Overview: Communications Tactics

Three months into Dialog, I’m excited to say we’ve succeeded in creating a well-lit place for thoughtful, live conversations between the Digg community and the people who make the best stuff on the Internet... Clear community guidelines work. Pre-moderation works. And most of all, the amount of personalized attention we’re willing to give each use…

Another 13 U.K. publishers are signed up to start using Facebook’s Instant Articles, including The Daily Telegraph, The Mirror, The Daily Mail and The Economist, Sky News, sports site 90min.com and The Sun.The BBC and the Guardian were the first U.K. partners, and there are plenty more waiting in the wings.

How can you make your social visuals more compelling?The Media Octopus put together an information-packed infographic on the importance of social visuals. It contains a lot of great advice and creative ideas for marketers looking to up their visual game, including these four tips for visual social success:

Ultimately, what publishers and advertisers care about most, however, is how much quality time a person spends with a story. To judge that, publishers are developing newer metrics like “time spent” reading, “scroll depth,” “engagement,” “recirculation,” “shares,” and “percentage of article completed.”

the collapse of the digital interface of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) IT system... supposed to be one of its key exemplars for GDS in showcasing its "agile" approach to delivering digital technology... the system will be 40 per cent over budget at £215m and has led to disallowance penalties to the EU of up to £180m per year due to mis-paym…

Using push notifications can be a very effective and powerful way to gain and maintain audience engagement on mobile apps. But if not done correctly, they can turn out to be utterly irritating. ... Personalization is the way forward if push notifications are to survive. 

If you create live video, here’s that table of live streaming apps you’ve been searching for.

As a reporte... there may be a simple solution to the bad commenter problem: You. When reporters get involved, it results in fewer uncivil comments, according to research... “it’s like a teacher walks into a classroom and suddenly all the kids are quiet and fold their hands at their desks.” Here are a few tips and best practices for reporters in …

uncivil comments dropped by 15 percent when reporters were participating in the conversation

a closer look at what types of comment sections news organizations ... value they are adding to news organizations’ overarching strategies...a list of questions to ask and best practices for news organizations seeking return on investment...key questions, considerations and links to further reading for evaluating what commenting strategy works bes…

benefit of building a brand that audiences recognize ... allow us to build a strong revenue model and a strong connection to an audience. If they see us on Snapchat and Snapchat has a very large audience, then they get to know and trust Vox and see it as a source that they care about... think about your brand as an interconnected ethos that should…

Empathy mapping is a way to characterise your target users in order to make effective design decisions. User journey mapping is a way to deconstruct a user’s experience with a product or service as a series of steps and themes. Put simply, these methods encourage your stakeholders to think about user needs effectively,

Howdy, a bot company devoted to automating common workplace tasks. Its product lives in Slack ... operates in the background, listening for the keywords and questions that will activate its powers. ... automates meetings, asking what people are working on, collating their answers, and distributing them to the team ... take your lunch order ... AI…

Mobile requires a different set of UI/UX and needs different forms of content and advertising, too. That's easy to write, but very hard to implement, especially if you have a newsroom full of experienced people who have learned their trade with a different paradigm in mind. Media startups like vox.com, Buzzfeed, Huffington Post and others... adapt…

“How data is generating green lights to keep you moving on the road” is a piece of native advertising paid for by Siemens and written by Quartz’s marketing team. It’s also a perfect example of how Quartz is bringing compelling storytelling and design to sponsored content... Quartz uses an in-house creative team to extract relevant stories and ta…

The news organisation has mostly been focusing on revamping its mobile apps, but the next step is bringing some of the learnings back to the homepage... third in a series looking at how news organisations are now approaching the homepage, after it was pronounced dead by many in 2014... our real challenge everyday is to come in and say 'ok, who…

Therein lies the trouble with virtual reality. The hardware is incredible, but the content has been slow to catch up. Shooting 360 degree video and audio in a way that isn’t jarring and tells a coherent story is difficult and expensive... any brand that deals with physical products and experiences should start thinking about what the ultimate VR …

If we define design as the decisions that determine how something works ... then Design Thinking is simply the process to make more thoughtful decisions.... We can only knit together what we already know in new ways to get to the something that’s never existed before.... Design Thinking offers — a way to get where you’re going when you don’t kno…

On Tuesday, the American people will see a multi-platform streaming and social broadcast of the State of the Union that reflects the ways people experience live events in 2016. We’ll be reaching people where they are — and making it possible for them to engage, respond, and share the President’s speech themselves in new and different ways... vide…

bringing new technology into the newsroom to change how the outlet commissions and publishes opinion pieces ... expand the coverage beyond just text, into visual story formats that can be accessed and shared across different platforms.... the FT's comment section is a "huge source of strength and a very valuable asset".... a new Facebook commu…

2015 MARKED PROPUBLICA’S most ambitious year to date in visual and interactive storytelling...here are some highlights from the year that was.

Publishers like the New York Times should be having an existential crisis over Facebook’s instant articles. Instead they’re embracing them.. digital content is being divided between a lucrative high-end entertainment world,... and a low-end publishing world where content is expected to be “free,” ... a model that... might work to BuzzFeed’s adv…

2015 is the Year of the Card. Screen-size cards are everywhere, from websites to native apps and are designed to look like their physical counterparts. It’s an easy way for you to shuffle through a series of digital containers with the flick of a thumb...cards are a style that seems just made for apps.

we want to create use cases for people with limited time available to explore news stories on the mobile ... challenge is to provide the news in a quick, snappy format while also providing the opportunity to deepen their understanding when needed. As well as providing summaries and deeper information we feel this approach could lead to news bec…

full rollout in those markets, and elsewhere in Europe, is slated for “early 2016”.) Upday sounds as if it will be aggregating a variety of editorial content based on contextual signals available via mobile — such as user location and interests. UPDAY will offer Samsung customers access to a range of news content that combines ‘Need to Know’ in…

In the last post, we saw 15 different ways you can instantly boost your email open and read rates today.We looked at how you can be play ethical, use hypnotic words, create a stellar autoresponder list and a personalized welcome message, among other things.Here are 16 more ways to make sure your emails are opened and to boost your click-through ra…

Google Spotlight Stories is a new form of storytelling made specifically for mobile and VR. In these 360-degree, interactive stories, your phone becomes a window to a world all around you. The sensors on your phone allow the story to be interactive; when you move your phone to various scenes, you are able to unlock mini-stories within the story.

We have read a lot of awesome articles from the community this year. We picked up for you the best of what we came through in 2015.

we’ve curated and categorized 62 of Medium’s best design posts from the past year. Enjoy!