How Ms. Ileane Spreads Interesting Ideas to Strengthen and Embrace Her Community

This week, we put Ileane Smith in the Scoop.it Spotlight. Ileane has found many ways to benefit from curation and find success on Scoop.it. If you missed her story, here’s a recap:

“I’m always reaching out to the Scoop.it community, doing some searches, looking at people who scoop my stuff and discovering their topics. That has led me to educational topics, ledme to discover new users, and more. I like sharing things from other people. The power of Scoop.it for me is having all the different ways that I can share that content and keep track of it and put it out there for other people.”

–Ileane

Meet Ileane

You may or may not know Ileane as a blogging expert, but she wasn’t always that. Three years ago, Ileane didn’t even have her own blog. In fact, her daughter had just started one and that’s when she first got onto WordPress. While trying to subscribe to her daughter’s blog, she ended up creating one of her own, and took it as a sign! She started writing about anything she could think of, without focusing on a specific topic.

Soon, Ileane wanted to learn how to do different things with her blog. She was frustrated with the fact that there didn’t seem to be a central place to learn about things to do on WordPress, so she decided to start one herself – talk about ambition! With that motivation, Ileane took an online course, and started searching for and studying all different types of tutorials. Eventually, she began writing them too.

When she left WordPress, she started taking her blogging more seriously. She decided to self-host her blog and, after many long hours of brainstorming, came up with the bane “Basic Blog Tips.” After all, that is what she wanted to do; she just wanted to give people basic blog tips! After some time with this blog, Ileane realized the importance of finding a niche or a focus for a blog.

Not long after she got started, Ileane got her first form of public recognition. Cornell, in partnership with Yahoo, published a paper about people who shared things about their expertise on Twitter. Ileane was shocked to learn that she was among the “Twitter elite” alongside sites Mashable and Engadget! Although Ileane wondered what had gotten her on this list with many bloggers who she looked up to for some time, she took it as a sign that people really were seeing something special about her content. Combine that with the encouragement and confidence she gained from the people she met along the way, she realized that she actually was someone who people looked up to.

Ileane’s first experience with curation

Ileane first discovered curation through an old curation tool. At first, she really liked it, and began doing a few tutorials on it. What caught her the most about curation? The fact that you could say more than twitter, but you also had the community feel. Though this site no longer exists, Ileane says that she still has connections with people she met there.

When she began using curation more, she began to appreciate that she could collect things by topic and save them in other places than her own repository. Finding existing experts on certain topics was fascinating to Ileane. More importantly, though, she also discovered that curation is a great way to establish your own expertise and to demonstrate that you are the authority on a particular topic.

When it began: Scoop.it

Ileane first discovered Scoop.it through a link posted on Twitter by fellow curator Anise Smith. The second she saw Scoop.it, Ileane recalls thinking to herself “Oh my gosh that’s gorgeous!” She fell in love with everything about the layout and how it made the content stand out. Although it took her a second to figure out where to click, as soon as she got it, she was hooked.

Using Scoop.it, Ileane realized that curation was a great way for her to build authority in some topics related to her professional field. For example, she might be known for her expertise in blogging tutorials, but she also has a great interest in YouTube. Although this might not be blogging, Ileane has a personal aspiration to succeed in using YouTube as well. Curating her topic on YouTube has gotten her a lot of attention, because it crosses so many different areas like business, education, and so on. Ileane is also able to add to her expertise by curating a topic on podcasting. Because she herself is still a student of podcasting, she is able to use curation to find and look through articles and learn in the process.

Ileane hasn’t forgotten about her roots, though. She still has a Scoop.it topic about her blog. Though this tends to be easily misunderstood, she explains, she uses it to keep track of the people who mention or share her blog so she is able to thank and interact with that person. She always makes sure to go back and comment, even if she doesn’t have a chance at the time. Keeping all of these mentions and social connections in one place makes it easy for Ileane to stay in touch with, and more importantly, give back to her online community.

Goal: Expand her community while bringing it together

Though Ileane – like most of us – doesn’t have all the time in the world to spend online, Scoop.it helps her achieve her goals in the short time that she has to devote. She says that she has made new connections on Scoop.it, and has also encouraged a lot of connections that she already had to join the Scoop.it community. Ileane has found some really interesting users that are mostly in the field of education and social media, because of the niche that she is in. One of the ways she connects with people is by reaching out to the people to share and Rescoop her content. Ileane also says that she was familiar with a lot of people in the education sector that she hadn’t had the opportunity to connect with until they connected on Scoop.it.

And most importantly, Ileane’s best-kept curating secret:

“Content is not king, because it’s the connections and the collaborations that you have with people that really rule the internet.”

And, to add to that, Ileane “wants to encourage everybody to try Scoop.it because, if you go in there and search for a topic that you’re interested in, you can be on there all day long.”

Stay tuned to find out who will be the next one in the #ScoopitSpotlight!

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