Overview: Content Creation & Marketing

How can you stand out among the other 95 million photos posted each day? How can non-designers and amateur photographers create beautiful content for Instagram?These are all questions we’d love to help you answer in this guide.

Brexit, as experienced by a British-Australian comms guy in Brussels.

News Feed Changes Mean Brands Should Invest in Facebook People More Than Pages... The News Feed algorithm is a lagging indicator, not a leading one. It now properly reflects what study after study shows the public truly values: relationships... No organization will ever be on the same footing as peers... Invest in Facebook people, more so than p…

“Four years later, this Tweet probably best illustrates, in a single image, the mistaken assumption underlying the failed UK Remain campaign…” - a post-Brexit update of my January 2012 post on BlogActiv, over on Medium.

Allen tucked favorable mentions of prominent “Playbook” sponsors into his editorial offerings... a State Department official essentially ghost-wrote an item for “Playbook.”The skinny: Mike Allen ran a press-release mill for vested interests in Washington... a weekly sponsorship for the newsletter falls somewhere between $50,000 and $60,000... Ev…

If you handle the marketing for your company, you will find that the below resources are either excellent starting points or perfect as-is solutions

Post’s website and mobile apps are a pleasure to use; the apps have been designed to serve different audiences depending on whether they are traditional Post readers or are instead interested in a more viral product offered at a lower price and that omits local news.... Bandito allows editors to publish articles with up to five different headlines…

Conventional marketing techniques teach us to frame customers by attributes... ultimately create products and entire categories too focused on what companies want to sell, rather than on what customers actually need... Customers rarely make buying decisions around what the “average” customer in their category may do—but they often buy things becau…

When people ask me how to build an audience, what they really want to know is, how do they get an audience to just come to them. You don’t. No audience just magically appears.... write up an entire profile of who your ideal customers/readers/viewers are ... go find them ... get your content in front of them

As young people flock to Snapchat, news outlets are trying to showcase news on the platform both as live stories and in Discover, where nearly 20 outlets... publish unique content exclusive to Snapchat.... set to launch a redesign of its Discover section to try and boost the number of users who use Discover... While Snapchat’s core function is a m…

Vox Sentences, the explainer site's bullet-pointed digest of the day's most important headlines, has seen huge gains... prompted Vox to create a position for its first-ever email editor... launch additional newsletters that will bring the site's explainer content on a variety of subjects to readers' inboxes... Vox adopts a distributed approach to …

Two-thirds of Facebook users (66%) get news on the site, nearly six-in-ten Twitter users (59%)... seven-in-ten Reddit users ... Tumblr 31% for the other five social networking sites about one-fifth or less ... Facebook ... reaching 67% of U.S. adults. The two-thirds of Facebook users who get news there, then, amount to 44% of the general populati…

The heart of differentiation therefore is your company’s ability to develop and promote distinctive products, services, and branded experiences on a consistent basis.  It’s not the output that sets you apart, but the way that everything you do supports the product and gives it context... set apart your company as a whole, instead of staking your f…

This isn’t the first time I’ve covered the impact of social media on news; technologies like augmented reality; and the impact of both on society. It is the first time these Top3ics have meshed so perfectly in one month.

“Trump leveraged a perfect storm... social media (big following), brand (celebrity figure), creativity (pithy tweets), speed/timeliness (dominating news cycles)"... Combining modern-day fame and an age-old demagogy, he bypassed the ossified gatekeepers and appealed directly to voters through a constant Twitter stream that seemed interrupted only b…

A year ago today, Facebook introduced Instant Articles... people are 20 percent more likely to read Instant Articles, which are accompanied by a lighting bolt icon in the feed, and 30 percent more likely to share them with friends...70 percent less likely to bounce... 30 percent more likely to share ...tests with some publishers where we help them…

Why not take some inspiration from the best headlines of the best headline writers? The blueprints exist to get your tweets, emails, updates, and articles clicked.

Think about platforms as fishing places where you can find large, engaged audiences and build a relationship with them by providing content. Then offer these users some other services off-platform... Never outsource the future... a great primer for news organizations just starting to tackle the distributed world and a good checklist for those mor…

by using social media curation, news organisations can remove the need for readers to look elsewhere, by automatically pulling in relevant social content from around the internet onto their websites... produce a quick breaking-news social stream related to a subject, or social content specifically focused to highlight the ideas and arguments withi…

I was taking work as it came in. Hustling, squabbling over rates, and trying to collect on long past-due invoices. I can feel the knots in my stomach to this day.I had no platform. My personal blog had 30 email subscribers, mostly composed of family and friends. I was burned out. My muchness was gone. I needed to get it back.

But what we are building with artificial reality is an internet of experiences... although every one of these environments was fake, the experiences I had in them were genuine... you gain authentic experiences, as authentic as in real life. People remember VR experiences not as a memory of something they saw but as something that happened to them.…

Charities have such a huge range of positive stories to tell and practical solutions to offer on so many of the big issues we face today, but too often they’re taking place under the radar.Constructive Voices will link up journalists and charities and equip both to approach news in a more constructive way, directing journalists to charities which …

Very few ... are capable of regularly creating compelling videos ... as social platforms look to saturate their feeds with video... they’re essentially competing for the same limited set of good videos. So those who create the ​quality​ stuff can demand payment. In recent weeks, those payments have begun flowing. For Facebook... people are simpl…

bandwagons are bad for your health, as illustrated by the impending death of content marketing and the gathering backlash against Slack (Slacklash? BackSlacksh?) and (already!?) chatbots.

gadget “blog,” Circuit Breaker, that will live primarily as a Facebook page, with posts appearing in the Instant Articles format... the best of old-school blogging together with a sophisticated, aggressive modern platform distribution strategy... It’s not (yet) possible to be an Instant Articles publisher if you don’t have a web source from which…

The potential – or, sadly more accurately, theoretical – political power of social media is to provide an important public forum in which those of diverse opinions can freely interact, rather than living in political enclaves inhabited only by those who reinforce what everyone already believes. The truth is that those entrenched political division…

What happened when I was invited to “do a Rápido” at the IABC’s conference in Rotterdam earlier this week.

Publications are hiring a point person to coordinate with new platforms like Facebook Instant Articles and Snapchat Discover... product changes of platforms happen on a daily basis. Just to track those changes and newly emerging platforms is a full-time job in itself

Last spring, the Financial Times altered its former metered access model and introduced paid trials, letting users pay £1 ($1.42) for a month’s access to content. At the same time, the newspaper also changed its policies toward social platforms and began making more content free to people coming to its site from Google, Facebook and Twitter. It la…

At The Guardian’s Media Summit in London, those publishers and others discussed what’s working for them with their platform strategies, and how sustainable off-site publishing is likely to be for media companies in the long term... Cosmo’s Snapchat Discover editions get 76 percent completion rates... 56 percent ... coming back to us five days …