Twitter and its impact IRL

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Here in the US, the Dow recently tumbled almost 150 points in a “flash crash” caused by widespread digital panic. What was the cause of this panic? Twitter.

The bigger story is that someone hacked the official AP Twitter handle and tweeted a false report of a terrorist attack on the White House, which claimed that the President had been injured in said attack. This is significant in the grander scheme because the Dow essentially measures the health of the US economy and a hit of this magnitude means lots of people (deserving or otherwise) needlessly lost a lot of money in nanoseconds. Continue reading →

Effective community building for social change

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NOTE: Eric is talking about the non-profit sector, but these rules apply seamlessly to for-profit operations, personal brands, and enthusiasts.

There are currently around 1.5 million non-profits registered in the US alone, with total contributions amounting to just under $300 billion. But while many charitable organizations do spend more than 66% of a donation on their actual mission, it is a rare case. Perhaps more importantly, donors have very little control over their money and how it gets used, or to what end. Continue reading →

Lame to fame: 4 tips for optimizing presentations for Twitter

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Presentations and slideshows have been historically one of the most boring and standard corporate media currently available to employees and management. They are meant to purely educational or purely for selling — they are very rarely anything but a pitch or a corporate update. But with the rise of Slideshare as a platform for sharing a new kind of presentation, a lean, value-adding, and stand-alone type of presentation, and its proof as a viable option for driving traffic, the “corporate presentation” can be leveraged for more than its functional purpose and optimized to spread the company or personal message via social media.

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Clash of the Titans

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Recently, Flipboard, the reading platform for iPad, announced a new feature allowing users to create their own personalized magazines with Flipboard content. Ironically, we also recently unveiled a new feature. We created Read.it, an interest-based reading application powered by Scoop.it content and curated by our community of users. Why is this ironic? Because the two huge platforms for curating and consuming content have simultaneously entered each other’s spaces at the exact same time. Continue reading →

The only web services that don’t change are the dead ones

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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 →

From the Desk of Scoop.it President Marc Rougier

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Scoopiteers,

It takes four legs for a service to run well and fast:

- a tangible value proposition

- an efficient and pleasant user experience (UX)

- a responsive and competent customer support

- a reliable quality of service (QoS)

Scoop.it helps people and businesses shine on the web by sharing content that matters. We are working hard to constantly refine your user experience, and to do so, we regularly conduct performance measurement, and listen to your invaluable feedback. We encourage our support team to create a close relationship with you as we value your continued support and engagement with our team and the product. (for more details, please #AskAlly).

But despite relentless efforts, March has been a very bad month with our QoS – meaning that we failed you on our product’s performance and service. Please accept our sincere apologizes on behalf of Guillaume, myself and the entire Scoop.it team. I’d like to also share some information about what exactly happened; and, most importantly, I want to reassure you: the problems are now fixed. We are up and running with lots of spare power, and it’s full steam ahead!

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4 ways to educate your audience and spread your message via mobile

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In the 3rd quarter of 2012, 1.03 billion smartphones were reported as active worldwide, which means nearly 1 in 5 people is walking around with the internet in their pocket. Nielsen recently announced that of these 1.03 billion smartphones, 42% of mobile users browsed and 23% purchased products via mobile in the last 30 days, which means there are 432,600,000 sets of engaged mobile eyes and 236,900,000 sets of thumbs actively purchasing products and services via mobile. These numbers are only growing. Continue reading →

Educate and engage your customer through social media: The Zappos Strategy

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We are more than just shoes! Zappos is a service company that just happens to sell ________. These are two statements that sit at the core of everything Zappos is, and guide Zappos as a company that continues to innovate. As the Social Community Manager of Zappos, I want that answer to be clothing, fashion, snowboards, footwear, cookware, bedding, and so much more. But Zappos is typically associated with 2 things: Footwear and great customer service. Continue reading →

Announcing our newest offering — Read.it!

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For the past few months, the team here at Scoop.it has been focusing on “taking curation beyond the platform,” our own little bit of rebellion against computer-only or anti-mobile curation tools and platforms. We launched a fantastic re-design of our iPhone application, integrated Scoop.it with MailChimp to easily take your curation to the world of email, and some other great stuff too.

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An easy recipe to share your Scoop.it newsletter with Twitter and Facebook

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I’ve been listening to all the feedback from our awesome community about our newest service offering, the MailChimp Newsletter integration feature, and have been hearing that many people would like the option of sharing the newsletter with their social audiences. This would require hosting the completed newsletter somewhere online with a public link to share. Unfortunately, this functionality doesn’t exist within Scoop.it yet (not to say it won’t shortly), but I’ve concocted a little work-around for everyone who wants to share their newsletter this way. It requires an extra tool, but its all free and pretty easy to do, and the end result is great.

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