Strategic Communications Planning Resources

Planning Tools

1. •Plan on a Page (POP).ppt
   

2. •Audience insight map.doc
   

3. •Goal setter.doc
   

4. •Message distiller.doc
   

5. •Message segmentation map.doc
   

6. •Media selection map.doc
   

7. •Social media messenger.doc
   

8. •Strategy maker.doc
   

Additional Planning Resources

1. 

   •(unfinished) A clickable version of the POP tool, with step-by-step guidelines and links behind each section.

Social Media Metrics Links

1. •Robin Broitman’s “Social Media Metrics Superlist”
   

2. •Mashable’s Ben Parr on “How to Track Social Media Analytics”
   

3. •Sarah Evans’ “15 Ways to Measure Return on Engagement (ROE) of Social Media”

Smart Users of Social Media

1. •CDC’s Swine Flu Social Media Tools
   

2. •Peter King’s wiki of social media marketing examples
   

3. •Red Cross
   

Social Media Metrics

1. •Google Analytics
   

2. •Google Blog Search
   

3. •Tweetbeep  
   

4. •Tweetreach
   

5. •Bit.ly

Writing Resources

Writing Tools

1. •Digital writing checklist.pdf
   

Research on how people read the Web and social media

1. •Dan Zarella’s The Science of Retweets. (2009). Compared to random tweets, retweets are 3x more likely to contain a link; more likely to contain concrete and novel words; and more likely to include calls to action (please, help, and check out were in top 20 words)
   

2. •OTOinsights’ An Analysis of Digg.com Engagement and User Behavior. (2009) Story headlines are the chief determinant of Digg voting, and short, direct headlines dominate.
   

3. •Jakob Nielsen’s Twitter Postings: Iterative Designs (2009).  How to design twitter postings and the importance of “costly signals.”
   

4. •Harald Weinreich et al: Not Quite the Average: An Empirical Study of Web Use (2008). On average, people read 20 percent of words on a page; that drops as word count rises.
   

5. •Stanford-Makovsky Web Credibility Study 2002.  Appearances matter -- people judge credibility of a site based on how professional it looks.
   

6. •Brian Clark’s The 80/20 Rule of Headline Writing (2006). On average, 8 out of 10 people will read a blog’s headline, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest.
   

Eyetracking studies

1. •Jakob Nielsen’s F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content (2007). Web users scan, often in an F-pattern, with a glance across the top, then down the left margin and in whenever something grabs them. They are far more likely to read the first graph than any other, and far more likely to read the first two words on a line than any words after them.
   

2. •Poynter Institute’s Eyetracking and the News (2007). Nearly half of visitors to online news sites read only headlines, story lists, teasers, summaries, other page display elements.
   

3. •Jakob Nielsen’s Newsletter Usability (2007). The average time spent reading a newsletter was 51 seconds. Participants primarily scanned, reading only 19 percent of a newsletter.
   

Neuroscience research on how people read

1. •Nicole K. Speer, Jeremy R. Reynolds, Khena M. Swallow, and Jeffrey M. Zacks. Reading stories activates neural representations of visual and motor experiences. Psychological Science, 20(8):989–999, 2009
   

2. •Friedemann Pulvermüller. Brain mechanisms linking language and action. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 6(7):576–582, July 2005.
   

3. •Jennifer Edson Escalas’ Narrative Processing: Building Consumer Connections to Brands Journal of Consumer Psychology, 14(1 & 2):168-179, 2004.