Overview: Communications Tactics

"“Policymakers seem to need answers yesterday,” reflected the young scientist from Italy. “That’s the direct opposite of how science works.”" - first report from the K4P audience research.The key finding from me was that scientists want to see their work taken up by policy, but seem at a loss on how. A platform which was explicitly built around ma…

The record is incorruptible... this sort of recordkeeping is valuable for journalism: it allows us to maintain archives that can’t be censored or altered after the fact... an ad-free publishing economy on Civil’s Ethereum-based platform... Popula is accountable to its readers alone, and is impervious to the interests and agendas of advertisers or…

What if “persuadability” isn’t the right metric to look at? ... Information warfare expert Molly McKew, who specializes in U.S.–Russia relations... "There aren’t good tools to evaluate the impact of shadow campaigns... Information and psychological operations ... are not just about information, but about changing behavior... of more than 36,000 …

Which did the ad industry choose?... It tried to ignore technology and automation... when that didn’t work, it bought the machines.... It didn’t invest in research, development, innovation... develop new services, new ways, new formats, new ideas, whole new ways of helping institutions and people relate, connect, and bond... So the broken relatio…

aimed to find new ways to help verified facts reach the widest possible audience. The competition sought creative solutions that newsrooms can adopt to take fact-checking beyond long-form explanations and bullet points.... selected teams from Argentina, Italy, Georgia and Mexico as the winners. ·

in some cases Facebook itself is earning revenue from their false stories... The design of Instant Articles ... obscuring information about a news source that could be used to help evaluate the content... additional false stories are promoted to a reader once they load a single Instant Article from a fake news site... company also specifically fo…

it’s leaps-and-bounds more useful to prototype your UX with a user’s real content than it is to test with real ML models... By re-orienting the conventional AI paradigm from finding ways to make the machine smarter, to exploring ways to augment human capability, we can unlock far greater potential in machine learning... we have a tremendous opp…

time to deliberately focus on design for interconnectedness and relationships ... customer (user) centric design created a narrative of isolation: the customer is ... someone that is provided with a solution ... to get the job done... [but] research ... explained that customers (users) may often look to engage more deeply with products... relat…

I read much faster than people talk, so they’re not a good way for me to learn things... the actual goal... is to reify the importance and social status of the conference organizers and speakers... There seems to be a widespread mindset that all you really need to succeed is insight... what separates success from failure is a sufficiency of sage a…

discovering a filtering algorithm's existence in a curated feed influences user experience, but it remains unclear how users reason about the operation of these algorithms.... Interviews revealed 10 "folk theories' of automated curation... Users who were given a probe into the algorithm's operation via an interface ... visible hints disclosing asp…

How do we convert users playing the game into users who would complete the survey?... take our readers on a visual journey around the world so they could explore where a news story happened. As a payoff, for every correct answer, the user would collect a stamp in their virtual passport... opted to follow an interesting take on the minimal viable p…

GDS does have a clear function and is learning from its experiences ... struggled to demonstrate the value of flagship initiatives... or to set out key priorities.... Another criticism ... not sustained its framework of standards and guidance, with some being removed and web links broken... leave scope for interpretation and disagreement... somet…

Progress has been sporadic, but... plenty of observers wouldn’t have expected this much of GDS when it was set up in 2011... It made its mark largely because it had Maude, the senior minister in the Cabinet Office and a heavyweight in the Conservative Party, fully engaged and ready to back GDS chief Mike Bracken in inter-departmental tussles... i…

a multimedia project ... shows there is more to Gaza than tragedy and conflict... tells the stories of Wissam the doctor, Salwar the kindergarten bus driver, Mustafa the potter, Eid the strawberry farmer and Samera the driving instructor, through the lens of their working days... a rare and unique window into the soul of a Gaza that is vibrant, dy…

it is important for change agents to identify and solve real problems by developing the important skills for collaboration, storytelling and influence... Although digital transformation is one of the biggest trends in business today ... many still do so as a grassroots effort driven by resourceful individuals — digital change agents ... Digital c…

The second meeting Madeleina Kay had was with Luca Jahier. It went longer, and the wifi cut out midway this time - see the 2nd part of this lovely chat.

Writing a report full of recommendations? Watch out for these 5 classic mistakes.- first of four posts written in reaction to Luc van den Brande’s Reaching out to EU Citizens: A New Opportunity.

Write a summary in a sentence or two at the start. Proceed straight to the recommendations, followed by the arguments for and against... Derek Sivers offers similar advice: to hone your writing, hire a translator.

This is a heavily updated repost of my latest Top3ics newsletter. It’s not a copy/paste repost, because Before you Repost it, ReThink It.

This edition focuses on getting the most out of podcasts and so includes a new tweak to my personal content strategy.

the more expensive the service a B2B company provides, the more incomprehensible its website... Do they have nothing of value to provide, and hide behind flowery marketing babble that’s as empty as their offering? ... tell people who you are, what you do, and maybe even why they should be interested. ... not look to dazzle with style over substan…

I was particularly ashamed of the way that the AAA ratings, which were in some sense a mathematical promise of safety, had been actually just lies, mathematical lies... like a weaponized mathematics ... actually people don’t want to know what their actual risk ... mathematics ... was being used ... so that people could go on doing essentially corr…

Habitual googling leads us to mistakenly believe we know more than we actually do ... even when we no longer have access to the internet. The more you use Google, it seems, the smarter you feel without it...

I moderated a panel discussion about Virtual Reality ... used Engagenow to bring the audience and the panelists closer. How?

ProPublica published an in-depth investigation into the algorithms that Facebook uses to determine what it considers “hate speech” ...Facebook’s rules were being inconsistently applied... to learn more ... its first Facebook Messenger bot... to collect stories about people’s experiences with hate speech on Facebook... to help quantify the organiz…

"lead magnets” or “freebies” or “opt-in incentives,” and they are insanely effective for growing your email list. And not only that, they can be excellent for growing trust with your audience as well... In this post you’ll learn: What makes a GOOD freebie What’s working for others (9 examples) How to design the right freebie for your business

Clinicians should aim to understand parents’ values and engage in genuine, respectful conversations; these processes can help vaccine-hesitant parents feel heard and understood... Recognizing cognitive biases ... can also help ... omission bias may lead parents to blame themselves more if a child develops a vaccine-related side effect ... than ...…

In this episode we explore both of those concepts as well as what makes a person susceptible to bullshit, how to identify and defend against it, and what kind of people are the most and least likely to be bowled over by bullshit artists and other merchants of feel-good woo.

Approximately 1–3% of users in the sample get these ‘very different’ results when searching for the query terms. Perhaps less headline-grabbing than fake news in this regard are special interest and lifestyle media, which feature heavily in the personalized results. I think we need more research on the relevance of these sources for political comm…

Be wary of using expert judgement as your only source of data... by all means apply your expertise to make judgments about a design, but be sure to validate these judgements with data... Hick’s Law ... states that the time taken to make a decision increases as the number of choices is expanded... Fitts’ law... the time required to rapidly move to…