It’s easy to spot the difference between an organization with digital DNA and an organization still making the transition. Here’s an example highlighting different approaches to breaking news. On Monday morning the Nobel Prize in chemistry was announced. The Wall Street Journal was pushing the story via multiple Twitter accounts. So I clicked on one …
Friday 5 — 7.31.2015
Optimizing your business for local search starts with working through the fundamentals. Brush up on your tactics with the ultimate guide to local SEO ranking. Looks matter. An experiment revealed that news site homepages get more pageviews and user engagement when they have contemporary image-rich and modular layouts. Modular pages have discrete blocks of customizable and portable content, …
Friday 5 — 7.24.2015
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 — 6.19.2015
Buzzfeed released a news app — and it’s a triumph of substance over listicles. The iOS-only app has a clean design and feature set for mobile, streamlined social sharing, and easy customization options. It’s relatively late to the game compared to the pared down and newly-free NYT Now, but will still likely be a contender for …
Friday 5 — 6.12.15
Cancel all your meetings today and read: “What is code?“ Finished with item number 1? Then turn your attention to the Nieman Lab’s elegant explanation of Apple’s news initiatives announced this week at WWDC. Here’s why we should stop designing for millennials as if they were an entirely homogeneous generation, alien to the ones that preceded it. Instead, …
Here’s why Google indexing tweets matters
This week I was looking for an article about the pressures of media coverage on scientific research to send to a few colleagues. All I could remember was that it was in the New York Times recently, and had the words “perils” and “publishing” in the title. So I searched within Google News for “perils publishing science nytimes” …
Friday 5 — 5.22.2015
For those of you already planning your Memorial Day driving routes, Google Maps has released useful, new features alerting users to delays and detours as you enter your destination. Beyond the time estimate, new cards provide additional context about potential delays. Related trivia: Google Maps also released the top destinations from Memorial Day 2014. Google is once again showing tweets in …
Friday 5 — 3.27.2015
We are all generating a lot of data, and are attempting to serve it up in meaningful charts. This post addresses four ways charts can focus less on their appearance, and more on delivering relevant answers and insights. “Beautiful, terrible, and addictive” Twitter has turned nine. Today, it’s a critical source for breaking news with one billion tweets sent every …
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 …
Friday 5 — 2.6.2015
Social media preferences vary by race and ethnicity. Instagram users reflect some stark differences, with 38% of blacks and 34% of Latinos using the photo sharing service, compared to just 21% of whites. In the surprising news category, it turns out that the best Gmail app for the iPhone is now made by Microsoft. Gmail has always worked well …