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.
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Working in the world of entrepreneurs and startups has given me a whole new appreciation for the phrase “fake it ’til you make it.” This isn’t to say that everyone who is just getting started in their companies or careers in general is completely faking it, but just that they are doing the right things to position themselves correctly before they might actually be a full-fledged expert.
In this post on Entrepreneur.com, the extremely smart Dorie Clark tackles a question that almost all of us have tried to figure out at one point or another: how do I make myself seem like I know what I’m doing when I’m just getting started?
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The Midwest is more than great BBQ and Tornado Alley. It’s a veritable pool of ingenious startups that are giving their coastal neighbors from New York to Silicon Valley a run for their money. From foodie startups to companies revolutionizing education, it’s crucial for investors and consumers alike to keep an eye on this surprising hot spot of entrepreneurship. Heading into 2014, here are five innovative Midwestern startups to watch.
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Last week, the latest edition of the #leancontent took place in San Francisco with an incredibly smart and inspiring talk from SmartRecruiters’ David Smooke. He enlightened an extremely engaged audience on the importance of guest blogging and how it can be used to build community and authority, especially for startups.
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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.
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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.
Read MoreEvery one of your people can become an advocate for your organization and your brand – an employee advocate.
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.
See on socialmediatoday.com
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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.
Read MoreI 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.
Read MoreIs content marketing worth it? Can your company achieve a positive ROI by investing in blogging, social media, and marketing automation?
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.
See on www.business2community.com
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SlideShare is a great platform for visual content and an amazing company: in just a few years, it has become the YouTube of presentations, one of the Top 150 sites in the world with an impressive 3 Billion views per month from 60 million unique visitors. Perhaps like many others, I originally thought of SlideShare as a platform to use only on specific occasions: when I had talked at a conference, when we had produced great slides worth sharing or when we had something specifically visual to communicate. I had had great experience and results but I don’t talk to conferences every day and so I sometimes felt I was missing out. And then, one night of September last year, I heard Jason Miller present at one of our #leancontent events and it became all clear: the team and I realized we could use SlideShare in a very different way – not just as a tool to recycle and share what you already created for other purposes but as a media channel that we would update on a regular basis. In a word, as a visual blog.
We decided to try it: over the next few months, we tried to publish at least every other week to SlideShare, integrating it in our content calendar alongside our blog and our Scoop.it content curations.
These are the first results after 4 months running this experiment.
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Visual Marketing Over/Under or How I Use Scoop.it
Friends like Phil Buckley and Mark Traphagen are curious about how and why I use Scoop.it. This G+ post shares a detailed analysis of how Scoop.it helps reduce #contentmarketing risks, provides fast feedback to influence social media marketing and creates a safe envrionment to test assumptions, create validated learning and learn fast.
The quest to effectively share knowledge within a company is one that still appears elusive. How do you keep on top of your competitors’ developments? How do you monitor articles that mention your brand? How do you make sure your teams get the information they need to make decisions and to learn?
If it wasn’t extremely obvious from the majority of my writing, I’m obsessed with learning. When I started out my career as a community manager, I didn’t even know what that meant. Two years later, I’m still not quite sure there is a single definition, but I certainly have learned a lot about what it means to build community, run social media strategies, and bring value to the crowded web with a group of brilliant content curators who I’ve been lucky enough to meet through the journey.
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If you struggle with providing a steady stream of fresh, relevant content for your website, you’re not alone. Perhaps one of the best ways to overcome this challenge, while also increasing the value you provide to your audience, is through the process of editorialized content curation.
But while we know that this process (when done right) is beneficial in terms of driving traffic, extending reach and providing interesting and valuable content, what does Google think about content curation?
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Content Marketing has been all the rage these past few years. We’ve heard from many speakers and influencers that content marketing is the new advertising and that “brands must become media to earn relevance”. But how do we measure its ROI and know our content isn’t just fueling some vanity metric but is actually helping our business?
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Content curation is not just collecting, it’s also sharing. And whatever our motivation, we curate content to have an impact so understanding where our traffic comes from is important. During our first 2 years of existence, the Scoop.it users have published more than 50M pieces of content attracting more than 100M unique visitors so we’ve been in a great position to observe not only where this traffic came from but also what best practices had the strongest influence on it. So we’ve analyzed all the content curated, published and shared through Scoop.it. This post is about sharing these data and learnings so you can be more effective with your content curation.
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As a social media manager, you’re probably aware of many of the pains that come with staying visible online and managing many social media channels at once. Luckily, there’s an answer to the woes of social media publishing: content curation. Here are 5 problems that social media publishers face and how content curation helps alleviate the pain.
Read MoreAhh, Influencers. A key component to your social media and inbound marketing success. Not only do we need them to propel our marketing efforts to the next level, but they also play a large part of your relationship marketing strategy. An Influencer campaign should be a part of your social media engagement strategy.
From the New Yorker: “When Jonah Berger was a graduate student at Stanford, in the early aughts, he would make a habit of reading page A2 of the Wall Street Journal, which included a list of the five most-read and the five most-shared articles of the day. “I’d go down to the library and surreptitiously cut out that page,” he recalls. “I noticed that what was read and what was shared was often different, and I wondered why that would be.” What was it about a piece of content—an article, a picture, a video—that took it from simply interesting to interesting and shareable? What pushes someone not only to read a story but to pass it on?”
This piece that Gregg Morris initially scooped on how some people have been putting a lot of analysis to understand how and why stories go viral: after all – as this great article points out – this was already something Aristotle was intrigued by.
The findings are interesting and I encourage you to read them as it can inform your content strategy. Keep in mind the conclusion however – which I think is great and wise: the more we understand viral content collectively, the less we understand it.
Why?
Because whenever humans are involved, martingales don’t exist for long.
It reminds me of financial markets: whenever stock information is perfectly distributed and statistical models are the same for everybody, no one really has an edge.
For content, the same that applies: when everybody’s trying to do an Upworthy-like headline, they become much less effective than they used to be.
See on www.newyorker.com
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Just recently, Scoop.it announced that Scoop.it curators will be able to connect their personal profiles for the purpose of Google Authorship, and at the same time, can now connect a Google+ Business Page for sharing curated content. This is really exciting news, as busy business owners and social media managers can now use Scoop.it to curate and share great content to all of their branded social media profiles – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and now Google+.
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Last week, Scoop.it announced its integration with Google+ Pages and Google Authorship. As CEO Guillaume Decugis explained, “we actually believe curation is a form of creation. So just as Google introduced Google Authorship as a way for publishers to be more visible in search results and benefit from a natural SEO method, we felt it was also important to add Google+ to the platform. So from now on, you will be able to link your Google+ profile to Scoop.it and not only be recognized in search results for your curated content but derive higher traffic from Google Search through the improved visibility authored results enjoy.”
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Read MoreIn conjunction with Social Media Week NYC, Scoop.it’s Ally Greer spoke to attendees and content marketers about the #leancontent methodology and how to use curation to jumpstart a business.
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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Noah Brier, the co-founder of Percolate, took to the stage this morning at Social Media Week NYC to give a broader perspective on the process that goes into content marketing process and tap into the ideal mindset of a brand content creator.
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Every time I visit the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, I see something I’ve never seen before. In fact, t’s considered the most influential museum of modern art in the world. With that in mind, meet Klaus Biesenbach. Klaus holds the title “Chief Curator at Large” at MoMA. If you’ve visited the MoMA and walked away impressed (like I have), Klaus has a lot to do with that.
As content curators, we should all aspire to be like Klaus. After all, wouldn’t it be great if our content collections drew as much interest, respect and admiration as the collections at MoMA? In order to achieve this feat, we need to become highly effective content curators. In other words, we need to curate Internet content as we would fine art.
Let’s consider seven habits of content creation that would make Klaus Biesenbach proud.
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I was recently asked by Bill Gasset: “how does one go about being in the recommended feed in the side panel for a specific topic?” As this is a question we frequently have, I thought I would turn my answer to him into a blog post so we can not only help other Scoopiteers benefit from it but also enrich it with your comments, ideas and suggestions.
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We couldn’t miss out on the day of love! You know that we’re usually all about business, but we also have infinite amounts of love for each and every Scoopiteer. With that in mind, here are the only — Valentines you’ll need. Download ’em, screenshot ’em, tweet ’em, share ’em, mail ’em if you want (do people still do that?)!
Most importantly, though, remember that we love you and are always here for you. Scoop on!
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While Webster’s might define a nerd as someone who is unstylish, unattractive or “hopelessly devoted to intellectual or academic pursuits” — nerds and geeks have increasingly become accepted among the mainstream. And lately, they’ve become more well-known for their enthusiasm for things they love. If you love to write or read, you might be a word nerd. If you have an unhealthy obsession for fashion, you could be geek chic.
No matter your interests, being well-educated is a great way to becoming a more well-rounded person. It also has a habit of making a person more enlightened, i.e. less judgmental and more congenial with others of different backgrounds. Here are some things you can do to keep your mind young and to expand your horizons.
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