Social media success is about much more than mastering the platforms and tools. Finding a voice that resonates, developing terrific content, and building an engaged community require a culture of experimentation and continuous learning. Quartz reports how NASA developed a smart social media strategy that fueled its global reach. Instagram has enabled desktop search for users, hashtags, and …
Friday 5 — 7.10.2015
We all see (and rely on) many more visual representations of data these days — charts are everywhere in your social streams. Needless to say, how you set up your chart to reflect the numbers matters. Here’s a handy guide to spotting charts that lie. (Yes, Yankees fans, that chart is deceiving.) Facebook is already a …
Friday 5 — 6.26.2015
News stories are often well told visually, particularly in an era where more data than ever is available. Business and tech news site Quartz launched Atlas, a slickly-designed command center for all its charts, where you can download, embed, or grab the data. And it’s an open source product, so you can create your own version. McKinsey looks at …
Friday 5 — 5.29.2015
It’s worth reading every one of Mary Meeker’s internet trends slides. I’m struck by the relative rapidity and impact of the trends in the American work environment, including what motivates the millennial workforce (hint: not money), the ways connectivity has changed the nature of work, and the rise of online platforms, marketplaces and their impact. The …
Friday 5 — 4.17.2015
Apps without an interface provide services to users through native mobile capabilities. For example, Magic lets you text a number to order whatever you like without hassle, while Digit monitors your bank account activity and automates your savings. Looking for all the narcissism potential of Facebook with the quick-hit guilty pleasure of Giphy? Try Kong, a social network consisting …
Friday 5 — 2.27.2015
Medium has expanded it focus from elegantly formatted longform content to dive headlong into the stream. Now users land on a page featuring an open, simpler editor up top, which lowers the barrier to entry and ideally attracts more users. Search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing are often presented as competing rather than complementary disciplines. Here’s …
What Google knows to show you
Google has come a long way from the user experience of “ten blue links.” Today, Google pulls in a vast amount of the information it searches, has a keener understanding of what you are looking for — and serves it up to you directly. Google’s organization of the world’s data, called ‘The Knowledge Graph,’ affects about 25% of …
Friday 5 — 12.12.2014
Facebook is surging ahead on mobile revenue as well as mobile market share. Facebook now accounts for about one-fifth of all data used on mobile phones, and owns four out of the top ten apps in the Apple iOS store and Google Play. More over at Quartz. Dark social is a term introduced by Alexis Madrigal two …
Friday 5 — 11.14.2014
Beyond audience analytics and editorial review, what are some other ways to suss out how well your website content is performing? Here are seven website graders you can try today. We’re all hoping for a silver bullet for email management, but Google Inbox isn’t it. While the Material Design approach makes the app look slick, the default bundling of conversations and …
Friday 5 — 10.24.2014
Analytics firm Chartbeat has opened up its measurement methodology, limitations and all. By exposing their thinking and technology, they give the service’s users better insight into their reports — and simultaneously ramp up the pressure on the competition to go transparent. Now that we’ve all given up on comments, annotation is on the rise. The Genius …