Read MoreAhh, Influencers. A key component to your social media and inbound marketing success. Not only do we need them to propel our marketing efforts to the next level, but they also play a large part of your relationship marketing strategy. An Influencer campaign should be a part of your social media engagement strategy.
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?”
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
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Last week, Scoop.it announced its integration with Google+ Pages and Google Authorship. As CEO Guillaume Decugis explained, “we actually believe curation is a form of creation. So just as Google introduced Google Authorship as a way for publishers to be more visible in search results and benefit from a natural SEO method, we felt it was also important to add Google+ to the platform. So from now on, you will be able to link your Google+ profile to Scoop.it and not only be recognized in search results for your curated content but derive higher traffic from Google Search through the improved visibility authored results enjoy.”
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Most people curate for the benefit of themselves or their organisations. What if we considered content curation from a user centered design perspective? What would audience centered curation look like?
An interesting look at curation from the user experience side.
For Content Curation to generate goodwill – in whichever form you can see it: thought leadership, brand awareness, lead generation, etc… – it needs to be first and foremost valuable to your reader.
How can you make curated content not only more useful and interesting to your audience, but ensure that they are having an enjoyable and successful experience consuming this content?
Great tips from Sam Burrough.
See on weelearning.co.uk
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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
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 MoreOkay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop. Why? Because over time it’s become a more and more spammy practice, and if you’re doing a lot of guest blogging then you’re hanging out with really bad company.
The head of the Google Webspam team has spoken: guest blogging is now on the hook and won’t be an SEO strategy you can rely on in 2014.
Following the demise of massive link building (which now can have adverse effects), this is another strategy once recommended by traditionnal SEO consultants that disappears as part of Google’s strategy to fight spam, cheap SEO tricks and promote great quality content in search results. The more Google Search evolves, the more it relies on new criteria such as social signals to promote quality content.
What this means is there’s no way around this simple truth now: to come up in search results, you need to publish good quality content and add value – either through great original content or carefully curated quality pieces. And in the race to publish great content frequently, it’s likely you will find the latter very useful.
See on www.mattcutts.com
Read MoreAhh, December. The best time of year for bloggers. The one month at the end of every year where we take the time to look back over the last 11 and – you guessed it – make lots of lists. Lists of fails and lists of wins, lists of bests and lists of worsts.
As Buzzfeed has certainly proven, everyone loves a list. Lists are easy to write, easy to read, and extremely shareable (hello, #leancontent!). But, what makes a list even more exciting is objectivity. I’m sure my list of the best albums of 2013 would be extremely different than my dad’s. There’s one thing that doesn’t lie, though, and that’s numbers. That’s why I decided to make an end of the year list based on your opinions, rather than my own. Take a look back, re-enjoy the 6 top posts from the Scoop.it blog from this year, re-share them, and if you happen to be inspired, start writing your very own post for us for 2014!
A framework for using Curation in a learning organisation
This excellent and very comprehensive article looks stall the aspects in which content curation is transforming organizations – from individual professional development to collective collaborative learning and communication.
“Increasingly we are being challenged to deliver ‘more with less’ in the learning department. Curation potentially holds an interesting answer to some of the constraints we’re facing in time and cost. Why build new content, when you can curate?”
Bill Gates once stated that in the future the way we would control information in business would determine whether we win or lose. Here’s an interesting framework to be among the winners.
See on www.ht2.co.uk
Read MoreIn 2008, Mark Zuckerberg laid out his theory about people sharing content on Facebook. “I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and [the] next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before,” he said.
This article reminded me of my own post on Business Insider predicting that the Facebook people-centric model will see its limits. Two years and one IPO down the road, we’re exactly there: with 1,500 potential stories to show to an average user news feed every time they visit, Facebook has a tough time determining what’s really important.
Perhaps more importantly, Facebook lost its raison d’etre
Read More“The Internet has changed the role of sales forever (…) what’s even more interesting is the source of where the information is coming from. In most cases it’s not the brand you’re researching, but a highly regarded 3rd party expert – or influencer – in the industry.” [See on traackr.com]
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Today the third major social network is becoming a public company. As with all major IPO’s, we will read a lot of diverse and conflicting opinions on its valuation: to some Twitter will be an overpriced money-losing startup, to others it will be the next major player of the Web and undervalued.
To add a data point to the debate, the Scoop.it team decided to study the value of social networks to small and mid-size businesses.
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Eric Wittlake uses a provocative title to list four reasons why content curation is not a silver bullet in b2b content marketing. While I agree with him there are no silver bullets in marketing, he makes some points which I disagree with.
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Read MoreYou may be hardwired as an introvert or an extrovert. But don’t worry there are ways to change how our brains work.
Slodes of the talk Jason Miller gave at the Scoop.it #leancontent meetup on Sept. 25, 2013.
We recently hosted our event series, #leancontent, with a guest from LinkedIn. His presentation focuses on driving revenue using smart content and optimized distribution steams. Check it out!
See on www.slideshare.net
Read MoreWhat are the biggest thinking mistakes all of us do nearly every day? We’ve collected the 8 biggest thinking mistakes here today for you:
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Web-based text outliners range from Notepad-like simplicity to sophisticated, searchable, collapsible idea wranglers.
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Twitter may share some things with Facebook, but it’s ultimately a different beast altogether.
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Editor’s Note: We’ve always held that content curation (with added insight and value) is great for SEO. The below infographic (courtesy of TechMagnate and Beth Kanter) lays out some of the benefits of content curation.
What exactly is content curation? To Scoop.it, its the “meaningful selection and sharing of online content for professional purposes or personal passions.” Professional purposes run the gamut from thought leadership to product marketing, and personal passions can be gathering and sharing knowledge about anything that gets your engine going. Many people curate every day without knowing it — whether it is sharing an insightful article they discovered on their favorite blog or retweeting a thought leader of their choosing. Curation is everywhere!
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Editor’s Note: As content curators, we sometimes think we might not have anything super interesting to say or struggle to add value on top of the message within the content we’re curating. Here are a few ways to re-spark your creativity while curating! Enjoy!
Editor’s Note: Copyright and fair use of images is oftentimes a difficult set of rules to follow. It’s very easy with the tools available (namely Google Image search) to grab pictures and use them without thinking whether you are using that image fairly or not. While this infographic is a bit self-promotional on behalf of imgembed.com, they are a useful platform for making the web a better, more fair place. Take a look!
Read MoreSome interesting insights in this article about writing for external sites instead of your own individual “platform.” All of this is based on the assumption, however, that to have a platform, one must have their own blog or original content at all. Is this true?
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Ask.com says that a thought leader is an individual or firm that is recognized as an authority in a specialized field and whose expertise is sought and often rewarded. In a world where information is often it’s own currency, thought leaders are seen as a resource because in order to earn that status, they have made a career of focusing on their primary expertise. Being a thought leader has cachet and, according to Malcolm Gladwell, if you spend 10,000 hours focused on one thing, then you’ll end up being an expert at it.
Read MoreRead MoreWeb platforms may one day catch up to traditional institutions like the Library of Congress in their ability to collect and organize millions of documents, according to an infographic by content curation platform Scoop.it.
Read MoreContent marketing is about more than just great content; it requires application, too. Here’s how to create an idea dashboard to track your favorite ideas.
Read MoreFor this article, I wanted to dig out the lesser known tips and tricks for you to make your blogging and social media strategy work.
Brands, companies, and individuals — I think it’s time for some real-talk about content and social media.
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What the heck is a Personal Branding Illusion? That’s a good question, but it begs the question “What is a Personal Brand?”, so let’s start there.
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Curating and sharing stories should be understood as part of a knowledge economy. If stories are tribal currency, then curators are money handlers.
The world has changed and so did the economy. From an agricultural to an industrial world, we’ve now moved into the post-industrial era where knowledge is the true currency and a lot of us are knowledge workers.
In this great post, Elia Morling explains how he views content curators as playing a key role as a “money handlers, changers and lenders all wrapped into one.”
See on tribaling.com
Read MoreThe 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.
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