What’s the best way to tackle management of digital teams to keep engagement and output high? I’ve been through two Internet booms and busts in corporations, nonprofits, and startups — so I’ve made plenty of management mistakes by commission and by proxy. Posted over at Harvard Business Review, five common mistakes I’ve seen or made myself.
Tag: strategy
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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 with the subject line — this version teases only one story, so it’s a single-shot opportunity to grab a reader who’s thumbing through all the early morning messages. Next, look at all that navigation taking up valuable screen space. The navigation narrates the static departmental structure of the institution rather than engaging the reader, and the links don’t work on mobile. And that big CUSTOMIZE? It goes to a page designed for the desktop. Finally, as the user scrolls through the ~12 screens of content, nearly every story has a thumbnail image, many of which are extraneous or tough to parse at that size.
[tweetable hashtags=”#news”]This email feels like a missed opportunity for what’s arguably the strongest brand in news.[/tweetable] Why not optimize for mobile readers who are likely stumbling to their first cup of coffee? There’s a second, larger opportunity to add editorial voice to this message. Don’t give me a laundry list of the entire Times — I’ll get that on a tablet or laptop, later. Instead, tell me what someone smart about today’s news thinks I should be reading.Compare the Times message with the same day’s Quartz weekend brief. There are four teasers in the subject line so if I’m not interested in global rebalancing, then maybe women on Wall Street? And the brief is built for mobile, with a clean, readable font.
This email projects a strong editorial voice. The New York Times leads by telling you about itself as an institution — in case you were wondering, here are all our editorial departments. Quartz engages you up from with a greeting and narrative in the second person that your high school English teacher taught you never to use. As you scroll, the links appear more naturally in the text, underscoring the idea that this was written by a human rather than a cut-and-paste of headlines. And it follows its own reporting with “Five links elsewhere that made us smarter.”
[tweetable hashtags=”#mobile”]Email isn’t dead. If anything, millennials are more plugged into email than ever[/tweetable] via savvy services like the Skimm or PolicyMic or even Upworthy. What’s different is the content strategy — the best email newsletters engage you early, can be read easily on mobile in an elevator or a Starbucks line, and have a voice that keeps you opening them, day after day. -
How to Build a High-Performing Digital Team
Organizational development is hard — and new digital capabilities require some new mindsets and skillsets. Posted over at Harvard Business Review blog network: six attributes to consider when sourcing talent for a high-performing digital team.
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What is an annotation on the web?
A new content type, user annotation, has been cropping up on popular websites lately. An annotation allows site visitors to interact directly with a chunk of content rather than scroll to the bottom of a page to leave a comment. User-contributed annotations are not only a way for readers to interact with text, but for users to engage with other media like images on Gawker and audio files on Soundcloud.
Unlike threaded commenting, which descends all-too-frequently into a cage fight of the uninformed versus the enraged, annotations offer the hope that civil discourse can occur when users interact directly with the content. User contributions are marked by a small icon (in this case, a 1) that other site visitors can click on to expand:
How do you create an annotation? Here’s what the process of leaving an annotation looks like on Quartz:
Clicking on the + box brings up a simple text field to submit an annotation. Site authors and editors can moderate the content before it is posted, and reward thoughtful contributions by featuring or replying to the annotation.
See the Citi logo at top right of the text field? That’s a clever revenue approach to have corporate sponsors underwrite a specific technical feature. Sponsoring technical features offers a promising complement to a predominantly native advertising business model used by many news sites — with fewer of the underlying editorial concerns.
Annotations have been around forever in academia, but this relatively new web behavior will be familiar to a wider group of people who use comments in ubiquitous desktop applications like Word or PowerPoint.
The days of sitting back and passively viewing content are, for good or for ill, over. Finding ways for people to interact with content that encourage new ideas or productive debate is the new nut to crack.
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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 the data-driven insight it provided to the Obama campaign:
Some Tech staffers had dismissed email as old-fashioned and uncool, without understanding how indispensable it would be in saving the campaign.
Last week, the New York Times realized that boomers are still heavy email users (and valuable consumers for their advertisers):
We’re pleased to announce that starting on Tuesday, Aug. 6, Booming will publish a weekly e-mail newsletter. This means you won’t have to go looking for us — we’ll find you.
And it’s not just the old media stalwarts. Quartz announced this weekend that it’s expanding its daily brief to include a weekend edition.
When we tried out a weekend version of the Daily Brief a while back, the response was enthusiastic. So from today we’ll be in your inbox each Saturday morning too, with some thoughts on the week’s big themes and the best writing we’ve seen on Quartz and around the web. Please give us your feedback, as always, by replying to this email. We hope you enjoy it.
Photo credit: greggoconnell
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How to manage deceptive online reviews
Via Bits Blog, an academic study on deceptive reviews explores why web reviewers make up bad things. It turns out that false negative reviews are not written predominantly by competitors or disgruntled employees. These reviewers are often loyal customers who have made multiple purchases from the company — just not the product in question. Customers writing false reviews may be upset about a different transaction, see themselves as “self-appointed brand managers,” or be seeking social status and validation in a public forum.
The paper offers some recommendations for those designing business rules for review sites to consider:
- reduce social status ties to reviewing like “elite reviewer”
- stop reporting every user’s number of reviews
- make it more difficult to see all reviews by one reviewer
- require prior purchase of the product before writing the review
False reviews provide a terrific example of unintended consequences, like these unexpected benefits and perils of showing quantifiable metrics like a user’s number of reviews. Review sites are communities where human primate behaviors, as one colleague likes to call them, tend to inflate rather than retract. It’s clearly worth investing time upfront in experience design to increase the likelihood of legitimate reviews, and ongoing analytics to spot the trends surrounding the deceptive ones. You might want to leave just a little room for gaming the system, though: the 4,288 reviews of the Hutzler 571 Banana Slicer are priceless.
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.nyc enters the domain name fray
Just over a year ago, I wrote a couple of posts about generic top level domains (gTLDS) — what people were applying for, and the risks of domain expansion.
Last week Mayor Mike Bloomberg announced .nyc, a top level domain the city will make available only to NYC-based businesses and residents. The theory is that a high-rent, sought-after internet domain is a brand benefit, and an opportunity for NYC-based businesses. There are still a number of legitimate questions about the both the execution and the benefit, but it’s an interesting effort in the context of Bloomberg’s broader digital innovation legacy.
On the coattails of this announcement, GoDaddy announced a marketing effort to push Los Angeles firms to adopt the .la domains. Unlike the newly approved .nyc, the domain is already available, and assigned to Laos. Not sure how much traction this will get as a non-exclusive offer without alignment to broader digital city initiatives.
Is there value in .nyc and other city-based geographic domains promoting locale as brand? Or will knowing domain names become a charming anachronism, like knowing telephone numbers (1-800-54-GIANT, anyone?) before an age of one-click mobile Yelp and speed dial? Traffic referrals today come primarily from search and social, with mobile social on a rapid rise. If I had a relative investment to make, I would prioritize optimizing for social before the additional domain, but am curious to see who opts for both.