Overview: Communications Tactics

Racontr is an easy tool to create and diffuse interactive content online

In this week’s edition, a months’ reading - some 30 posts - on social media, digital transformation, content/system design and EuroPCom2015. But first some news from me

I feel reasonably confident that within the next 6–12 months, you will only see Instant Articles in the mobile newsfeed. Why? Because they are better... they will eventually be available on all Facebook environments. There is seemingly nothing stopping Facebook from rolling out a full front-end to the product so writers can produce directly in …

"The experience of users happens beyond the screen and in the gaps... between channels, devices and business silos." (and between government departments, and indeed governments) "You might be thinking this sounds more like customer service design than user experience design. You might be right." - User experience design is not what you th…

Blog posts take hours to write, those great images need to be found or created and those social networks need to be managed and nurtured. It is often not done or persisted with because there are no apparent quick rewards. This is where the tortoise can beat the hare by slow persistence. It is a marathon and a journey not a sprint... you are bui…

Facebook and Apple... have chosen to focus on a future that takes the shape of an article... largely developed in response to the constraints of print ... a great opportunity for news organizations themselves to rethink those assumptions... considering the time scales of our reporting in much more innovative ways. Information should accumulate …

nice enewsletter design from litmus

“Canva enables anyone to become a designer”

Keyword research is one of the most important, valuable, and high return activities in the search marketing field. By researching your market's keyword demand, you can not only learn which terms and phrases to target with SEO, but also learn more about your customers as a whole... you can predict shifts in demand, respond to changing market c…

Social Media had its place in marketing during the early days, but as platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest) have evolved brands/businesses have lost their ability to stand out... social media is a channel to connect with and provide value to your existing users...should be the responsibility of a cross functional team member who wo…

Here’s what we’re doing so far on Makerbase to discourage abuse before it starts and address it right away when it does happen. - 8 Steps for Preventing Abuse in a Web Community — Making Makerbase — Medium

information architecture has become ripe with myths... I want to take a few moments to dispel some of them.... People convince themselves that information architecture is about organising content in a logical way. It is not... people aren’t logical.... users need to be able to reach content in three clicks.... there is no evidence to support…

the value of curation combined with a second, algorithmic step: personalization. Fill a barrel with the best of the best. Now when I walk in, based on insights about my taste and what I’ve selected in the past, choose *for me* from the barrel. Wow! Thanks! - Why I Unfollowed You on Instagram — Medium

There is no shortage of content aggregators and aggregators of aggregators... give us a better overview of all the sources of information we have subscribed to and found ourselves now depending on... Constantly checking our feeds for new information, we seem to be hoping to discover something of interest, something that we can share with our ne…

Think of an interaction as a conversation between your product and your user... if the conversation is boring, your user will eventually leave ... Without interactions, there wouldn’t be any delight in the experience. - The 5 Pillars of Interaction Design — Medium

I’ve been experimenting with online communities since 2002, and thought I’d seen every useful idea already implemented. Knowledge Hub (“K-Hub”) has a lot of features common to Community of Practice platforms, and have an interesting take on Blogs, which I’ve not seen anywhere else. And it’s almost excellent...

… because in the past I used marginal notes to provide additional info, remarks and links without breaking the flow of my main text… Now it looks like I’m having a massively narcissistic conversation with myself & my Profile is a total mess

... because in the past I used marginal notes to provide additional info, remarks and links without breaking the flow of my main text.... I’ve just gone through one of my longest posts to turn all of my suddenly-set-to-Private notes into Responses. Now it looks like I’m having a massively narcissistic conversation with myself & my Profile is a tot…

For its genre, Dorsey’s memo is indeed admirably brief and to the point. But it’s still riddled with jargon. Why is it so hard for executives to write in a truly straightforward manner? Here is Dorsey’s memo, with our suggested cuts in strikethrough and additions in bold. - Jack Dorsey’s jargon-free firing memo, edited to remove the jargon - Qu…

This COP21 soonfeed lets you discover and get alerts to live streams, live blogs, hangouts and other online happenings related to the Paris climate talks. - 50 Days of Spin to COP21 - Happeningo

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In this week’s edition, two new social media products in one week; a few good longreads for the weekend; and more stuff for your online toolbox.

The code behind the effort is all available on Github... the fact that it uses an open repository doesn’t mean that Google isn’t running the project, or deciding what gets included and what doesn’t... publishers have another option ... simply take the best parts of the specification from the publicly available documentation and implement those …

"Accelerated Mobile Pages speed up mobile page load times through a new open framework called AMP HTML, which Google says "allows websites to build light-weight web pages." Google says it has nearly 30 publishers signed on to participate in the project, including The New York Times, Vox and Gannett." (What was the point posting each of the 6 ar…

the Google standard gives publishers a streamlined page-loading script they can use that takes advantage of smart caching of content—either on their own servers or on Google’s servers—to make the various elements load faster...an order of magnitude faster than the typical mobile page... a completely open standard that any publisher can implemen…

Media Cloud... is an open source, open data platform that allows researchers to answer complex quantitative and qualitative questions about the content of online media... by collecting and analyzing the news stream of tens of thousands of online sources.... academic researchers, journalism critics, policy advocates, media scholars, and others c…

... it’s fantastic... there is a lot to nitpick, but it is fantastic from a strategic perspective.... Twitter just reinvented the newspaper. It’s not just any newspaper though — it has the potential to be the best newspaper in the world... imagine a tweet-based newspaper drawn not only from the best sources in a mobile-friendly format, but one …

“moments” are mini news digests of tweets across a range of topics... with splashy full-screen photos and videos. Each individual moment is made up of about 10 tweets... allows users to follow stories they’re interested in for a limited period of time... clearly targeted at curious or casual users... a “catch-me-up” type of news digest, using t…

Moments surface the best of what’s happening on Twitter... What you see on Twitter is what’s happening in the world. What follows are the standards and guidelines for creating Moments that we as a Twitter curation team follow. - Twitter Moments: Content Guidelines | About