The Scoop.it Content Curation Blog

How content curation can help you to engage your audiences

Articles by Clair Byrd

Are current events the new keywords?

The “trending topics” section on Twitter has always been a fascinating example of virality to me. Sometimes, you get the weirdest combination of stuff (Pandora, women, and Christmas?), and it makes me wonder “how on Earth did that make it into the trending topics?” But, because of the power of trends on social media, I’ve begun to wonder how current events can impact content strategy. For instance, if I were to produce and publish a brilliant infographic and publish it on the same day that Kanye throws another Twitter tantrum — how does that affect the engagement on my post? How much traffic do I lose because the social web has its collective eyes turned toward Chipotle? It’s definitely an interesting (and possibly depressing) subject to ponder.

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Why Content Curation is the Ultimate Compliment to the Creator

Before today, imitation was the greatest form of flattery. If your idea was good enough to be copied, then you were golden. But now, with the state of the web in our lives, this balance is shifting. While “copying” still does exist online, the concept of “copying” is now simply a way to bump your own Google ranking by farming someone else’s content. This, is not flattering. Even if correctly cited, 100% republished work is simply cheating to get ahead. Curation, on the other hand — the meaningful selection, enrichment, and sharing of existing media — combines imitation and creation. Curators have to create a new perspective or idea on top of the existing media which supports the content in the original.

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5 ways to engage your audience through authentic communication

Communications from branded properties, celebrities, or anyone with a “following” can often come of as false, contrived, and sometimes insensitive, even if they have the best intentions. This article was inspired by a recent email campaign I received, where the “reply” email address was “no-reply@redacted.com.” This gave me pause. I don’t know why this particular email campaign set me off, but I was genuinely irritated that they would really prevent me from interacting with their brand. Who wants to be told they actively can’t reach out to someone who is proactively talking to them. That’s basically a brand saying “you don’t matter and we don’t want to talk to you.”

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Are knowledge-sharing institutions showing too much bias?

Our knowledge sharing institutions of today are beginning to “humanize,” to focus more of their resources on creating readable, shareable media than on reporting cold, hard facts, simply to stay relevant and on top of peoples’ online radars. To make facts more palatable, many medias will interpret ideas with respect to their own unique brand Point-of-View, one only has to consider CNN versus FOX news here in the USA. But, do institutions who stand and a major knowledge source for world readers have a responsibility to keep bias out of their findings? Is “fact omission” or “spin” an appropriate way to interact with vital facts? Or, as I seem to see it, has major marketing technique got its claws too far into our knowledge sharing institutions and our own lives (because, really, we as readers are the ones who perpetuate this problem).

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Trending: Social Calls To Action

Social media has been changing recently with the advent of cool new curation tools like us and RebelMouse, all of which extend the life of your social content by significant margins. With this in mind, tweets and other posts that are simply headlines with a link are no longer good enough. As social media continues to morph, you need to think about social like you think about SEO — optimized for clicking. A million retweets don’t count for much if no one ever actually interacts with your brand. As you create positioning for your social content, consider these new Social Calls-to-Action, or SCTAs.

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The Miley Cyrus Effect: Leveraging Current Events in your Content Strategy

Recently, I’ve noticed a spike in the rate at which pop cultural current events get picked up in both major and minor media. A quick google search for “Miley Cyrus VMA” yields a shocking 71,600,000 results, many from massively influential media sources, such as CNN, the Huffington Post, and Mashable. Many of these sites don’t even include a commentary or any original content at all, choosing instead to simply re-post the notorious video. I also recently came across this post, where the author was so frustrated by the lack of views on his other, much more brilliant content, that he falsely labeled an article with “Miley Cyrus,” simply to get his content in front of people.

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The Like economy: how social gratitude affects content efforts

Studies have shown that our brain reacts positively to our content being “liked” or shared on social media. Social gratitude, and notoriety among a peer group, are really the only reasons individuals post content to social media. If no one likes your post, it even can bring you down, or make you feel like no one cares. This is especially prevalent among the youth, with 52% of the teenage Facebook users of the iGeneration (born in the 1990s) clicking “like” daily or even several times a day. Generation Y were a close second with 45% daily “like” clicks, followed closely by 32% of Gen Xers and 24% of Baby Boomers.

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Driving revenue with social, content, marketing automation

Slodes of the talk Jason Miller gave at the Scoop.it #leancontent meetup on Sept. 25, 2013.

theclairbyrd‘s insight:

We recently hosted our event series, #leancontent, with a guest from LinkedIn. His presentation focuses on driving revenue using smart content and optimized distribution steams. Check it out!

See on www.slideshare.net

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Content curation for SEO — from professional purposes to personal passions

Editor’s Note: We’ve always held that content curation (with added insight and value) is great for SEO. The below infographic (courtesy of TechMagnate and Beth Kanter) lays out some of the benefits of content curation.

What exactly is content curation? To Scoop.it, its the “meaningful selection and sharing of online content for professional purposes or personal passions.” Professional purposes run the gamut from thought leadership to product marketing, and personal passions can be gathering and sharing knowledge about anything that gets your engine going. Many people curate every day without knowing it — whether it is sharing an insightful article they discovered on their favorite blog or retweeting a thought leader of their choosing. Curation is everywhere!

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Stealing images from the web vs using images ethically [infographic] | visua.ly

Editor’s Note: Copyright and fair use of images is oftentimes a difficult set of rules to follow. It’s very easy with the tools available (namely Google Image search) to grab pictures and use them without thinking whether you are using that image fairly or not. While this infographic is a bit self-promotional on behalf of imgembed.com, they are a useful platform for making the web a better, more fair place. Take a look! 

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Learning how to write effective sentences for the web

Communication between people is 55% body language, 38% tone of voice, and only 7% the words you actually say. Quickly consider the impact of stripping away 93% of the meaning someone understands from an idea you are trying to communicate — something we do every single day when we create or interact online. The efficacy of that remaining 7% becomes incredibly important, especially if you have business or personal brand investments on the line.

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Are you a thought leader?

Ask.com says that a thought leader is an individual or firm that is recognized as an authority in a specialized field and whose expertise is sought and often rewarded. In a world where information is often it’s own currency, thought leaders are seen as a resource because in order to earn that status, they have made a career of focusing on their primary expertise. Being a thought leader has cachet and, according to Malcolm Gladwell, if you spend 10,000 hours focused on one thing, then you’ll end up being an expert at it.

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Learning to learn: 5 ways to optimize your to-do list

The age old to-do list — a common tool to help get $#&T done. In my years of to-do listing, I’ve discovered that it is often this common productivity trick that actually prevents me from being optimally productive. Yes, counter-intuitive, but true. This oft bottleneck-in-disguise make me feel like I am a super hero, that in fact, yes I can finish 2908329874 tasks in the next three hours while simultaneously cooking for a dinner party and writing my novel.

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Ideas reign supreme — We raised 2.6 M and hired an ace new VP to continue molding the web’s content into ideas that matter

Why are we here?

For a long while, the Scoop.it team has had a vision that fostering ideas, molding existing content into more valuable forms, and sharing knowledge with their communities of interest is what our platform can do best. Recently, after many conversations and interactions with our community, we realized that these values and behaviors were being adopted by more and more users across the platform. As a team, we immediately resonated with these users and we’re excited to be seeing our vision become more and more concrete as time passes.

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Mini infographics to share!

Myself and the Scoop.it team have begun creating miniature infographics (affectionately called “micrographs” at the office) based on Scoop.it user data we’ve discovered over the past few months. These are absolutely free for you to save, enrich with your own thoughts, and share with the entire world.

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The day Google Reader died.

Today, Google Reader was officially turned off. While not a fundamentally game-changing action on its own, when coupled with several other trends in the online content landscape such as the rise of curated media (Upworthy, etc) and the development of new curation and reading tools (Flipboard and our own Read.it), we can infer that a major shift is coming our way, and coming fast.

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Can an algorithm really predict love at first sight? | citizentekk

theclairbyrd‘s insight:

I’ve always questioned the efficacy of online dating websites that use robots and math to select possible partner choices between people.

I think that online dating, at its core, probably does “work.” But I think that math and robots will always return “safe” potential pairs and takes away the potential for the magic of human chemistry to create unique and sometimes non-sensical or non-typical pairings that are incredibly successful.

Is this okay? Of course it is. But I think that taking away the human component of match-making in preference of safe bets is a mistake. In the war of people vs robots and the automation of the entire world, romance should always be organized and curated by people.

See on citizentekk.com

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