Should social networks curate their own content? Or should users do it?
The challenge [for social networks] is to create something of permanent value for the community, to offer more than a temporary spotlight.
Austin Powell comes back on PaidContent the recent announcement by Tumblr to shut down Sotryboard and lay off the editorial team that was highlighting and curating Tumblr’s best content.
He makes a point that it’s been extremely hard for most social networks – with the notable exception of LinkedIn with its influencer program – to add value by curating its users’ best content.
I wonder whether that’s actually such a big deal. Continue reading
The only web services that don’t change are the dead ones
Some of you have asked, “How do we decide on making changes on Scoop.it?” We felt that this is an interesting opportunity to share the answer openly.
First, let me start by saying that it’s a process that has evolved to become much more complex now that millions are using Scoop.it every week. In the beginning, we were able to let our vision and intiution guide us, but now we have a responsibility to you, the Scoop.it community, who have decided to use this service as your content curation hub on a daily basis.
Sometimes decisions are easy: when you asked for curated newsletter capability on our feedback forum, it was just a matter of planning this together with the right resources and partner. It can take some time (bear with us…) but the decisions are simple. Sometimes, it’s a question of vision: we have strong values and a vision for what we feel content curation and the interest graph should stand for, and that of course. continues to guide us just like we recently experimented by launching Read.it.
At the UX (user experience) level though, this can be more difficult: not so much for the inspiration and the big ideas but for the little details that can have a big impact. Should this button be at the top or the bottom? Left or right? Should we give users one main option and a bunch of secondary ones or should we highlight the three that are the used most often? Did we make that feature visible enough? Or is it too prominently displayed and annoying? A lot of these questions don’t have good or bad answers you can easily guess: you have to try out to find out. Continue reading
Time for next-generation interest-based content curation? RIP Google Reader
TechCrunch: Google just revealed plans to shut down eight of its services as part of what it’s calling an ongoing spring cleaning effort. Some of them are pretty arcane, but among TechCrunch writers, anyway, we’re pretty bummed to see that Google Reader will be shut down on July 1.
Here’s my take on it. Continue reading
A communication revolution and the rise of mobile user-generated content
Isn’t it time for text to enter the mobile UGC (UGC) revolution?
When Facebook bought Instagram for $1B last year, some called it genius, others called it luck. But whether we think that deal made sense or not, it marked an important change in the history of the web in general and of mobile internet in particular: the rise of mobile user-generated content. Continue reading
The Big Problem With Facebook's Graph Search: Privacy Constraints | Fast Company
“If the future of search is likely to be social, the future of social is likely to involve more search.”
This is a post I wrote for Fast Company on the conflicting tension I immediately saw following the launch of Graph Search by Facebook. Facebook’s new search tool will either have to remain private, resulting in limited, biased content, or make private data accessible to search.
Here’s why.
How Google Author Rank could change content marketing… and journalism
Here’s a little piece of SEO nerdery that affects us all: Google is using Google+ to influence search results in a big way, and brands and media organizations alike have yet to wake up to the…
Erin Griffith analyzes how the use of authorships combined with Google+ is now impacting Google search results.
This change is not new but, as she puts it, it is significant: “Google was always about the algorithm, not curation, certainly not curation through something as, well, human as a social network. The emphasis before was about what was on the page not who wrote it.”
While she focuses on the new importance of authorship given by Google, what’s happening is actually a mix of a couple of things which are in my opinion equally good:
- Authorship
- Social results
#1 means that an identified, reputable author will prevail; #2 is part of the social signal that Google uses more and more to rank results and that builds on curators’ activity.
Bottom line is that – as I predicted a while ago – the age of low-quality content cheaply produced by random anonymous writers in content farms for pure SEO purposes is over. By combining a measure of the author’s influence as well as taking into account curators’ appetite for a piece of content, Google is bringing quality back in the game. Which is good for authors, curators and… readers.
See on pandodaily.com Continue reading
The New SEO Rules in a Content Marketing World
Five years ago, SEO was all the buzz. Today, it has shifted to “content marketing,” which aims to create stories humans want to read and engage with. – The above chart is a good summary of this trend.
Shane Snow makes a good summary on Mashable of the trends impacting SEO these days. We moved from a machiavellian approach to game Google to influence-based content marketing because social media changed the game as others have observed before.
The success of Social Content Curation is a good example of that trend: human sharing and curating content beat the system and become such an important trend that Google had not only to change their algorithms but also start a social network just because of that.
See on mashable.com Continue reading
The end of fame (as we know it)
I gave this talk at TechWeek L.A. (where else on such a topic?) last week as I felt the new social media evolutions, particularly the rise of the interest graph, are making things move quickly on that subject.
Why do we remember famous people in history? How? How about today’s celebrities? And how are the Internet and the Social Web changing that now?
A look at the fame creation process tells us it is indissociable from the media creation process, which has been deeply impacted by new information technology. The Andy Warhol prediction is probably no longer valid and we need to rethink fame in the context of a distributed Internet network which more and more becomes topic-centric and no longer people-centric.
Content curation: your next Social Media Marketing idea
These are the slides of my talk at the Social Media for Non-Profits conference in San Francisco today.
1. Why does Content Curation matter for marketers?
2. 7 Best practices for Content Curation
3. And great examples of NPO’s effectively using Content Curation.
Part #3 is specific to NPO’s (but might be inspiring to any Content Curator) but #1 and #2 are generic for all Content Marketers.
Photo by JD Lasica – Thanks!
See on www.slideshare.net Continue reading
How much B2B traffic can Content Curation bring to a website? Study finds 464% growth in just 4 months.
This is a very interesting case study by the team at B2B Content Engine on the impact Content Curation has on a B2B web site’s traffic. B2B sites typically have niche audiences which are hard to find from untargetted methods and costly to generate with targeted advertising.
What this study shows is that consistent content curation provided not only impressive results on traffic growth but also lead generation conversion at a 12% rate. In addition to many other great benefits such as brand visibility, awareness, etc…
It also gives an idea of the volume of content that was required to achieve that, which – compared to what we see users typically achieve on Scoop.it – is very similar and reasonable.
It also supports some other best practices we’ve mentioned already such as:
- being multi-channel: traffic doesn’t come from one source but combining several channels (linkedin, twitter, …) is key; it’s what we call the hub model.
- frequent publishing: it’s not about reaching our massive volumes so much than it is about publishing every week.
- use of topic site customization or web site integration to facilitate lead conversions (typically what Scoop.it Business allows to do very simply)
- giving context is important: for readers but also for SEO reasons.