In an age where new phone applications fly at us faster than bugs at a windshield, app developers are working hard to stand apart from the crowd. On April 12th, Facebook upped the ante when it launched Facebook Home. As this app hits its one month anniversary, the important question is, Facebook Home: Boom or Bust?
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Be gone, irritating chain email about a fake virus scare that your head of HR sent out! Away, pictures of a random offsite meeting that no one actually cares about! Never again will your inbox show 298324 because everyone replied all on a staff-wide email about break room etiquette.
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Here in the US, the Dow recently tumbled almost 150 points in a “flash crash” caused by widespread digital panic. What was the cause of this panic? Twitter.
The bigger story is that someone hacked the official AP Twitter handle and tweeted a false report of a terrorist attack on the White House, which claimed that the President had been injured in said attack. This is significant in the grander scheme because the Dow essentially measures the health of the US economy and a hit of this magnitude means lots of people (deserving or otherwise) needlessly lost a lot of money in nanoseconds.
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Some of you have asked, “How do we decide on making changes on Scoop.it?” We felt that this is an interesting opportunity to share the answer openly.
First, let me start by saying that it’s a process that has evolved to become much more complex now that millions are using Scoop.it every week. In the beginning, we were able to let our vision and intiution guide us, but now we have a responsibility to you, the Scoop.it community, who have decided to use this service as your content curation hub on a daily basis.
Sometimes decisions are easy: when you asked for curated newsletter capability on our feedback forum, it was just a matter of planning this together with the right resources and partner. It can take some time (bear with us…) but the decisions are simple. Sometimes, it’s a question of vision: we have strong values and a vision for what we feel content curation and the interest graph should stand for, and that of course. continues to guide us just like we recently experimented by launching Read.it.
At the UX (user experience) level though, this can be more difficult: not so much for the inspiration and the big ideas but for the little details that can have a big impact. Should this button be at the top or the bottom? Left or right? Should we give users one main option and a bunch of secondary ones or should we highlight the three that are the used most often? Did we make that feature visible enough? Or is it too prominently displayed and annoying? A lot of these questions don’t have good or bad answers you can easily guess: you have to try out to find out.
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For the past few months, the team here at Scoop.it has been focusing on “taking curation beyond the platform,” our own little bit of rebellion against computer-only or anti-mobile curation tools and platforms. We launched a fantastic re-design of our iPhone application, integrated Scoop.it with MailChimp to easily take your curation to the world of email, and some other great stuff too.
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TechCrunch: Google just revealed plans to shut down eight of its services as part of what it’s calling an ongoing spring cleaning effort. Some of them are pretty arcane, but among TechCrunch writers, anyway, we’re pretty bummed to see that Google Reader will be shut down on July 1.
Here’s my take on it.
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We see the tides of media and content creation turning toward mobile as a preferred creation platform. What do you think?
We’ve been thinking here at Scoop.it about the mobile and social revolutions and how we can help make the curation process a seamless part of your day. We think that the most interesting reading and content consumption happens during the “in between” moments these days — on the bus, during breakfast, etc — instead of during typical 9 to 5 hours, which has been the case historically. Instapaper recently released a study of reading data collected for over 100 million articles, which shows the majority of mobile content being consumed has actually shifted to between 6 pm and 9 pm. They also released data showing that there are very specific spikes in content consumption specifically via iPhone:
Based on compelling data like this and feedback from our community, we believe that the future of curation is mobile. We’ve made some awesome changes to the iPhone app to make your job as curator easier and your mobile curation more effective. It shouldn’t be a chore to feed your social channels interesting content while you’re on the move, and we are working to unchain your curation experience and make it even more effortlessly flexible and mobile.
Read More“A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.” – Thomas Carlyle
February is all about letting your loved ones know how you feel, and for us that means you.
To show our love this month, we’re lifting the topic creation limit: for free!
All you have to do is ask! Send an email to business@scoop.it and we’ll grant you access to unlimited topic creation – but only for this month, so don’t waste one minute!
Read MoreFOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE [San Francisco, CA — December 11, 2012] — Scoop.it, a leading social media and content curation platform for professionals and businesses, recently announced it’s platform redesign, elements of which focus specifically on…
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Over half a century ago, management guru Peter Drucker presented the concept of the knowledge worker. Compared to the manual laborer, the knowledge worker focused on quality over quantity and worked more independently as problem solvers. Drucker said the key to improving the productivity of the knowledge worker is to allow them the freedom to innovate, learn and grow.
The knowledge worker is now the professional of today who uses Social Media and the Web to enhance his productivity, reach new customers or clients, conduct research and more. So which social network do today’s knowledge workers use?
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When PR professional Jody MacPherson first started her personal Scoop.it page on politics, she had no idea that she would end up on TV.
The political world around election time is just about as fast-paced as fast-paced gets. It’s easy to get lost in the number of tweets, blogs, news sites, facts, and not-so-factual musings. Today, social media is arguably one of the biggest influencers of elections and political opinions.
During the most recent election in Alberta, Canada, Jody MacPherson discovered that this is both a great and an overwhelming fact. Jody is passionate about politics and was part of the political party who was challenging the current administration. Knowing how difficult it is for most people to follow along and find all of the right (and factual) information, and being a PR professional by day, Jody found that curation was the next logical step to help her spread her political mission.
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Social Media is easy. But only in theory.
When you get down to the practical things Social Media requires, you realize that a lot of them take time, require some special skills or are simply too complex to bother. While blogging and social networks have now been around for years, the truth is that for a lot of people, using Social Media in a professional way is still anything but a no-brainer; whether your job consists of running a business, pitching new customers, fundraising for a cause, educating students or coaching clients, it usually takes a good 100% of your time, so how can you “do Social Media” on top of that?
The key to solve this includes working on smarter workflows. At Scoop.it, for instance, we realized that having a suggestion engine combined with a bookmarklet for 1-click publishing greatly helped our users. And by adding features like the connections to the social networks they wanted or the ability to rescoop one another’s content, we have taken – and continue to take – steps towards making the whole Social Media Publishing workflow much simpler.
HootSuite is another company that has worked extensively on this workflow problem. By combining monitoring and cross-posting, they’ve built one of the most popular Social Media platforms to date with millions of professional users.
We’re therefore thrilled to be partnering with HootSuite today and to introduce the Scoop.it App for HootSuite. From now on, HootSuite users can combine the powerful stream layout that enables them to monitor various sources of content at once with Scoop.it’s easy content curation capabilities. This means more relevant content but also more visibility for this content when it’s published to your Scoop.it pages, whose topic-centric nature drives on average 3 clicks per visitor and greater discovery from Social and Search. Scoopiteers who already leverage topic-centric content curation to develop their visibility online can now diversify their sources of content by using HootSuite to monitor various content streams, including the topics they follow on Scoop.it or some specific Scoop.it searches to closely monitor their interests.
Our team at Scoop.it is hard at work and you may have noticed many exciting integrations that we’ve launched over the past month from SlideShare to BufferApp to LinkedIn Groups.
Yesterday, we announced our Apps & Extras to help you navigate through all of these great additions, which we hope helps make the Scoop.it experience even better for you.
Ayantek, a full-service digital marketing firm offering innovative web, mobile, search, and social media solutions to some of New England’s largest companies, has a vision that probably sounds pretty familiar to most marketing agencies. According to Marketing Programs Manager Barry Clifford, Ayantek’s main business goal is “to validate [their] belief that by providing excellent value and customer service to clients, a small business can grow into a viable, sustainable enterprise, and can supply a quality lifestyle to its employees without compromising on its core values.”
Ayantek’s global consultants are industry experts with decades of experience conceiving, designing, building, and managing interactive programs that drive measurable improvements and deliver competitive advantages for their clients. They help their customers achieve market leadership through a combination of strategic thought leadership, exceptional user experiences, and industry-leading proprietary and open-source technologies.
Seeing their success in these areas, Ayantek continuously wants to expand their client base and spread their services across multiple Fortune 500 companies in the technology, healthcare, manufacturing, and financial sectors.
According to a recent survey conducted by Econsultancy, 90% of respondents (1,300 marketing professionals) believe that content marketing will continue becoming increasingly important within the next year, but a surprisingly low 38% of them actually have a content strategy in place.
It’s hard to say that a day goes by for marketers without hearing, talking, or reading about some type of content marketing strategy. This is clearly demonstrated by the 73% of respondents who believe that brands are becoming publishers. Why is it, then, that only 38% of companies currently have a defined content marketing strategy and only 55-58% say that they are planning one?
After seeing these numbers, I thought of a few reasons why companies wouldn’t have a content marketing strategy, and why those reasons are not acceptable excuses.
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I’ve read recent news on how LinkedIn has become seriously interested in content launching new features that encourage their users to rate each other on skills and expertise as well as engage with business visionaries.
Here at Scoop.it, we’ve known that content plays a significant role in developing thought leadership and brand equity. Today, we launched a new feature where you can share your scoops directly to a LinkedIn Group. Imagine that? You can strengthen your professional network by sharing ideas that matter to a community that cares for such insight and knowledge.
Read MoreYesterday, I had the privilege of listening to a fireside chat with Marc Benioff and Sir Richard Branson at Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce X.
While each and every topic proved to be equally if not more interesting than the last, Branson said one thing that really hit home for me:
“For a business to not embrace social media…you’ve clearly got your head in the sand.”
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Curate SlideShare Content with Scoop.it!
Presentations work great for Curators but Curators are also great for Presentations. Whether you’re using SlideShare to upload your presentations or using Scoop.it to curate your favorite topic, learn how the new Scoop.it / SlideShare integration can help you better leverage your publishing activity.
Read MoreIn this series, we spotlight standout Scoop.it curators. Those whose passion ignite others’ interests. Find out here about who has inspired us. Learn their secrets to sharing ideas that matter to a community hungry for great content. Hear their story. Get inspired.
Check out the Scoop.it Spotlight today to begin learning about the stories of these great people.
#ScoopitSpotlight
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Last week, we introduced the new visual dashboard which was a big change for Scoop.it. We’ve already seen positive impact in our analytics but, more importantly, we’re very excited and pleased by your reactions. We also heard you as you said you missed the old community leader board and the ability to see your daily stats broken down per topic: removing these two features was a mistake but we’re happy to announce that it’s fixed as of today!
Curation starts with inspiration.
Today Scoop.it introduces its New Visual Dashboard, centered on your Interest Graph and connecting you with other great curators by topics.
– Focus given to your followed topics
– Dynamic & instant view to the newest curated posts on what matters to you
– Search for the best curators on your interests
– More visibility for your great curation
On Friday, we all learned the devastating news of Twitter leaving LinkedIn and no longer allowing its users to send their tweets directly to the professional networking site. As every professional who feeds their LinkedIn directly from their Twitter account received the email stating that “tweets will no longer be shared on LinkedIn,” frustration and confusion began to take over.
Read MoreEver since we started working on Social Media – actually before we even thought of Scoop.it – we’ve realized how much content discovery and content publishing were really two sides of the same coin. Working…
Read MoreIn today’s world, everything is mobile. Sharing photos, tweets, status updates and check-ins wouldn’t be half as fun if we couldn’t do it from anywhere our busy lives took us. Though long form content creation…
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When you’re passionate about something, can the Facebook timeline be a good representation of your digital self? Its design and features certainly hint so but at Scoop.it, we felt it would only work if you could find a way to smoothly mix your interests to what’s originally a friends & family network.
Show what you care about!
We are glad to now announce our new Facebook Timeline integration! By turning it on (it’s optional of course), your Facebook Timeline will be automatically updated in real time whenever you curate new content.
Read More“One thing that becomes clear from the latest Pew report on the state of media is just how big a role aggregators — both human and machine-powered — are playing in news consumption.” comments Mathew…
Read MoreScoop.it’s first mission is to help people publish gorgeous magazines by means of curation – and by doing so, make their passion and expertise be heard and recognized on the web. We endeavor to offer the easiest and most powerful solution to help curators find great content, edit it in engaging magazines, and share it to their Social Media. The rapidly growing community of curators on Scoop.it tells us we are on the right track; we feel this is a valuable mission!
Now, curators and visitors are asking: what about discovering content and curators in Scoop.it too?
More and more curators find inspiration from other curators’ publications; more and more visitors want to dig deeper and access more content related to their interests. We thought we needed to address it better: helping people publish but also helping people discover great curators and curations. More discovery and exchange will make our community and our experience richer!
Content that I care about is the only way to engage me, empowered by a context that make it easy to find. We love to see the depth of engagement on the platform. If we share the same passion or interests and your product is a reflection of it, how could your brand not resonate with me?
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