Overview: Communications Tactics

"Thoughtful, longform content is king... A young, bare-bones website called Wait But Why is disproving the notion that thoughtful, long-form content and virality are mutually exclusive... monthly averages of 1.6 million uniques and 4.6 million page views... Its newsletter has over 106,000 subscribers... Its most viral article... has well ove…

What would you say to a young person considering a career in Journalism? I would advise learning programs like Final Cut Express, and thinking about following the example of the Center for Digital Storytelling's model of 2-4 minute videos that tell a tightly-focused story. - Ending a 31-Year Run at The Denver Post | Jason Salzman

Every brand, every company, and every person has a story to tell, and visual storytelling is a very effective way of sharing your brand’s message and engaging with your customers. - The Science of Storytelling Through Facebook Images

"This is not just about great user interface design but real end-to-end digital [services]... Some things have not been smooth, not all the exemplars have been a resounding success, however Mike took the challenge, dared to be measured and held accountable and the results have certainly been positive and to the betterment of the public purse." …

"Fresh powder beckoned 16 expert skiers and snowboarders into the backcountry. Then the snow gave way."Just an extraordinary online experience from NYT.Update: "The Pulitzer Prize-winning multimedia feature about an avalanche in Washington State changed the way The New York Times approaches storytelling" - ‘Snow Fall’ at 10: How It Changed Journal…

the key to making it work is thinking how it can improve your journalism and what kind of stories can shine through it. Here are some recent examples from the Financial Times, Quartz, BBC, The Guardian and BuzzFeed: - How 5 news outlets are finding success with podcasts | Media news

"The EU Commission and Parliament probably spend hundreds of millions of euros on comms projects every year, but almost nothing on stimulating the emergence of the European Online Public Sphere..." - Posted to Story-Europe's Medium publication to give Catalyst project some content to kick DebateHub’s tyres with.

Examples include using the app to cover breaking news, the annual Budget, share data snippets, new perspectives and take viewers behind-the-scenes

What separates Medium from everyone else is that responses create this amazing platform for discussion and stories breed their own little ecosystems. So why don't we treat responses and their result with as much respect as we currently do recommendations?... a story that inspires twenty responses is more "successful" in my opinion than one that…

While most the activity on LinkedIn occurred within the first 24 hours after posting, Medium was more of a slow burn... led to shares from outside networks. Of the 1,500 views of my article, 500 came from Facebook, 400 from email, and nearly 300 from Twitter... For years, we’ve been warned away from such tactics... in a world in which Facebook …

"I can accept that. Here are my theories on why Medium sucks and I would like for people to tell me why I am wrong.... Why are comments so deprecated here? ... The recent I Racist post ... garnered 33 “notes” on one paragraph... it is painful to read as a bizarre little sidebar on the side of the page... nobody is here. Everyone is cross po…

The conversation continued through various responses and notes in different responses, blooming outward, but at that point to actually follow it you needed to perform a very impressive feat of what Gutbloom so aptly calls “digital spelunking”. Which then led everyone to discuss what could make the social part of Medium better... the thing I’d m…

The rich, diverse, free web that I loved - and spent years in an Iranian jail for - is dying.Why is nobody stopping it?... The hyperlink was my currency six years ago... represented the open, interconnected spirit of the world wide web ... a way to abandon centralization ... and replace them with something more distributed, a system of nodes an…

I’ve created an email newsletter that features one fantastic piece of journalism each day....So far 3,000+ awesome people are subscribed to the newsletter and the daily emails average open rates around 50% (that’s double the industry average)... What I really want to build is a community for people to find, share, and discuss great, in-depth jo…

Breaking Smart is a technology analysis site... binge-worthy collection of essays approximately once every 2 years. Season 1, comprising 20 essays...written by Venkatesh Rao and illustrated by Grace Witherell...an in-depth exploration of Marc Andreessen’s observation that “software is eating the world... subscribe to our email list, featuring a…

I developed a metric to identify gatekeepers, who increase your influence, and flak-catchers who reduce it. I tested the GREEDY FRAGILE algorithm developed by West Point for drone targeting decisions, which measures how much an individual participant in a network makes it more or less centralized. The results were fascinating. - An x-ray of Bru…

So many memories…

Instead of a link to the signup page of our daily email — where you’d have to enter your information, wait to get a confirmation email, then click a link inside it — you get a supersimple one-click interface.

Publishers may be able to get more value out of their tweets thanks to a new design change on Twitter... on the platform’s iOS or Android apps... stories will get some extra room, complete with lead art and the first few words of a story... part of the company’s plans for bringing more media into your home feed. - Twitter’s new article prev…

TheSkimm is a roundup of daily news aimed at busy professional women in the tone of your “smart friend”... 1.5 million subscribers, ... celebrity fans ... has attracted five presidential candidates to act as guest curators... 40 percent open rate... high engagement and a focused audience. One of the secrets of its growth: a referral program tha…

The last couple of years has seen a revival of the Art of the eNewsletter. I have found myself paying much more attention to enewsletters in my Inbox... than to the marketing junk gushing from social media

"Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works." - Design terminology, demystified — Medium

"Setting up teams of video experts with pricey editing suites is a significant investment ... and still creates a bottleneck ... Here are three ways to organise video operations that have emerged over the past months out of my conversations with premium European news publishers:"

Great in-depth look at an email marketing success story. Resonating point: "Don't assume you know who your customers are until they've had a chance to show you." - What Startups Can Learn from Watsi’s Wildly Successful Email Campaign - First Round Review

"Despite the differences among the many organizations producing digital video, a consensus appears to be forming around three organizational best practices..." - Building a news organization's capacity for video

The secret to improvement is to realize that all successful presentations have 3 components, the relative proportion of which differs according to what the presentation's goal is. - 3 Components All Successful Presentations Have | Andras Baneth | LinkedIn

Great example of how to cover a social media trending topic via video: "A video featuring a beauty blogger with adult acne has been watched almost seven million times.... shows some of the comments that Em Ford received online after posting images of her face with and without make-up... she wanted to point out the "unrealistic expectations" soc…

Design triumphs over content: The CAPS15 conference really looks interesting … if only I could read the programme!

Quite enjoyed helping put together a press campaign for the ECC-Net, one of the Commission’s under-appreciated projects. 

The reasons are simple but powerful: you can’t control the communication. Despite it being a communication channel/social network (emphasis on network)/community (very debatable), it points into the other direction: filtering information, needing to pay for content to be seen, very distracting by other things like games, Ads (which used to be cont…