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 …
The institutional odyssey
Exploring best practices — and unanswered questions — as we navigate social conversation in today’s digital organization Back in the mid-90s, establishing an institutional web presence began with writing a million dollar check to Oracle. As a next step, you hired a fleet of technical employees, one of whom was called a “Webmaster”—schooled in the …
Friday 5 — 5.15.2015
The big news for publishers this week was Facebook Instant Articles. The New York Times and Buzzfeed were among the first publishers on board, reaping the benefits of reach, fast-loading articles, revenue sharing, and data access. While some fear it’s a deal with the devil, Poynter is more measured in its assessment. What do Facebook Instant …
Friday 5 — 5.1.2015
Facebook is up to 4 billion daily video viewers, and some think it may unseat YouTube as the go-to video destination. Not much of a present for YouTube’s 10th birthday. Instead of bucketing content referrals by each social network, BuzzFeed launched a new technology to track content shares across social networks. Dubbed Process for Optimizing and Understanding Network Diffusion …
Friday 5 — 4.24.2015
If you are responsible for a high-volume brand homepage, be sure to read this Nieman Lab take on the Atlantic re-design. I particularly like this framing from Bob Cohn: “In an age of social traffic, a homepage is less about traffic triage — directing lots of direct visitors to the content of their choice — than …
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 — 4.10.2015
The first round of many Apple Watch reviews are in — here’s my favorite one, although it’s derided capably here. Certainly no one is suggesting it’s a digital must-have, but most agree it packs a few canny features. (For the optimists: Pre-order here.) New Pew research covers teens’ 2015 use of social media and technology. A solid …
Friday 5 — 3.20.2015
Facebook introduced new friend-to-friend payments on Facebook Messenger. Now friends can split a lunch check, or settle a wager right in a chat. And, for now, zero fees. Google Code shut down and moved nearly a thousand of its open source projects to GitHub. Here are a few important ways GitHub got it right where others failed. Should news media drop costly native apps …
Friday 5 — 3.13.2015
Google Maps is an app many use daily — after all, not everyone can live in a CityMapper zone — but have barely scratched the surface in terms of functionality. Here are some useful tips, including offline access and one-handed use. New digital projects often start with an existential crisis of organizational identity. Land the …
Friday 5 — 3.6.2015
Meerkat is a new livestreaming video app that launched and skyrocketed this week. Tightly integrated with Twitter, the app allows you to livestream video direct to your Twitter feed. It’s ephemeral content — viewers cannot replay it, but creators can save the original video to their phones. Despite the mass adoption of Gmail, Google has …