The Idea Farm's Blog

  If you are a professor or graduate student, you know more about your field of study than most of the writers giving written sermons on opinion pages, Quora pages, Sub-Redditt’s, Twitter feeds, and possibly bookshelves right now. Your research and education informs your point of view. You know what you’re writing about — but commentators might know better how to write for a general audience. This means that the voices who have the most to contribute to public discourse are often getting drowned out. If this is something you struggle with, here are some writing tips to reach a broader audience: Don’t approach your introduction like it’s the warm-up before you get to the good stuff. Approach it like your only chance to attract your reader into your thoughts. Your lead is your opportunity to engage your reader: You’re conveying that your words are worth the reader’s effort. If you have writer’s block, look at the opening paragraphs of a practiced columnist, someone like Maureen Dowd ...

Instagram is Helping You Focus With Quiet Mode Instagram is launching ‘Quiet mode’ to help people focus, and to encourage people to set boundaries with friends and followers. Once enabled, you won’t receive any notifications, your profile’s activity status will change to ‘In quiet mode’ and we’ll automatically send an autoreply when someone DMs you. Instagram users have told them that they sometimes want to take time for themselves and are seeking ways to focus at night, while studying, and during work or school.  With quiet mode one can simply customize hours to fit your schedule and once the feature is turned off, we’ll show you a quick summary of notifications so you can catch up on what you missed. ‘Quiet mode’ is available to everyone in the US, United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and Instagram hopes to expand to more countries soon. Instagram Supports Teens’ safety with Updated Parental Supervision Tools Instagram aims to help parents be more aware o...

  According to a NewsLab study, 80% of journalists use social media in their daily work 1 . Journalists told us that they’re using social media to complete a variety of work-related tasks, including story promotion, networking, sourcing information, and receiving PR pitches. Naturally, time management becomes a challenge and social media burnout is imminent. On top of the rising demand for content output, journalists are expected to be always listening and always engaging. Monitoring the latest news and user-generated content and promoting their own stories on social media can take up a large amount of time in a journalist’s day.   So how can journalists find and maintain a balance between staying on top of the latest news, connecting with their audience, and getting everything else accomplished? When you’re checking social media platforms daily for your job, how can you tell when you’ve reached your mental limit? To help you recognize some signs of social media burnout a...

  Implementing integrated marketing strategies and delivering measurable results is the essence of comprehensive marketing solutions for businesses across all industries. Due to budgets, specializations, and trust concerns, finding a marketing agency is challenging for many companies. Agencies help businesses develop marketing strategies that capture leads and engage them through advertising. Instead of focusing on the low-hanging fruit and quick fixes, an agency provides long-term strategies and results-driven initiatives and campaigns. A marketing agency or firm can help with the following 5 bedrocks of marketing strategy 1. Uncover Solutions to your current business challenges and market environment. 2. Identify Goals of your main marketing objectives and sets specific, quantifiable goals. 3. Create Strategies that are within your budget, customizing plans to assist you with reaching goals. 4. Generate Campaigns and executes them to attain the short-term and long-term goals ...

Nothing is what happens when you go through the motions instead of utilizing social media to advance the goals of your product or organization. Below are the most essential actions and the most common mistakes organizations make. 1. Do Make a Social Media Plan. You need to decide first what you’ll post (both words and images), how often to schedule your posts, what “brand voice” and “brand design or look” you’ll use and who’ll keep your profiles up to date. 2. Don’t Let your accounts fall by the wayside . The fundamental sin of social media is not keeping to a routine schedule of updates. 3. Do broadcast and Do not chat . Your presence on social media is about conversation and visibility. If you’re blasting messages into either the wrong venue or target, you’re missing the benefits of engagement. 4. Do respond quickly . One recent survey showed that a third of customers who contacted businesses through social channels expected a response within half an hour, regardless of the hour. 5. ...