One thing I pride myself on – and you’ll know this if you’ve read anything I’ve written in the past – is always continuing my quest for new knowledge. One of the most important parts of working in a field that evolves so quickly is keeping up with the trends and the experts.
If you’re a content marketer, digital marketer, or B2B professional in need of some inspiration, I’ve got some for you. Read, learn, be inspired, and share!
Curation is the key to consistently delivering relevant content to your target audience, but how does it impact SEO?
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Have You Made the Business Case For Content Curation? If not, this data will help persuade your management to invest in content curation.
Source: heidicohen.com
This is a solid summary by Heidi Cohen on why content curation is besoming essential to businesses. Its role to content strategy mix has evolved from being anecdotical a few years ago to becoming central as it not only helps fill the gap but provides meaningful synergies for your created content.
Now as Heidi puts it, content curation is not free: while it’s – as she puts it – “a low cost way to fill your content marketing pipeline“, low doesn’t mean zero. I still regularly have debates with people who think that automated aggregation can replace content curation: it doesn’t. There’s no way to set it up once and forget about it. You’ll need to invest as little as 15 minutes a day to achieve results but these 15′ need to be spent.
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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.
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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.
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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:
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Here is a 50 point Second Half Content Marketing Checklist to help you create content like an A-lister. Use these questions to get your content on track.
Source: heidicohen.com
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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 duplicate content which could hurt SEO and defeat the purpose.
3. Re-publishing content means it’s read on a platform from where we can’t convert 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.
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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.
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Every day, there are more than 500 million tweets sent out onto Twitter. Approximately 30 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook each month. On a social networking website that has loads of traffic, how do you attract attention?
Read MoreSocial media marketers are keen to drive engagement but it may not necessarily be a viable strategy. In fact, it comes at a cost.
Source: www.slideshare.net
Mark Schaefer has a great point: we often confuse the means with the end.
In a blog post that I wrote a couple weeks ago, I explained why I thought social media publishing was dead – as we know it. One of these points was that the impact of publishing on social media for our goals is the combination of volume, quality and engagement. As Mark explains, engagement is only one variable in that equation.
So how can you convert your social media activity to make it count towards your goals?
One of the important basic first step you can take is to make sure you publish through a content hub that you can make your own and from where you can convert visitors: to subscribe to your content, to reshare your previously published content or to sign up for whatever pre-sales activity makes sense in your business.
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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.
Read MoreIn 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.
Source: www.youtube.com
“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.
A win-win deal for all.
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Content Repurposing – Updating or changing content into a different form than the original to serve a different audience or the same audience differently.
Source: www.toprankblog.com
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.
Several techniques like the ones Lee Odden mentions here addressing just that and prevents your content from “melting like wet snow as soon as it hits the ground“.
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“Do you have a content marketing strategy? Do you have the resources necessary to implement your content marketing strategy? Do you find it easy to create unique content on a consistent basis? If you answered NO to any or all of these questions, you’re not alone.”
Social Media engagement does not only happen on the social network itself.
Ask yourself the question: what’s better for you? That someone likes one of your picture on Facebook or that she subscribes to your blog’s newsletter?
Why I’ve decided to stop taking “content” gigs and other journalists should, too.
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.
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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.
Source: socialmediatoday.com
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…
Read MoreSource: www.slideshare.net
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.
My talk was thus on how to relieve that stress…
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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.
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Whether you’re a freelancer fresh out of college or a Pulitzer-winning pro, you should be curating content.
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“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…
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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.
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Read MoreOne of my core beliefs of effective content marketing is to deliver content people actually want. Publish stories they actually will enjoy – to read and to share.
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.
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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.
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While content marketing has been all the rage as a buzzword over the past 2 years, more and more people are rightfully asking the question of its ROI: is it effective? Can I afford content marketing as a small business? How do I even measure content marketing ROI?
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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.
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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.
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