’ branded content division, T Brand Studio, now includes 70 staffers and will “deliver more than $50 million in revenue this year,” up from an estimated $35 million in 2014

Distro lets anyone transform an HTML article into the format mandated by one of the various platforms.

includes translating political explainers as "part of our attempt to reach new readers who are interested in American politics — but perhaps don't speak English... "We were convinced that there is a need for translated articles, but we hadn't hit on the right formulation in terms of how to get a professionalized translation that's turned around qu…

what the Associated Press has learnt about the process of creating 360-degree video stories

websites that support Chrome push notifications can send out updates that look and feel like regular app updates even if the Chrome browser isn't currently active on an Android device.. it requires an HTML5 feature called a Service Worker ... notifications will work on desktop and on Android, but not on iOS.... it will be up to web developers to …

While Slack is basically a chat room for your business (with private messaging functionality), Groups also lets users share common calendars, OneDrive-hosted files, and OneNote notebooks... With Groups threaded messages, however, anyone with access can dive in at any time and read back over all the entries without being distracted by other items i…

When people ask me how to build an audience, what they really want to know is, how do they get an audience to just come to them. You don’t. No audience just magically appears.... write up an entire profile of who your ideal customers/readers/viewers are ... go find them ... get your content in front of them

media companies, from the Telegraph to Bloomberg, have spent serious money pushing their video products... the path to monetisation is still not clear: the cost of creating content is high, and business models involving adverts are being affected by adblocking and falling rates (cpm's)... if you are going to attempt to make money from video, succ…

well-known for its data-visualizations — half of the 60 daily articles published contain charts — and on May 10, it officially took the wrapper off Atlas, so anyone can sign up and create their own graphs.

Vox Sentences, the explainer site's bullet-pointed digest of the day's most important headlines, has seen huge gains... prompted Vox to create a position for its first-ever email editor... launch additional newsletters that will bring the site's explainer content on a variety of subjects to readers' inboxes... Vox adopts a distributed approach to …

Google also debuted a new VR platform called Daydream... helping define the specifications, such as high-performance sensors for accurate head tracking, for VR-capable smartphones... to reduce the delay between head movement and picture ... reduce latency to less than 20 milliseconds.

When people watch a live video after the fact, the engagement graph provides a valuable signal that can help people explore the video and easily identify highlights that they may find engaging...the engagement graph could push broadcasters to pepper their streams with moments of delight...