The Scoop.it Content Curation Blog

How content curation can help you to engage your audiences

Articles by Guillaume Decugis

5 Ways To Prove To Your Boss You Need Content Curation

Posted on
July 30, 2014
by

Have You Made the Business Case For Content Curation? If not, this data will help persuade your management to invest in content curation.

Source: heidicohen.com

This is a solid summary by Heidi Cohen on why content curation is besoming essential to businesses. Its role to content strategy mix has evolved from being anecdotical a few years ago to becoming central as it not only helps fill the gap but provides meaningful synergies for your created content.

 

Now as Heidi puts it, content curation is not free: while it’s – as she puts it – “a low cost way to fill your content marketing pipeline“, low doesn’t mean zero. I still regularly have debates with people who think that automated aggregation can replace content curation: it doesn’t. There’s no way to set it up once and forget about it. You’ll need to invest as little as 15 minutes a day to achieve results but these 15′ need to be spent.

Read More

Introducing Templates, Embedded Topics, and WordPress Integration through Scoop.it

Posted on
July 23, 2014
by

We started Scoop.it for a simple reason: back 4 years ago, we observed that Web 2.0 didn’t just bring all of us an opportunity but also created an expectation that would require new tools for busy professionals. With blogs, social networks and content platforms, you don’t just have a chance to become a media if you’d like to: you are now expected to regularly publish content. The content we publish determines not only how visible we are online but also shapes other people’s perception of our interests, our areas of expertise, our skills etc.

In short, you are the content you publish.

Of course, this means first of all you should participate and that’s what we’ve been focusing on enabling so far: an experience and a curation technology that makes it easier and time-efficient to discover, curate and publish quality content on our interests. But because this content is intimately connected to our online identity, reputation and brand, we’re pleased to launch today awesome and super easy new ways to brand your curated content with Scoop.it:

Read More
Posted in
Product News

Should you re-publish your content to other blogs, Medium or LinkedIn blog? A data-driven answer

Posted on
July 18, 2014
by

One of the Lean Content best practices we’ve seen several speakers at our meetups recommend is to leverage existing audiences on top of your own to increase the reach and the impact of your content. While your blog may or may not yet have a strong audience, there’s always more people to reach. By placing your content on publishing platforms which offer interesting discovery mechanisms or having blogs that are read in your industry re-publish it, you could in theory multiply your own reach by not doing much more.

Though the idea makes perfect sense, it also comes with questions:

1. Re-publishing on other platforms can be more or less complex: some like LinkedIn publishing platform or Medium are public or in the process of being public; some industry blogs (for example, in our space, Social Media Today or Business 2 Community) recruit contributors based on their own selection criteria.

2. Re-publishing content is creating potentially duplicate content which could hurt SEO and defeat the purpose.

3. Re-publishing content means it’s read on a platform from where we can’t convert our audience: to subscribe to our blog, to sign up for a demo of Scoop.it, etc. As part of our own Content Marketing efforts, conversion is an important metric.

At Scoop.it, we like to put ideas to the test so we did an experiment a few weeks ago to come out with data that would support or reject this.

Read More

Social Media Engagement is Not a Strategy

Posted on
July 14, 2014
by

 

Social media marketers are keen to drive engagement but it may not necessarily be a viable strategy. In fact, it comes at a cost.

Source: www.slideshare.net

Mark Schaefer has a great point: we often confuse the means with the end.

In a blog post that I wrote a couple weeks ago, I explained why I thought social media publishing was dead – as we know it. One of these points was that the impact of publishing on social media for our goals is the combination of volume, quality and engagement. As Mark explains, engagement is only one variable in that equation.

So how can you convert your social media activity to make it count towards your goals?

One of the important basic first step you can take is to make sure you publish through a content hub that you can make your own and from where you can convert visitors: to subscribe to your content, to reshare your previously published content or to sign up for whatever pre-sales activity makes sense in your business.

Read More
Posted in
Content Curation

Your employees are your brand

Posted on
July 8, 2014
by

In this talk, Mark Burgess brings to our attention how employees, through social media, are changing how companies market to, and engage with, customers and prospects. With the transparency and opportunity for personal connections that social media offers, pushing fabricated, unauthentic sales pitches doesn’t work anymore. Instead, we are witnessing the rise of the social employee who creates a win/win proposition by leveraging their personal brands to build trust and increase the digital “surface area” of the brands for which they work. The result is nothing short of a revolution.

Source: www.youtube.com

“Employees are the brand at IBM” said IBM’s Ethan McCarty. But isn’t it true in a lot of companies? 


Are your employees thought leaders then? Or rather, what are you doing to develop – and show – their thought leadership?


As Burgess develops in his talk, there is a clear synergy between developing employees into thought leaders and building the corporate brand. 


But how can this be achieved? 


As shown in this topic, thought leadership is highly connected to knowledge. Empowering employees to share their knowledge easily and in an engaging and rewarding way therefore becomes critical:

– easily because they don’t have (much) time,

– engaging because they won’t do it if it’s not impacting,

– rewarding because that’s what’s in it for them.

Aggregating, promoting and spreading that knowledge through collaborative content hubs like the ones Scoop.it Enterprise offers that show the collective curation work of your brand’s employees is one of the most efficient ways to promote your brand: by promoting them.

A win-win deal for all. 

Read More

How Content Curation and Repurposing Extend the Life of Your Content Marketing

Posted on
July 7, 2014
by

Content Repurposing – Updating or changing content into a different form than the original to serve a different audience or the same audience differently.

Source: www.toprankblog.com

When I started to publish content, I felt frustrated that it didn’t have the impact I wanted. I had spent hours, sometimes day on trying to get thoughts, data and examples together and when hitting publish, the post only lasted for a few minutes before being drowned in the social media flow. 

Several techniques like the ones Lee Odden mentions here addressing just that and prevents your content from “melting like wet snow as soon as it hits the ground“.

Read More

Sharing is not enough: why you need a content hub for your online presence.

Posted on
June 16, 2014
by

Social media needs to be part of an overall sales and marketing strategy that includes your website, not something that is isolated from everything else you do to promote your business. It isn’t a one hit wonder that will magically drive people to your business.

Source: socialmediatoday.com

Sue Cockburn makes a great point on SocialMediaToday; and one that I’ve often seen underestimated: just like in ancient Rome, all your social media roads should lead to the center of your online presence, aka your website (as a matter of fact, I was highlighting it myself in a talk last week).

As she pointed out, one of the reasons for this is certainly the hype on social media (and its apparent simplicity).

With the Scoop.it team, we’ve been trying to identify the other reasons explaining that by observing many companies – small or large – implementing their content strategy:

– small businesses are often finding it difficult to…

Read More

Content is king: easy & simple ways to curate relevant content

Posted on
June 16, 2014
by

Content is King: we’ve heard this sentence so much that for a lot of us it can become a factor of stress and frustration. Are you suffering content FOMO? Relax: content curation is here to the rescue. And here’s how to make it practical and easy through hands-on best practices and tips as well as free or freemium tools to stop worrying about not doing enough with content. 

Source: www.slideshare.net

These are the slides of a talk I gave to the Social Media for Non-Profits conference on June 11 in Mountain View.

Like many large and small businesses, non-profits are often looking at social media in general and content in particular as a huge opportunity to embrace but also one that is hard to master. Limited resources, lack of inspiration, lack of credibility are often mentioned as blocking factors so that overall a lot of people are left with fear of missing out.

My talk was thus on how to relieve that stress…

Read More
Posted in
Uncategorized

Beyond Analytics: The best SEO Tools for Content Marketers

Posted on
June 5, 2014
by

“We all want content marketing results, but they can be hard to get without the right SEO tools. Here is a list containing 27 search optimization essentials.”

SEO changed over the past few years through the Google Search algorithm updates: from being a complex, tech process involving back links and labor – and to be fair not always very “white hat” – it became synonym for “regularly publish great content“.

This means that SEO tools have considerably changed and while analytics tools like Google’s or Moz are still very important, they help you measure but they don’t solve the main problem content marketers have: how to scale the content volume without sacrificing quality.

So we’re not surprised to see content-focused tools in…

Read More
Posted in
Content Curation, SEO

4 ways to integrate Scoop.it with WordPress

Posted on
April 29, 2014
by

Before we even launched our public version, we recognized that a lot of content curators were also occasional or regular bloggers and started to offer ways to integrate with Wordpress – the leading blogging platform. Since then, we’ve seen a lot of our users leverage this integration as well as more and more of our Enterprise clients wanting to combine content curation through Scoop.it and the CMS capabilities of Wordpress for their sites. So we’ve multiplied the ways you could integrate with a Wordpress site or blog and including the recent addition of the Scoop.it plugin for Wordpress for our Enterprise clients.

Read More
Posted in
Scoop.it Hacks

The benefits of content curation for seo

Posted on
April 28, 2014
by

In a recent survey of 1,550 US professionals on the impact of content curation for their business goals, 65% said content curation helped with regards to SEO. Not only that but data from 65M+ pieces of content curated on the Scoop.it platform show that an average of 40% of traffic comes from Google Search.

Read More

1,000,000 people and businesses are now using Scoop.it!

Posted on
April 9, 2014
by


Interest-based content curation was only a vision 2 years ago when we launched: in a post Web 2.0 world, we felt that more and more we are the content we publish. Whether we liked it or not, we would all need to become media – a problem for busy professionals who don’t have time or inspiration for that and whose primary expertise is often not to be a content publisher.

Since then, publishing-by-curation rapidly turned into an important trend as 1,000,000 freelance professionals, community managers, content marketers, educators, knowledge managers, thought leaders, and more are now using Scoop.it to demonstrate and share their professional expertise, develop visibility for their small or mid-sized businesses or to make the company they work for smarter.

Read More
Posted in
Product News

How to Unleash the Power of Employee Advocacy

Posted on
April 5, 2014
by

Every one of your people can become an advocate for your organization and your brand – an employee advocate.

Guillaume Decugis‘s insight:

Excellent point made by Mike Bailey that reminds me of an argument also made by Marketo here. And exactly the trend we see happening with more and more of our enterprise clients at Scoop.it: while a lot of companies are still in a command-and-control mode with small marketing teams in charge of every aspect of outbound communication, we see a growing number of organizations realize they need to leverage their employees – and their employees social network – so that their communication becomes much more effective.

As the graph above explains, an employee sharing content to their networks has up to 20x more impact than when the brand does it (when you normalize their number of followers/friends).

Content curation plays a key role here: you not only need to create relevant and engaging content hubs for employees but they need to be easy for them to curate, share and publish from. As often, adoption is key and you need systems where employees can easily take ownership through a rewarding experience which seems to be what’s driving more and more demand to use Scoop.it internally within the enterprise.

See on socialmediatoday.com

Read More

Can SMB’s afford the impressive ROI of Content Marketing?

Posted on
March 25, 2014
by

Is content marketing worth it? Can your company achieve a positive ROI by investing in blogging, social media, and marketing automation?

Guillaume Decugis‘s insight:

A great compilation of studies on the ROI of content marketing from Eloqua and Hubspot. There are lots of interesting numbers which show how valuable content marketing can be in the long run: unlike advertising which costs increase with success, content marketing scales up by delivering economies of scale with lower and lower costs per lead or visitor.

Now, the caveat is that these studies focus on sizeable organizations who can afford the following investments: “According to Eloqua’s findings, a mid-sized organization should expect to spend approximately $12,000 a month and a larger-sized company could expect about $33,000 a month.”

This raises the question of the accessibility of content marketing to small and mid-size businesses. To really be the new advertising, Content Marketing needs to become accessible to all – hence the growing interest for leancontent solutions and tools. 

See on www.business2community.com

Read More

5 lessons we learned experimenting SlideShare as a visual blog

Posted on
March 21, 2014
by

SlideShare is a great platform for visual content and an amazing company: in just a few years, it has become the YouTube of presentations, one of the Top 150 sites in the world with an impressive 3 Billion views per month from 60 million unique visitors. Perhaps like many others, I originally thought of SlideShare as a platform to use only on specific occasions: when I had talked at a conference, when we had produced great slides worth sharing or when we had something specifically visual to communicate. I had had great experience and results but I don’t talk to conferences every day and so I sometimes felt I was missing out. And then, one night of September last year, I heard Jason Miller present at one of our #leancontent events and it became all clear: the team and I realized we could use SlideShare in a very different way – not just as a tool to recycle and share what you already created for other purposes but as a media channel that we would update on a regular basis. In a word, as a visual blog.

We decided to try it: over the next few months, we tried to publish at least every other week to SlideShare, integrating it in our content calendar alongside our blog and our Scoop.it content curations.

These are the first results after 4 months running this experiment.

Read More

6 ways to measure and improve the ROI of Content Marketing

Posted on
March 11, 2014
by

Content Marketing has been all the rage these past few years. We’ve heard from many speakers and influencers that content marketing is the new advertising and that “brands must become media to earn relevance”. But how do we measure its ROI and know our content isn’t just fueling some vanity metric but is actually helping our business?

Read More

Where content curation traffic comes from and 4 ways to increase yours

Posted on
March 6, 2014
by

Content curation is not just collecting, it’s also sharing. And whatever our motivation, we curate content to have an impact so understanding where our traffic comes from is important. During our first 2 years of existence, the Scoop.it users have published more than 50M pieces of content attracting more than 100M unique visitors so we’ve been in a great position to observe not only where this traffic came from but also what best practices had the strongest influence on it. So we’ve analyzed all the content curated, published and shared through Scoop.it. This post is about sharing these data and learnings so you can be more effective with your content curation.

Read More

The Science behind viral stories on the Web

Posted on
March 1, 2014
by

From the New Yorker: “When Jonah Berger was a graduate student at Stanford, in the early aughts, he would make a habit of reading page A2 of the Wall Street Journal, which included a list of the five most-read and the five most-shared articles of the day. “I’d go down to the library and surreptitiously cut out that page,” he recalls. “I noticed that what was read and what was shared was often different, and I wondered why that would be.” What was it about a piece of content—an article, a picture, a video—that took it from simply interesting to interesting and shareable? What pushes someone not only to read a story but to pass it on?”

Guillaume Decugis‘s insight:

This piece that Gregg Morris initially scooped on how some people have been putting a lot of analysis to understand how and why stories go viral: after all – as this great article points out – this was already something Aristotle was intrigued by.

The findings are interesting and I encourage you to read them as it can inform your content strategy. Keep in mind the conclusion however – which I think is great and wise: the more we understand viral content collectively, the less we understand it.

Why?

Because whenever humans are involved, martingales don’t exist for long.

It reminds me of financial markets: whenever stock information is perfectly distributed and statistical models are the same for everybody, no one really has an edge.

For content, the same that applies: when everybody’s trying to do an Upworthy-like headline, they become much less effective than they used to be.

See on www.newyorker.com

Read More

Launching Scoop.it for Google+: authorship and posting to Google+ Company pages

Posted on
February 20, 2014
by

While some debate whether Google+ is a ghost town or not, the search giant’s social network quietly passed the 1 Billion user mark. That’s right: 1 Billion people have a Google+ account which is 2x Twitter’s user base and only 15% less than Facebook’s. Perhaps more importantly, the +1 button is pressed more than 5 million times a day and 340 million of its users are active.

Scoopiteers didn’t need to wait for those metrics to be public to demand that we add Google+ to the Scoop.it’s sharing options: as our platform is a hub to discover, curate and share content to feed your online channels, it’s natural to offer as many distribution options as possible. So today, after integrating  with Facebook profiles and pages, LinkedIn profiles, groups and pages, Twitter and many other social platform such as Wordpress or Tumblr, we’re excited to launch our integration with Google+ with 2 new features:

  • Adding Google+ Company pages as a sharing option to Scoop.it

  • Adding Google+ authorship to your Scoop.it profile

    Read More
Posted in
Product News

Content Strategy of disruptors: how Open Garden builds an engaged community around mesh networking

Posted on
February 6, 2014
by

Changing the world not only takes a great idea but also takes building momentum around it. The team at Open Garden, a San Francisco based startup, who could be to mobile data what Skype was to telephone calls, understood from the beginning how important it was to build a community around its disruptive idea.

But how can you do this when you’re also running a startup, coding a product and making deals with your first strategic partners?

Open Garden Co-founder & CEO Micha Benoliel explains in this video how using Scoop.it allows him and his team to build this kind of momentum through publishing by curation and thereby engaging their community around a key tenet of its mission mesh networking – the awesome concept that we can all share wireless bandwidth (and that Open Garden makes a reality through its Apps and technology).

Just like any startup, Micha and his team – former Skype employees – are experts on their market. So when they

Read More

4 ways to leverage the Interest Graph through impacting Content Curation

Posted on
January 24, 2014
by

As the volume of content published on the Internet continues to grow, consumers can help shield themselves from the noise that doesn’t matter to them by curating only the content that matters on interest graph platforms

Guillaume Decugis‘s insight:

 

Content curation and the Interest Graph are two different things but are deeply connected. While some content curators like Maria Popova are great at being eclectic, a lot of value to readers come from being able to discover and read from publishers who address the specific niches they’re interested in.

Chad Politt from Digital Relevance clearly establishes that connexion in this contribution to the Huff Post and I would draw the following conclusions for content strategists and content curators:

Read More