Overview: Content Creation & Marketing

"Grabbing the attention and interest of online consumers can feel like a full-time job.... So what’s an author lacking infinite hours in a day to do? Incorporate automation! ... I use it to delegate low-payoff activities and focus squarely on what matters most – building relationships." - Five great tools for boosting the effectiveness of social…

http://connectyou.sharedby.co/share/l4qsnd

"But the strategy of marketing itself as a fast food alternative to Big Food has clearly worked well for Chipotle. Now Chipotle is betting that it can sell even more burritos by lambasting the Big Food companies that drug animals in the name of profit. That's the message of a new short film and game the company launched Thursday that takes a cu…

"Trello's a fantastic free app which is fun to use, and makes planning content workflows a snap. The video outlines a workflow, and you can download the Trello board shown"

"the lifespan of your link is connected more to what content it points to than on where you post it: on the social web it’s all about what you share, not where you share it!"

"Almost six months after RebelMouse launched, the service is finding a home in the digital journalist’s toolbox."

If only RM also read the article you link to, auto-tagged it (auto-translating it if necessary) and provided faceted search, it'd probably provide 70-80% of a Hub. Neat tool for group efforts like bloggingportal, too.

"A recent study by Facebook analytics service EdgeRank Checker states that posts with hashtags do not have as great of reach than those without."

"Illustrator Steve Lowtwait and writer Michael Smith are telling a fictional story through social media that's centered around a protagonist called "Hawk Funn." They have set up real social profiles on Facebook and Twitter for fictional characters in the story, and they post about the characters' lives just like real people would. If you follow Ha…

Good questions on content strategy: "Is a content strategist someone who is a master of the English language, someone who can spin snappy marketing content into a flexible web design that responds to the screen real estate and capabilities of a mobile device? Or, is a content strategist someone who examines your current content lifecycle in an a…

"Content marketing is the art and science of using text and visual content to promote your business without being overtly sales-oriented. Content marketing can be in the form of articles, blog posts, white papers or eBooks as well as visual and audio content like videos, Google+ hangouts and podcasts. In contrast to newspaper writing, which repo…

"When a crisis like this happens, and you’re in the wrong, the mob is in charge of your brand. " - good advice for handling a crisis, and good techniques for monitoring sentiment

we are headed into the fourth phase of social media... will see streams become primary design elements of operating systems for computing and mobile devices... all media types will be resolved in place, in the stream

The ever-excellent For Immediate Release (episode 638) put me onto 10 things you still need to know about social media / social business, by Olivier Blanchard (aka the Brand Builder), which sounds like every other post you've ever hear of. But it's worth a read...

At last, an opportunity to blog about gardening and EU comms in the same post.

On November 8, MEPs will discuss '10 concrete political proposals' for creating the European public sphere via digital media, developed by IHECS (Institut des Hautes Etudes des Communications Sociales) and their partners via Socialeuropeanjournalism.com.

Last year, in the runup to the first EuropCom conference, I gave it a bit of a hard time. My cynicism was confirmed by many I knew who went, describing it as a conference about Web2 and social media which allowed little or no participation. Oops.

The subject of Klout has come up a few times on Twitter, so I'm posting this so I can point people toward a few articles I've found useful. Something I can't do in 140 characters. Which proves my eventual point.

"The Filter Bubble", by MoveOn.org foreign policy director Eli Pariser, shows that the forces creating the Brussels Bubble are about to be reinforced by technology, operated invisibly - and with impunity - by a handful of companies.

A few weeks before the Hungarian media storm broke late last year, the BloggingPortal editors were contacted by the (then upcoming) Hungarian Presidency team, seeking ideas for how they could cooperate with the Euroblogosphere. Being a loosely-at-best organised gang of volunteers, it took us a while to respond. To their immense credit...

A while ago I posted the idea that EUROPA could suffer if the EU Institution's limited online communications resources were refocused on social media. While social media offers the EU a great deal, this could be a serious problem, particularly given EUROPA's importance to any EU social media strategy. Commenters seemed to both agree and disagree...

A longer version of an article I published recently in NewEurope

Next week will see yet another physical meeting in Brussels dedicated to exploring the European public space, an irony which appears permanently lost to the organisers of the neverending stream of conferences, seminars and workshops which can be only attended by Brussels Bubble Insiders, and have neither webstreaming nor any online community (Euro…

When I came to Brussels in 1991 it was as a science writer. It remained my profession for many years, so when scienceblogs.com was launched in 2006 I checked it out ... but never really had the time to follow it. Now via another (ex?)science writer, I hear news of scienceblog's sudden implosion following a tragic loss of ethical compass.

The lack of specialists in EU-oriented blogs is impeding the development of the European online public space.