The Scoop.it Content Curation Blog

How content curation can help you to engage your audiences

Content Curation

SEO: what it used to be vs what it is now

Posted on
November 10, 2014
by

SEO: what it used to be vs what it is now

With Panda, Penguin and all the other Google updates, SEO has changed over the years. What used to work doesn’t anymore.

Source: www.quicksprout.com

As many have observed for some time now, SEO has completely changed over the past few years. From being machine-centric, it became people-centric. But what does it mean concretely to content marketers?

This infographic by Neil Patel gives a number of interesting points, a couple of which I want to comment:

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Be Human in Your Content Marketing

Posted on
November 6, 2014
by

Don't be a robot content marketer

Here’s one of the most significant tenets of content marketing: People like to do business with other people. They don’t like to do business with faceless, anonymous, inhuman brands or big corporations.

Source: www.business2community.com

Occasionally people ask us how they could fully automate their content publishing. They’d like to not only get content suggestions automatically but also that this content be published automatically. They’d want to set up once and then forget their content marketing while just reaping the benefits of it. I don’t blame them and I even understand them. But content simply doesn’t work that way for the precise reason Amanda Clark from Grammar Chic introduces this post we’ve curated.

Communication is fundamentally human.

It’s not just an ethical question but it’s also a matter of efficiency

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Inbound Marketing: the power of content curation

Posted on
November 5, 2014
by

Inbound marketing is definitely more efficient and appealing to the sophisticated modern customer than traditional interruptive outbound techniques. But for inbound marketing to work, you need to have its lifeblood: content.

Source: www.slideshare.net

This Slideshare is from a talk @Marc Rougier recently gave on how content curation helps to solve inbound marketing #1 pain point: scaling the content you publish to feed your landing pages and conversion loops.

Content curation has played an important role in content marketing for some time now. And as content Marketing and inbound marketing are converging – especially for B2B marketers who are looking for ROI – we wanted to look specifically at what it brought to inbound marketers specifically.

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Are you using Lego blocks to make your Content Marketing lean?

Posted on
October 30, 2014
by

Creating original content on an ongoing basis can be a challenge, so most marketers practice the fine art of content repurposing.

Source: www.toprankblog.com

As a kid my favorite game was to play Lego and build, deconstruct and rebuild stuff (spaceships mostly: I’m a geek…). As a father, I’ve been fascinated to see that construction game becoming my kids’ favorite too and see what they came out with in terms of new ideas to build. This is what this post by Leed Odden made me think about so here’s a good question for all content marketers:

Are you thinking of your content as modular lego-type building blocks?

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3 Practical Ideas To Make Content Marketing Everybody’s Job

Posted on
October 29, 2014
by

content marketing should be team work

“The need for content has moved beyond a traditional marketing department’s ability to create and is now everyone’s job.”

Source: www.ducttapemarketing.com

Or why Content Marketing needs to grow beyond the marketing team (as I also wrote about in that post). Now, where I disagree with John Jantsch is when he uses the word “creation”. I talk to hundreds of business owners, entrepreneurs and even VP Marketing at larger companies which all tell me how incredibly hard it is to get non-marketers to create content.

Don’t fool yourself: you won’t get everybody to create content.

But here’s what you can do very easily.

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3 Key Take-Aways for Content Marketers From the 2015 CMI/MarketingProfs Benchmark

Posted on
October 10, 2014
by

“This is the fifth year that MarketingProfs and Content Marketing Institute have put together this report on how marketers use content in their marketing mix. With changes in the industry, the report may look a little different than you remember.”

Source: www.slideshare.net

Content Marketing is being adopted very quickly, especially by B2B Marketers. The Content Marketing Institute together with MarketingProfs published this great report that gives many enlightening facts about the key challenges they face and how they resolve them.

Among other great findings, here’s what I found particularly interesting:

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If you still think curation doesn’t add value, watch this music video

Posted on
September 18, 2014
by

This guy created a remix of 23 music videos from YouTube to create awesomeness.

Source: www.youtube.com

Ever since we started working on content curation, we’ve had this question: is content curation adding value? Is it stealing? Is it repeating like a parrot?

And ever since we started, we’ve seen more and more examples of how the remix culture is becoming a massive trend.

Just like good DJ’s, good content curators are creating something new out of the existing by not only aggregating but giving new meaning to content.

This video made me speechless. Isn’t it amazing?

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Can you afford to have a content strategy that isn’t lean?

Posted on
August 28, 2014
by

“As content marketing has become a vital strategy for brands and agencies, the need to measure the success of that content has grown as well.  An Aberdeen Group report revealed that the most effective content marketers are also those most likely to measure.”

Source: blog.visual.ly

This report by the Aberdeen Group highlights the need to measure results as a key success factor in content marketing.

Beyond this key findings – companies which measure tend to do better – there are interesting numbers as those in the above chart. The companies surveyed in this report had a customer acquisition cost of $20-$30,000.

Does this feel a lot to you?

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Third-party content is 4x to 7x more trusted than your own

Posted on
August 26, 2014
by

“I had always believed that most of the marketing content used by a company should be developed internally (…). Because of three recent research studies, I now have a different view on this issue.”

Source: customerthink.com

Some people still think that the only type of content that can demonstrate your expertise and show your thought leadership is the one you create.

If you’re still thinking that, think again as the data has spoken.

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16 B2B Content Marketing Stats You Need to Know Today

Posted on
August 14, 2014
by

Jeff Zabin, CEO of Starfleet Media and celebrated business researcher, recently released his 2014 Benchmark Report on B2B Content Marketing and Lead Generation. The report was created with the intention of “provid[ing] a rich, up-to-date snapshot of how B2B companies are creating, licensing and utilizing content assets in their incessant quest to demonstrate thought leadership, raise brand visibility, and, perhaps most importantly, generate qualified leads.”

B2B content marketing is a unique field that’s still constantly developing, and this report has some important insights into it’s current state as well as where it’s headed. I’d recommend reading it for yourself, but in the meantime, I’ve pulled out some of the most interesting statistics and findings.

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10 Inspiring Quotes From the Best B2B Content Marketing Experts

Posted on
August 7, 2014
by

One thing I pride myself on – and you’ll know this if you’ve read anything I’ve written in the past – is always continuing my quest for new knowledge. One of the most important parts of working in a field that evolves so quickly is keeping up with the trends and the experts.

If you’re a content marketer, digital marketer, or B2B professional in need of some inspiration, I’ve got some for you. Read, learn, be inspired, and share!

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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.

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Must Read Report: The Internet’s Latest Disruption – Knowledge

Posted on
July 17, 2014
by

Know or die: risk and opportunity of Knowledge 2.0

“And the web stormed the enterprise and disrupted roles, tasks and jobs: it cast speed, openness, flexibility and efficiency throughout, sparing no business processes: manufacturing, logistic, accounting, customer relation management, lead generation…”

The digital mutation is also profoundly disrupting how knowledge is acquired, organized and shared. Knowledge is an intangible, yet strategic asset of any enterprise. With businesses becoming more virtual and dematerialized, its value is patently and rapidly growing.

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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.

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Content Curation

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“.

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5 Ways to Beat Content Marketing Overload

Posted on
June 13, 2014
by

This intensive guide created by Vocus was inspired by Mark Schaefer’s infamous Content Shock theory of a few months back. He essentially states that soon, there will be too much content for anyone to stand out and that marketers need to start taking actions to combat this unfavorable outcome sooner than later.

I’d recommend content marketers to read this entire guide and note some of the tips inside, but here are a few of the key takeaways worth noting.

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Posted in
Content Curation

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…

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Posted in
Content Curation, SEO

Important Stats You Should Know from Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report

Posted on
June 3, 2014
by

Last week, Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers presented her Internet Trends report for 2014 at the Code Conference in California. Each year since 2001, KPCB has partnered with some of the best data analysts in the country to create a comprehensive report of rising Internet trends across all industries. This year, the presentation resulted in a 164-slide deck that you can read in its entirety here. Since we’re fans of tl;dr analyses & content curation, though, here are some of the most important points from the first half of the report.

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Learning to Learn: How To Look Like an Expert From Day One

Posted on
April 15, 2014
by

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Working in the world of entrepreneurs and startups has given me a whole new appreciation for the phrase “fake it ’til you make it.” This isn’t to say that everyone who is just getting started in their companies or careers in general is completely faking it, but just that they are doing the right things to position themselves correctly before they might actually be a full-fledged expert.

In this post on Entrepreneur.com, the extremely smart Dorie Clark tackles a question that almost all of us have tried to figure out at one point or another: how do I make myself seem like I know what I’m doing when I’m just getting started?

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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

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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

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How Martin Smith Uses Scoop.it To Find Content Marketing’s Over / Under

Posted on
March 19, 2014
by

Visual Marketing Over/Under or How I Use Scoop.it
Friends like Phil Buckley and Mark Traphagen are curious about how and why I use Scoop.it. This G+ post shares a detailed analysis of how Scoop.it helps reduce #contentmarketing risks, provides fast feedback to influence social media marketing and creates a safe envrionment to test assumptions, create validated learning and learn fast.

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