Overview: Content Strategy

"She was presenting on Blogger Relations – Why and How to Get Started. A perfect topic for her since she knows the issue from both sides. I asked her what was an important takeaway from her talk. Here is what she shared." - from the @Steveology blog

"At Menlo Innovations, structure and multiple keyboards allows you to split the difference between chaos and bureaucracy". - How One Company Replaced Meetings and Bureaucracy With Pairs, Ceremonies, and Storytelling, from Fast Company

NYTimes' collection: "the common thread is the form of storytelling — an integration of text, video, photography and graphics ... From a ship in the South China Sea to the cost of health care..."

An unfortunately accurate corrective to the recent "Facebook is dying" meme. 2013 truly was the year everyone just couldnt be arsed checking the facts: "A British academic studying social media found that young people use lots of new-fangled services, such as Instagram, because their parents are on Facebook. “What we’ve learned from working with …

Nothing new, but then it's 2013 review time: "this was the year someone isolated the DNA of the viral story, and the world ... saw for the first time the awesome potential of viral content ... Upworthy had about seventy-five thousand [Facebook] likes per article, twelve times more than fourth-place BuzzFeed. Among them were posts like the one wh…

Some key points from "The Benefits of Quality Content and Genuine Social Engagement ... to create great, sharable, engaging content and become an active participant on social platforms: - Quality content is what your clients want to read, not what you want to tell them.... - Content that gets highly shared is content with heart. Real stories, re…

Maybe EU hoax stories can be useful ... An interesting take from Nieman Journalism Lab on the value viral hoax stories can bring to conversations on complex topics. The point being that the hoax would not have gone viral in the first place if it did not touch upon a complex, important topic in some way: "Yet at the same time, these strings of …

"For those of you not familiar with native advertising, it refers to a publication serving up paid stories and editorial content the same way. You’ll hear this technique also referred to as sponsored content and branded journalism. With no one clicking on banner ads, publications hope to find economic salvation in native advertising. But here’s …

"Semantic web, social network analysis, entity extraction, and news-as-API ... nerd stuff, but it will become important — a few news projects are already working on it. If they can prove these ideas can be good for business, others will follow." Nieman Journalism Lab with a few trenchant views on reinvigorating news in S. America, of which only o…

A good holiday break longread: "As people talk back to organizations, organizations find they have trouble telling their story and listening to their customers at the same time. The forces of change affecting content can test the conventional responsibilities of marketing and IT and customer service. "

The rapid evolution in newsmedia provides a lot of ideas for better content strategies in a less organisational, more networked society. One such concept is ideas-based, or fluid, beats for journalism: "... a way for reporters to be human-centric rather than newsroom- or bureaucracy-centric", according to the latest piece in Niemanlab's Journalis…

#Context emerging as 2014 theme: "...newsrooms are going to reframe our understanding of “responsive design.” We’re going to see content move beyond simply responding to screen size and instead respond to reader context, adapting to behavior." - Nieman Journalism Lab

Neat use of Twitter and Storify storytelling, used by 2 different people to tell the same underlying (and inspiring) story in different ways.

One of the reasons I created this Tumblr was to use it as a 'first draft’ of a Content Hub (see post), an idea which crystallised after reading Sloan’s original content strategy piece on Stock and Flow.The Hub is basically my way of saying that there’s more to life than the Stream. Unsurprisingly, Alexis Madrigal’s piece in the Atlantic caught my …

Today's online news environment is ideal for spreading bullshit. As someone like HuffPo's Washington bureau chief puts it: “If you throw something up without fact-checking it, and you’re the first one to put it up, and you get millions and millions of views, and later it’s proved false, you still got those views. That’s a problem. The incentive…

Nice data visualisation: " This Index allows you to compare well-being across countries, based on 11 topics the OECD has identified as essential, in the areas of material living conditions and quality of life."

Data-driven storytelling, sharable journalism in a British skunkworks. What's not to like? From NiemanLab: "Data-driven storytelling and web-native, sharable journalism are two of the biggest trends in media at the moment. If you locked the two together in a room, Ampp3d might walk out the door ... As a news site, Ampp3d keeps its output fairly …

"What colors have you chosen for your marketing materials? What were your reasons for making that particular choice? Was it because you liked those particular colors, or did you have a particular marketing message in mind? While visual appeal is an important consideration, your color choices could be sending a specific message to the people who vi…

When designing a logo for your business, it's important to take into account the way people interpret color. It's the right time to ask, what kind of emotion do I want my brand to convey?

Most stuff on my TumblrHub tagged 'content strategy' are also tagged 'content marketing', so I've been pondering the distinction for a while. Quite like this take: "Content strategy is a field of practice useful for content as marketing and content as a product or service. In other words, the practice is distinct from the purpose."

"Changes in Google’s search algorithms have twice hammered the young company in recent years, leaving its brands ... hemorrhaging traffic." Variety writes like this is a bad thing? Thank Google for rewarding quality.

This video is aimed at developers interested in combining machine translation, automatic semantic analysis, human curation, faceted and federated search, and social media to create a machine-assisted multilingual longform content curation engine.

Gratifyingly, the preview of the Hashtag Europe wireframes seemed to do the job, and allow people to understand just what this tool could do...

"we’ve created five fully customizable infographic templates that will give you the inspiration and foundation you need to build your own infographics right in PowerPoint. "

"Wondering how to begin creating an organic search strategy at your company? What’s a good way to integrate your company’s various online components, such as the website, blog, or YouTube channel? Perhaps we can help! In under fifteen minutes, I outline a strategic approach to SEO for a mock company, Webmaster Central, where I pretend to be the SE…

Pour le Journée Européenne du blogging multilingue, a video of one minute (waltz) length sur the bloggingportal.eu reboot, avec une "first look" à les wireframes et pas un mot dans mon accent francais de vache espagnol.

The EC finally gets on the 'back of the envelope' bandwagon

" Tour Builder allows users to create a virtual tour using photos, descriptions and mapped points (or pinned locations). "

"The idea here is that when you use storytelling tricks to get your point across, people are going to be more responsive. This is true in everything from PowerPoint conversations to business deals. "