Being a content curator is all about displaying information. We don’t create the content, we display it. We share it – and people read it. But, first you have to display it. There are several skills involved in displaying content. Here are some thoughts for you to consider when creating and curating a Scoop.it topic.
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I recently partook in a discussion among some fellow community managers on the best ways to learn about the industry and how to train its future generations. When the conversation reached the point where we all shared the “training” we went through ourselves, the answers began getting interesting.
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The ubiquitous internet meme comes in many forms — from iterations on top of iterations of a viral video to a random picture of a cute animals with an ironic white Impact caption. They also seem to proliferate like one of those animals with an ironic white Impact caption, if you know what I mean.
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If you aren’t engaging your customers online, your business is missing out on a huge opportunity to generate sales and gain valuable new customers. Creating and maintaining an online presence isn’t easy. You can quickly become overwhelmed or waste money on unsuccessful outreach if you don’t approach it in an informed, strategic manner.
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One of the hardest things about becoming the “voice” of an organization is figuring out what in the world to say. Do you promote your group endlessly? Do you send out fun links you think your constituents will enjoy? Do you talk to your fans and figure out what they want? Well, the answer is yes to all the above. However, it’s very easy to fall into the trap many other organizations do and either promote the heck out of your mission or refuse to talk about yourself at all. Both tactics can result in you missing out on customers, constituents or funding and even chase your current followers away. So how do you find a good balance?
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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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Presentations and slideshows have been historically one of the most boring and standard corporate media currently available to employees and management. They are meant to purely educational or purely for selling — they are very rarely anything but a pitch or a corporate update. But with the rise of Slideshare as a platform for sharing a new kind of presentation, a lean, value-adding, and stand-alone type of presentation, and its proof as a viable option for driving traffic, the “corporate presentation” can be leveraged for more than its functional purpose and optimized to spread the company or personal message via social media.
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In the 3rd quarter of 2012, 1.03 billion smartphones were reported as active worldwide, which means nearly 1 in 5 people is walking around with the internet in their pocket. Nielsen recently announced that of these 1.03 billion smartphones, 42% of mobile users browsed and 23% purchased products via mobile in the last 30 days, which means there are 432,600,000 sets of engaged mobile eyes and 236,900,000 sets of thumbs actively purchasing products and services via mobile. These numbers are only growing.
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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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I’ve been listening to all the feedback from our awesome community about our newest service offering, the MailChimp Newsletter integration feature, and have been hearing that many people would like the option of sharing the newsletter with their social audiences. This would require hosting the completed newsletter somewhere online with a public link to share. Unfortunately, this functionality doesn’t exist within Scoop.it yet (not to say it won’t shortly), but I’ve concocted a little work-around for everyone who wants to share their newsletter this way. It requires an extra tool, but its all free and pretty easy to do, and the end result is great.
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Putting the power of message amplification into the hands of the sharer equalizes the content landscape: the person who understands the myriad behaviors by the many types of people who would be interested in sharing your specific brand of content and then actually executes on these idiosyncrasies successfully will win. Not just the person with the biggest budget.
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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Recently at a SXSW panel, the authors of the book Spreadable Media were discussing the future of internet media and how “viral” content is actually not viral at all. The panelists argued that virality (in the traditional medical sense) is passive — a host doesn’t choose to contract a virus and doesn’t choose to spread it through his body. The virus spreads by its own means. They made the point that “viral” content and media (think Gangnam Style) are actually active choices; that virality in media doesn’t just happen. A choice is made by a user to share that specific piece of media within their own networks.
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Isn’t it time for text to enter the mobile UGC (UGC) revolution?
When Facebook bought Instagram for $1B last year, some called it genius, others called it luck. But whether we think that deal made sense or not, it marked an important change in the history of the web in general and of mobile internet in particular: the rise of mobile user-generated content.
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The Scoop.it team will be headed to SXSW this year and we’d love to see you! We’ll be checking out the programming, haunting community get-togethers, and riding around on the Hootsuite #HootBus, so keep an eye out! We’re hoping to interview some of our awesome users at the conference about their big ideas, favorite topics, and how they are using Scoop.it, so if you’d like to be immortalized in the Scoop.it annals of history, email clair@scoop.it and I’ll get you set up.
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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 MoreDid you know that there’s a place where many of your customers live and actually want to talk to and hear from you in real time? It’s a magical land, it’s real, and it’s called Twitter.
Twitter is one of the most efficient tools out there to connect with your audience, to share engaging information and content, and even to provide personal customer service. If you do it right, it’s a gold mine; if you don’t, it could result in disaster.
It may be true that “gold mine” and “disaster” are the two extremes and that it’s possible to be alright at Twitter, but who strives to be mediocre? If you want to rock it and make sure each and every tweet is the best it can possibly be, take these 6 tips into consideration the next time you sit down to write the perfect tweet.
See on leancontentmarketing.tumblr.com
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The newspaper. One of the most sacred institutions of the publishing world and one of its oldest, most respected methods of knowledge gathering and collection of popular opinion, dating all the way back to the first printing presses ever created. There is something uniquely special about waking up, grabbing the paper from your front steps in your slippers, and reading about the world over a cup of coffee. Even your cat standing directly in front of your face so you must crane your neck while trying to read about a local celebration or tragedy is endearing.
Today is Community Manager Appreciation Day, and I find myself reflecting on all of the lucky occurrences that helped get me to where I am. From Penn State to Paris, and now, San Francisco, it’s been quite a journey. This is my story.
“If the future of search is likely to be social, the future of social is likely to involve more search.”
This is a post I wrote for Fast Company on the conflicting tension I immediately saw following the launch of Graph Search by Facebook. Facebook’s new search tool will either have to remain private, resulting in limited, biased content, or make private data accessible to search.
Here’s why.
See on www.fastcompany.com
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Social media often gets a bad rap for being a driving force behind people falling out of touch, neglecting in-person relationships, and reducing productivity for people around the world. Naysayers blame it for shorter attention spans and proliferation of bad grammar, and the most vehement of those naysayers believe that social media has led to privacy being a thing of the past. To be fair, there have been many times where I’ve been trolling my Twitter feed only to be thoroughly horrified by TMI moments and tHingz Speld lIKE THIZ.
Here’s a little piece of SEO nerdery that affects us all: Google is using Google+ to influence search results in a big way, and brands and media organizations alike have yet to wake up to the…
Erin Griffith analyzes how the use of authorships combined with Google+ is now impacting Google search results.
This change is not new but, as she puts it, it is significant: “Google was always about the algorithm, not curation, certainly not curation through something as, well, human as a social network. The emphasis before was about what was on the page not who wrote it.”
While she focuses on the new importance of authorship given by Google, what’s happening is actually a mix of a couple of things which are in my opinion equally good:
#1 means that an identified, reputable author will prevail; #2 is part of the social signal that Google uses more and more to rank results and that builds on curators’ activity.
Bottom line is that – as I predicted a while ago – the age of low-quality content cheaply produced by random anonymous writers in content farms for pure SEO purposes is over. By combining a measure of the author’s influence as well as taking into account curators’ appetite for a piece of content, Google is bringing quality back in the game. Which is good for authors, curators and… readers.
See on pandodaily.com
Read MoreMy name is Ally Greer. I’m a marketer with expertise in content marketing and curation. You’ve probably never heard of me.
With over 500 million users on Twitter, 175 million on LinkedIn, and over a billion on Facebook, you probably haven’t heard of most people on the Internet. The bad news is that this also means most of those people probably haven’t heard of you either.
That said, I’m certainly not here to tell you how flooded the Internet is and discourage you from jumping into the information pool. In fact, I’m telling you to do the exact opposite. Although it isn’t likely that all 500 million people on Twitter will be following you by the time you’re finished reading this (or ever), there are a few ways to look what we call “information overload” right in the face and use it to your advantage.
In a digital world characterized by an overwhelming amount of noise, everyone is struggling to find relevant content from people and brands with an expertise on a specific subject. Content curators are the ones who step up to the plate.
According to Michael Brenner, cofounder of Business 2 Community, content curation is the process of identifying relevant content for your audience from multiple sources, modifying or editing that content to reflect the needs of your audience and delivering the content to the appropriate channels of distribution.
The truth is, you’re probably already curating content. Do you share links on Twitter? Do you Retweet content that you find interesting? Do you write blogposts referencing content that’s been created by others? If so, you’re a curator. You know what you’re talking about, you know where the best content on your topic of expertise is, and you put it together for the world to see. But, the question still looms: if no one knows who you are, how will they find it?
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You may have noticed (or maybe not, because they are so awesome to use) that we recently rolled out some big changes to the Scoop.it platform. Firstly, don’t panic. Secondly. you’re going to love them. We had you (and your success online) in mind while designing them, and we’ve done some intense testing with the new features and the beta testers are just as excited as we are. All the changes make the platform better — allowing you to accelerate and grow your visibility on the web and truly shine.
The changes are all awesome; giving you more control over the look and feel of your topic pages, deeper access to your social networks and more seamless connections between your various social properties.
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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Five years ago, SEO was all the buzz. Today, it has shifted to “content marketing,” which aims to create stories humans want to read and engage with. – The above chart is a good summary of this trend.
Shane Snow makes a good summary on Mashable of the trends impacting SEO these days. We moved from a machiavellian approach to game Google to influence-based content marketing because social media changed the game as others have observed before.
The success of Social Content Curation is a good example of that trend: human sharing and curating content beat the system and become such an important trend that Google had not only to change their algorithms but also start a social network just because of that.
See on mashable.com
Read MoreThis evening, we were happy to host the co-founder of the awesome social media tool BufferApp, Leo Widrich (@LeoWid), who shared five awesome lessons that he’s learned over the last two years of developing his very own content marketing strategy.
At the time of its creation, Buffer App didn’t have any users and its two young founders tried relentlessly to get any tech blogs to cover them. When this didn’t work, the co-founders asked themselves, “if no one else will write about us, why can’t we just write about ourselves?”
Since Leo was the “marketing guy,” he was charged with putting out as much content as he could to spread the word about Buffer App. Two years and a highly successful social media app later, Leo has learned some of the most important lessons in content marketing:
1. Pick Quantity over Quality
2. The Hidden Power of Images
3. Copy and Steal
4. Help 1 other person with each piece of content.
5. Show your passion and culture
Read more on leancontentmarketing.tumblr.com
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I gave this talk at TechWeek L.A. (where else on such a topic?) last week as I felt the new social media evolutions, particularly the rise of the interest graph, are making things move quickly on that subject.
Why do we remember famous people in history? How? How about today’s celebrities? And how are the Internet and the Social Web changing that now?
A look at the fame creation process tells us it is indissociable from the media creation process, which has been deeply impacted by new information technology. The Andy Warhol prediction is probably no longer valid and we need to rethink fame in the context of a distributed Internet network which more and more becomes topic-centric and no longer people-centric.
See on www.slideshare.net
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For this week’s #scoopitchat, we’ll be joined by Jeff Domansky, also known as @ThePRCoach.
As Principal of Peak Communications Inc, Jeff Domansky works with clients as a public relations and social PR consultant, C-level strategist, communications coach, content marketing expert, curator, crisis communications manager, contributor to blogs and publications, and connoisseur of other words starting with C. You can see his bio on LinkedIn.
Make sure to follow @allygreer, @scoopit, and @ThePRCoach, and we’ll “see” you all on Twitter tomorrow at 11am PST!
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