The absolute need to deploy a serious content marketing strategy has been obvious for quite some time now – at least amongst businesses with a reasonable online ambition. Content is the lifeblood of SEO, engagement, brand awareness, thought leadership and ultimately lead generation. So, while “Content is King” might not be the latest scoop; it doesn’t necessarily mean that every SMB has deployed an effective content strategy.

And by effective, I mean a strategy that delivers a positive, measurable ROI.

Since 2011, we’ve been providing SMBs with an effective way to curate content as part of their overall content strategy.  As our user-base has grown, we have fielded several surveys to assess the value of curation, and to understand what the next, major need would be as far as content marketing is concerned.

As we suspected, SMBs who include curation in their content marketing report a positive ROI. We also understand that concrete return on investment is the overarching objective for SMBs. While content is still king, it also needs to fill the treasury! It’s ROI or RIP.

In order to deliver ROI, content marketing for SMBs needs to be lean.

Happy holidays, Scoopiteers!

As you probably know, a few months ago we launched Scoop.it topic page templates in an effort to encourage personalization and of curated content. You have been experimenting with our first edition templates and making your topic pages look beautiful since then, and we want more!

Today, we’re excited to announce four more templates to be used on Scoop.it topic pages. And, that’s not all. One of them was designed by Scoopiteers Bang2Joom! Without further ado, here is your winning template, Fashion:

Every business’s marketing objectives require awesome content. Whether you’re focused on building thought leadership, increasing brand awareness, boosting SEO, engaging with an audience, or generating leads, it’s no longer a question that content marketing is the answer.

You create content, you outsource content, you curate content. Content curation has indeed proven its efficiency as a potent element of your editorial line, especially in terms of inbound marketing.

Now, the question remains: how do we turn this into a simple, scalable process?

When I became an entrepreneur, I was told by some friends that the odds of my startup turning 3 were practically non existent. I’m not sure if that statistic is really true but it stayed with me as some kind of magic number – a bit like turning 18 was fascinating to me as a teenager, imagining I would suddenly become a grown-up overnight. Somehow we beat the odds back then with Musiwave (my former startup) and today I’m excited to announce we’re doing it again with the Scoop.it team and community: it’s now been officially 3 years since we launched Scoop.it!

Here are some of the milestones we’ve achieved in the past year thanks to your support.

Last week, we announced lots of exciting new features on Scoop.it, including WordPress integration, topic embeds, and templates. for topic pages.

Now, we want to hear from you. We’re firm believers in the old (ok, not that old) adage “you are the content you publish online,” and the increasing importance of branding the content that you’re sharing to your websites and social media feeds. As we continue to grow as a platform, we want you to tell us how we can make this branding process easier for you.

Over the next few weeks, we want you to put on your creative hats and submit some designs of templates you’d like to see on Scoop.it for your topic pages. 

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:

Scoop.it Pro and Business just got a little more exciting! We’re excited to announce two new features of the premium plans on Scoop.it.

Update: TL;DR is now live for everyone at tldr.scoop.it. Enjoy! 

The Internet throws at us a full Library of Congress every 5 minutes or so. It’s just way too long to read!

We did not build Scoop.it to make the Internet shorter, though; we built it to help professionals and businesses to exist on the web; to cut through the noise, to demonstrate their thought leadership by becoming publishers on their specific topics.

This last weekend was a tough one for our team as Scoop.it was sadly added to the growing list of websites that have been recently targeted by Ddos attacks. Following the first attack on Friday and our post on Monday, we’ve been up and running without interruptions but we nevertheless wanted to come back on some of your questions and give you as much clarity as we can.

(photo: Startup Stock Photos)

Since last Friday, we’ve experienced several Ddos attacks (distributed denial of service) on Scoop.it that sadly are significantly affecting our service’s availability.

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.

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

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It’s pretty safe to say that it’s been a strong beginning to 2014 here at Scoop.it. We’ve been working, hypothesizing, testing, listening, and implementing pretty much since the clock struck midnight on January 1st. That said, I wanted to check in with you today to give you some insight into what’s going on over here – including some pretty big and exciting new announcements!

Calling all New Yorkers!
After last year’s Social Media Week New York trip, where we met tons of awesome people, spent time talking about Scoop.it, curation, and the future of social, and learned more than we ever could have imagined learning in a five-day span, we’re ready for more!

In case you hadn’t realized (or been on social media all day), today’s date is quite fun. It’s November 11th, 2013, also known as 11/12/13. Did you know that a couple even got married at 9:10 am, on live television?

For the sake of being extra cheesy, and a little bit due to not wanting to miss out on the date-related fun, I found this to be the perfect opportunity to showcase some of the amazing things you can find on Scoop.it. With the recent addition of Interest categories, discovering fascinating content is easier than ever, and connecting with likeminded individuals to build communities of interest is extra fun.

In that spirit, I present to you 11 interests / 12 curators / 13 topics that you might not have found before on Scoop.it.

Today might be just another Thursday, but there’s a few little sparks of excitement here in the world of Scoop.it. It doesn’t take much to get us excited, and that’s why we’re really pumped to tell you about the two little features we rolled out earlier today!

As Scoop.it turns two today, we are excited to share a great milestone: we’re only a few weeks away from reaching 100 million cumulated unique visitors on the platform! That’s right: 100 million different people have been to Scoop.it to discover the awesome content of our amazing community of curators. How much content you ask? Well, a few months ago we counted 50 million curated pieces.

When we started working on Scoop.it, the horizon wasn’t that far. Out of a failed project, we needed to be quick to apply the lessons that we had learned.

At long last, sanity and clarity may be coming to the Internet.