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.
With 18.7 million bloggers online (Social Media Today), reading and writing blogs has become an essential part of everyday life. Among the most popular: personal, business and education blogs spark major interest in readers across the globe.
The one-liners below are suggestions to include in your next blog post to capture attention, engage readers and increase conversions.
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:
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 duplicatecontent which could hurt SEO and defeat the purpose.
3. Re-publishing content means it’s read on a platform from where we can’tconvert 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.
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.
SEO may be one of the biggest buzzwords of the decade, but what is it and why does it matter? SEO, also known as Search Engine Optimization, has become a critical component to the way that companies do business on the Internet. This guide will help you understand the definition of SEO, why it matters and how you can measure it in terms of your own business.
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.
“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.
Content Repurposing – Updating or changing content into a different form than the original to serve a different audience or the same audience differently.
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.
According to Forrester, 74% of consumers prefer to receive commercial communications via email. In a world of social conversations, that powerful stat supports that email marketing can still be a huge asset in your marketing campaigns. No matter what industry you’re marketing to, if you’re sending emails, you better be doing it well.
Check out this list of email one-liners [broken out by industry] that can drastically impact your email campaigns.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
“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…
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.
Raise your hand if you have ever sat in a lecture hall. Keep it raised if you have ever felt alone in the lecture hall. If you have ever felt alone while studying for that big exam. Or if you’ve ever missed a class, needed lecture notes, but knew no one in that class. Keep it raised, if by the end of the semester, of the 500 people in that class, you only met 1 or 2 of them, and by ‘met’, I mean gave them a formal head-nod or stared at the back of their head for 16 weeks. Keep it raised if you have ever bombed a test, but you feel like you studied a lot. (You really didn’t have to raise your hand, but if you did, props).
Yes, we’ve all been through these pain points. You probably wouldn’t even be reading this post if you didn’t passionately agree with me that these problems need fixing. They need fixing so badly that, if they don’t get it, they can put a damper on your college experience.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, original content should be the cornerstone of your content marketing. And curating content can raise your brand awareness and bring more visitors to your website. So how do these two fundamental marketing pieces work together? Very nicely. In terms of content marketing in any industry, how you marry creation and curation could mean your success or failure.
Specifically in education, EdTech consultants, teachers and librarians are doing a great job combining creation and curation to showcase student creativity, school information and thought leadership. We’ve pulled four worthy examples of users in the EdTech space who exemplify using powerful online tools to master creation and curation consistently.
A common theme at Scoop.it is helping people with important things to say be heard through all of the noise that exists online today. Creating an integrated content strategy that includes a healthy mix of creation and curation is the first step to success in this area, but another very important aspect that’s often overlooked is lead generation.
A few weeks ago, content marketing expert Michael Brenner posted on his blog a list of signs that a business is not ready for content marketing. He brings up an interesting point in that many businesses believe they need to launch a content marketing strategy simply because everyone else is doing it, even though they may not be properly equipped to do so.
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.
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.
Where do you get your news? Some sources are too concerned about political correctness to give the news the treatment it deserves. The following are some news websites that (thankfully) don’t hold back.
During the first quarter of 2014, Scoop.it conducted a survey of over 1,500 professionals who had been using content curation as a part of their content marketing strategy over the previous year. While it’s old news that more marketers are turning to content marketing and curation & making more space in their strategies for both, we wanted to find out what actually happened once these marketers had taken the proverbial leap.
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.
It seems today that everyone wants to start a blog, given that there are more than 150 million blogs on the Internet. Despite the competition, it’s still a great idea. A blog can help you market your business or improve your hobby, but with so much competition, how can you break into the blogosphere with a bang?
To continue sharing some of the learning-by-doing lessons I’ve come across over the past two years as a community and social media manager, I looked into the world of Facebook Insights to learn a little more about the often debated Facebook Reach and see what it’s actually done to help me.
I write and publish guest blog posts because writing – like your startup – is for other people. It’s reaching new audiences. It’s sharing new experiences, practices and revelations with old friends and new friends… and even brands. It’s communication for the modern reader. Blogging is increasingly how many startups reach their next customer. In fact, 76% of professionals who used content curation saw an impact on reported business goals.
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.
