Traffic to The Conversation — that written-by-academics-for-everyone-else site that’s always been a port of last resort for expert opinion content — is way up since the beginning of the pandemic, says Columbia Journalism Review.
“Way up” = 81 million page views in April for all The Conversation sites plus republication by other sites — double that of April 2019.…
Every client I work with quickly reveals their safe words.
No, not like that. Not “pineapples.”
At first, my clients use these safe words to mean: this content angle we’re developing is probably too risky. It’s tickling a tripwire for their audiences.…
Your organization had an opportunity these last two months that most research-driven organizations didn’t take.
Did yours?
The opportunity, that is, to answer a simple question, posed nicely by Geoffrey Director, the VP of Intelligence at the content marketing firm Manifest:
…What is the content that only your brand can provide that would also be genuinely valuable to your audience?
Here’s a condensed version of what I’m telling all my clients — all researchers who run their own teams and organizations, large and small — right now:
There is only one story for the foreseeable future.
If you can’t be hyper-relevant to it, hold off on almost all your communications for now.…
Research-driven organizations, as a rule, are (unlike the rest of the world) obsessed with what’s on their websites.
So why do their websites all look the same? And why is the content so dull?
It’s because these organizations aren’t obsessed with their websites as vehicles of differentiation — but as extensions of their organizations and organizational mindsets.…
How do you decide what specific tactics — tweeting? op-eds? a roundtable? smoke signals? — to use in communicating your research idea to non-specialists?
Most research communication efforts throw up their collective hands and say: let’s do everything. Or let’s do what we always do.…
The Agitator, a must-read newsletter on fundraising trends and strategy for non-profits, last week posted a series on audience building amidst the ever-shifting sands of Google and Facebook. (In two words: treacherous.) Some takeaways:
How can you engage exactly the grass-tops people you want talking about your ideas, expertise and new research?
Katy Napotnik of The Urban Institute reveals Urban’s blueprint for doing so in a Medium essay that every CEO, director and comms director at research-driven organizations should marinate in.…
Not commercially — I know that’s Instagram and your local pet costume pop-up store. I mean scientifically. Who can scientifically explain why the hell we love Halloween so much?
Mathias Clasen, for a start. Five years ago, Clasen (an assistant professor of literature and media at Aarhus University) wrote this wonderful synthetic essay for the British Psychological Society, curating what research says about the anthropological and evolutionary psychological roots of Halloween.…
All of the leaders of research-driven groups I’ve worked with over the last five years have two things in common (other than their work being based in research).