Overview: Content Strategy

"This video would have cost peanuts. Although it’s not something that can be directly applied to most of what we do, it’s here because of what it reminds us: there’s no better comms than filming people loving what you do. Unfortunately, you first need to give them something insanely great. The greatest communications can’t transform fish’n’chips…

"Starbucks’ first-ever brand campaign, Meet Me at Starbucks ... showcases stories of how people use Starbucks as a meeting point, with an emphasis on the idea that technology brings us together, but there’s nothing quite as authentic as an in-person cup of joe. ... an incredible job of striking an emotional connection with people by associating t…

"Taster is a place for the BBC to try new ways of telling stories, develop new talent, and put new technology through its paces. It also allows the BBC to showcase a range of editorial and technology projects that may have previously remained behind closed doors... Enables the BBC to ... innovating quickly, gaining valuable feedback and respond…

"many brands even ignore the importance of curation in their streams and instead continually talk about themselves.... Content Curation is the act of discovering, aggregating and posting online content that was produced by others... typically focused on a specific topic or small number of topics that are considered relevant to the audience you’re…

"Scheduling Technology Leaves Low-Income Parents With Hours of Chaos" Within 24 hours of this article's publication, Starbucks changed their scheduling policy. - Working Anything but 9 to 5 - NYTimes.com

"Uprising: Winner of the 2013 AAAS Kavli award for online science journalism." - The Environmental Scandal That's Happening Right Beneath Your Feet - The Matter Archive - Medium

"Vox is placing bets on political coverage that aims to break free from the echo chamber ... creating policy-driven campaign coverage by reimagining what a traditional political reporting team looks like.... At most news outlets, journalists who cover big policy issues like healthcare and education are kept separate from reporters who tag along w…

"With election season starting up, will we see native ads masquerading as independent political reporting?" - The Dirty Politics Of Native Advertising | Tom Foremski | LinkedIn

"In 2014, we published a series of posts to help marketers get back to the basics of content marketing or to improve what they are doing. In case you missed some or all of the series, here is a quick primer." - A Blueprint to Jump-Start Your Content Marketing Strategy

"Since Taylor launched an earlier version of the site at The Boston Globe in 2007, In Focus has known for longform photo storytelling, featuring huge, high-quality images.... If you’re pandering to social media, if you’re going for clickbait, it cuts away at any sort of storytelling." - Q&A: How Alan Taylor, online photography pioneer, is rethin…

"Rather than publishing and aggregating news on a central site, the idea is to take the information to existing communities on the web — distributed journalism... The specific focus is on providing context around breaking stories ... the number of sources and reporters on the story grew quickly over a number of days. That created challenges in se…

Came up with a winning communication strategy to promote worthy-but-heavy pdf reports from the European Commission.

Not just an interesting video about what neuroscience says about self-interest and compassion (and the lack of it amongst wealthy people!). Also a good example of how to maintain interest in a 'talking head' video interview through animation and video techniques. - We Are Built To Be Kind - YouTube

"The best infographics are clear, easy to digest, and eye-catching. But the process of distilling data into a neat little chart, bar graph, or venn diagram usually requires pages and pages of messy preparatory sketches, which are rarely seen by the public. Infographic Designers’ Sketchbooks ... take readers behind the scenes of the creative proce…

"Our hope with adaptive content is to tailor content to a customer’s experience, behavior, and desires... a culmination of ... experience maps, storyboarding, empathy maps — and what we’ve been saying for so long about creating an experience... ... we all believe that our experiences should be more interactive. Why? Smartphones." - 16 Stats That…

Here's a conundrum for you. And a probably quite dangerous post for me.

"Machine learning can help by finding those hidden patterns you probably didn’t even know existed, so you can tune your marketing campaigns accordingly.... DataPop relies on semantic search and natural-language processing to infer connections between what consumers enter into the search window and what they really want, and then on machine learn…

"In this gallery are our favorite graphics of the year. " The Best Science Visualizations of the Year | WIRED

"We are currently witnessing a re-architecture of the web, away from pages and destinations, towards completely personalised experiences built on an aggregation of many individual pieces of content ... the result of the rise of mobile technologies... from many pages of content linked together, towards individual pieces of content aggregated togeth…

“focus groups are supposed to ... source ideas that need to be researched.... No one buys shoes, cooks dinner, votes, banks, or even buys movie tickets sitting at a table under florescent lights while engaged in a moderated group discussion." or seek to understand the EU, for that matter. - Focus Groups Are Worthless — Medium

"Here is the science around storytelling and how we can use it to make better decisions every day:"

"... Both outlets are trying... to crack the task of making a viable online outlet for in-depth, narrative journalism of several thousand words, paid for by readers. They are the most recent, but far from the only, entrants into an overcrowded genre." Good overview of the intense innovation and first failures in the oversaturated longform marketp…

"handing over a key component of your relationship with readers to Twitter and Facebook is a mistake... suggests to readers that their comments and interaction aren’t worth the trouble" [If] "Comments are broken ... that’s not the fault of readers — it’s the fault of publishers for not seeing their relationship with their readers as being of valu…

"information consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently ... instead of reaping the benefits of the digital revolution we are intellectually deprived by our inability to filter out sensory junk... we are collectively wiser... but individu…

"While many journalists have lost faith in the future of their trade, venture capitalists are taking the opposite view.... providing big chunks of funding to online news providers, such as BuzzFeed, Vice, and Vox. Some of what these publishers put out is mere click bait, but they also produce serious journalism... subscription-based journalism ..…

"At the moment, it looks like the feature is experimental " Just in case the world didn't have enough cat gifs... - YouTube Now Lets You Make GIFs From Videos

"An image is the gateway to your emotional memory... And on the visual web an image is the gateway to accessing almost all content and information... we are adapting to a different kind of a web, one that will be increasingly visual... [but] the only available methods to surface and categorize photos are beyond basic; we need something intuitive…

As long as they remain so, journalism's screwed. A good @Guardian overview, if another is still needed, promoted by the latest dustup across the pond (New Republic). "we do still need institutions that take seriously the mission of informing and debating, of reporting events and exchanging ideas – and we need them to be integrated into the way …

"With Hive, a developer can create assignments for users, define what they need to do, and keep track of their progress in helping to solve problems. " - The New York Times R&D Lab releases Hive, an open-source crowdsourcing tool » Nieman Journalism Lab

Great article on improving intranet UX, and useful inspiration for any website manager: "During the online cardsorting sessions I covered over 1000 content items and got nearly 36,000 individual responses. The first batch ... designed to elicit our main navigation labels. Subsequent tests then checked that the chosen names would suit all the intr…