With a growing and highly engaged (dare I say fanatical?) user base, Instagram has remained a social media darling. This comprehensive piece describes how its founders make the business tick, keep user engaged in a landscape of mercurial tastes, and prepare the app for monetization in the future. There’s a new Facebook app, but only for …
Friday 5 — 5.9.2014
You likely don’t need a set of graphics and stark statistics to remind you how much work email has encroached on our personal lives. Also: thoughtful essay on how excessive corporate email promotes burnout rather than productivity. Email marketing is a staple of corporate and nonprofit outreach, but how do you get those overloaded recipients …
Friday 5 — 2.21.2014
Facebook forked over $19 billion for WhatsApp, and the internet is full of articles explaining why. Among the most compelling is Buzzfeed’s take that WhatsApp posed a significant threat. WhatsApp is growing fast globally, consumes a great deal of young users’ smartphone time, and fills that critical “staying in touch” niche that Facebook would like …
Digital strategy, content, and cake
What do you get when you bring together 400 folks interested in digital strategy for content and community in higher education — and add cake? ConfabEDU offered a heady mix of ideas and energy for innovative content approaches in the digital/social/mobile world. Superb keynotes from Kristina Halvorson, Dan Roam, and Karen McGrane were interspersed with terrific sessions …
Friday 5 — 9.27.2013
Kudos to the Boston GlobeLab team on the beta launch of 61 Fresh, which features the most popular local stories shared on Twitter. Great to see the Harvard Gazette make the top-tweeted, and I’m buying a drink for the genius who added the “mute sports” feature. Maintaining a website requires constantly updating rapidly deprecating software, …
Friday 5 — 09.13.2013
So, the iPhone 5C/5S launched and turned out to be more evolutionary than revolutionary. Is Apple more about fashion than electronics these days? Infographics are everywhere, and their stepchildren “snackables” are likely clogging your social media stream. “Get me an infographic” has replaced “Make me a viral video” as the new top-down, digital/social mandate. Here …
The best news email knows mobile, adds voice
What do effective news headlines emails have in common? First of all, they’re mobile in design and content. Here’s a daily email received yesterday from the New York Times: This email arrived at 4:43 a.m., when I’m still about four hours from a laptop encounter. How could this headlines email perform better for mobile? Start …
How to ace an interview with substantive content
Mashable recently posted a selection of tips aimed at entry-level job seekers on how to make a good first impression in a job interview. They’re reasonable tips, and worth mentioning because they aren’t always heeded. But they focus on the surface elements, like dressing appropriately and shaking hands. Let’s face it, though: those are tables …
Email: definitely not dead yet
In 2011, email was not long for this world according to virtually all the tech headline writers out there. Three recent events are reminders that there’s still a lot of opportunity inherent to highly-measurable, easily-adjustable content delivered to you anywhere on your mobile device. Earlier this summer, Wired reminded us not to dismiss email given all …
Try it: 3 ways to tell a story online
Compelling content is a differentiator in a world where everyone is an online publisher. That content can take entirely new forms: data visualization (like this recurring developments site from Beutler Ink) or inspired curation (like Brainpickings by Maria Popova). And of course multimedia plays an ever larger role in online storytelling. Last year’s groundbreaking New York Times feature …