Today, February 5th, 2014, is Digital Learning Day. According to its website, the focus of this awareness campaign is “about giving every child the opportunity to learn in a robust digital environment everyday, with the goal of success in college and a career.”
To celebrate, here are 5 of the best, must-follow #edtech curators on Scoop.it.
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Last week, the Scoop.it team and I were extremely excited to announce the launch of our brand new Rewards Program. Now that all of the new rewards members have been notified, I’d like to shine the Scoop.it spotlight on a few of the top curators from the past six months.
These curators have set an extraordinary example for the rest of the Scoop.it community as well as the greater online community of curators. They’ve helped us through every step of our journey to making the web a smarter place, and we’re proud to have them on our team. Check out their profile and topic pages, and think about even sending them a tweet to say hi!
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Creating vs. curating. If you work in marketing, or maybe even if you don’t, I’m sure you’ve been a witness to this content debate at one point or another. There are numerous arguments for each side, and ultimately, both are included in any successful content strategy.
The ideal mix between content curation and original content creation is a debate that I often find myself having with my colleagues and industry peers. So, in the spirit of Super Bowl XLVIII this weekend, I decided to ask the experts what they thought in a matchup that I’ve officially dubbed Content Super Bowl I.
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It’s pretty safe to say that it’s been a strong beginning to 2014 here at Scoop.it. We’ve been working, hypothesizing, testing, listening, and implementing pretty much since the clock struck midnight on January 1st. That said, I wanted to check in with you today to give you some insight into what’s going on over here – including some pretty big and exciting new announcements!
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In 2013, the field of community management expanded more than ever. According to The Community Roundtable, the average community manager has 3.7 years of experience. Just imagine how many more companies are employing community managers now than in 2010!
Today, January 27th, is the 5th annual Community Manager Appreciation Day. In honor of this event, I’ve compiled a few interesting stats on the world of community management from 2013, and added in a few tips from my two years of experience in the field. Feel free to pass them along!
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Most people curate for the benefit of themselves or their organisations. What if we considered content curation from a user centered design perspective? What would audience centered curation look like?
An interesting look at curation from the user experience side.
For Content Curation to generate goodwill – in whichever form you can see it: thought leadership, brand awareness, lead generation, etc… – it needs to be first and foremost valuable to your reader.
How can you make curated content not only more useful and interesting to your audience, but ensure that they are having an enjoyable and successful experience consuming this content?
Great tips from Sam Burrough.
See on weelearning.co.uk
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At the beginning of this month, I decided that I was going to take a different approach to New Years Resolutions. After much consideration, it simply started to make more sense to plan on taking specific actions that would lead to achieving objectives, rather than to plan open-endedly on reaching vague goals.
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As the volume of content published on the Internet continues to grow, consumers can help shield themselves from the noise that doesn’t matter to them by curating only the content that matters on interest graph platforms
Content curation and the Interest Graph are two different things but are deeply connected. While some content curators like Maria Popova are great at being eclectic, a lot of value to readers come from being able to discover and read from publishers who address the specific niches they’re interested in.
Chad Politt from Digital Relevance clearly establishes that connexion in this contribution to the Huff Post and I would draw the following conclusions for content strategists and content curators:
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In a recent post, top content marketer and blogger Mark Schaefer scored a hit and started a big controversy by predicting the end of content marketing as we know it because of a forecasted Content Shock. With Content Marketing having been all the rage these past few years, his post made some noise generating responses and debate from many. And while a lot of people have given numerous arguments as to why he’s right or wrong – including Shel Holtz who argues that as content consumers we become better and better at filtering content through various curation tools – nobody yet has looked at the role publishing-by-curation and the interest graph played in that picture.
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As a platform that helps people, businesses or organizations with their content strategy, it’s always been natural for us to use content ourselves in our communication. For a lot of companies – including Scoop.it – communicating through content means having several distribution channels – including email – and today we’d like to share a few things we’ve learned using email newsletters as a content marketing distribution mechanism.
Read MoreOkay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop. Why? Because over time it’s become a more and more spammy practice, and if you’re doing a lot of guest blogging then you’re hanging out with really bad company.
The head of the Google Webspam team has spoken: guest blogging is now on the hook and won’t be an SEO strategy you can rely on in 2014.
Following the demise of massive link building (which now can have adverse effects), this is another strategy once recommended by traditionnal SEO consultants that disappears as part of Google’s strategy to fight spam, cheap SEO tricks and promote great quality content in search results. The more Google Search evolves, the more it relies on new criteria such as social signals to promote quality content.
What this means is there’s no way around this simple truth now: to come up in search results, you need to publish good quality content and add value – either through great original content or carefully curated quality pieces. And in the race to publish great content frequently, it’s likely you will find the latter very useful.
See on www.mattcutts.com
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You will often hear that those with some of the most publicized successes arrived at those accomplishments by simply out-working those around them. Jerry Rice, the all-time greatest wide receiver in NFL history, famously chased horses and caught bricks as a child to develop speed and coordination, while developing a 365-day training schedule throughout his pro career. Notable successful executives such as Tim Cook are known for their routinely early starts to their work days, while others like Marc Cuban are known for forfeiting vacation days for the first seven years of his career.
Health and work-life balance risks aside, I would never contradict that a strong work ethic, focus, commitment, and having an intense voraciousness for success will lead you down a path in the right direction. Luckily, achieving success and reaching your maximum output starts with a much simpler step, and that is in finding what I like to call The Stretch Zone.
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Calling all New Yorkers!
After last year’s Social Media Week New York trip, where we met tons of awesome people, spent time talking about Scoop.it, curation, and the future of social, and learned more than we ever could have imagined learning in a five-day span, we’re ready for more!
If you are a private citizen with no business concern at all, then there is no great need for you to be on social media. The main reason that many private citizens are on it is because it is fun. You get to communicate with your friends and complete strangers. It is also loaded with brand new content every day, including content that your friends and family have posted. It allows people to see family photographs that were uploaded by distant relatives. It also allows you to share things between friends that will make them laugh. If however you are running a website, blog, business, or all three, then it is vitally important that you are on social media.
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Freelance writing is an incredibly rich and fulfilling career, especially if you’re passionate about writing on a particular subject or niche. It’s entirely possible to make money if you decide to become a freelance writer; in fact, it can easily become a full-time job. The only trick is that you have to treat it like one: honing your skills, dedicating set times to do your job, and promoting it.
On the first work day of 2014, there is certainly no shortage of resolution lists floating around the Internet. If you’re anything like me, you probably spent some time on Tuesday night thinking about what you wanted to accomplish this year, or what you were going to change. Personally, I decided to be more assertive in all aspects of my life. Maybe you decided to be a better communicator with friends and family, or to multiply this year’s revenue by 3.
Read MoreAhh, December. The best time of year for bloggers. The one month at the end of every year where we take the time to look back over the last 11 and – you guessed it – make lots of lists. Lists of fails and lists of wins, lists of bests and lists of worsts.
As Buzzfeed has certainly proven, everyone loves a list. Lists are easy to write, easy to read, and extremely shareable (hello, #leancontent!). But, what makes a list even more exciting is objectivity. I’m sure my list of the best albums of 2013 would be extremely different than my dad’s. There’s one thing that doesn’t lie, though, and that’s numbers. That’s why I decided to make an end of the year list based on your opinions, rather than my own. Take a look back, re-enjoy the 6 top posts from the Scoop.it blog from this year, re-share them, and if you happen to be inspired, start writing your very own post for us for 2014!
A framework for using Curation in a learning organisation
This excellent and very comprehensive article looks stall the aspects in which content curation is transforming organizations – from individual professional development to collective collaborative learning and communication.
“Increasingly we are being challenged to deliver ‘more with less’ in the learning department. Curation potentially holds an interesting answer to some of the constraints we’re facing in time and cost. Why build new content, when you can curate?”
Bill Gates once stated that in the future the way we would control information in business would determine whether we win or lose. Here’s an interesting framework to be among the winners.
See on www.ht2.co.uk
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Earlier this week, at Scoop.it’s December Lean Content meetup, we were visited by nonprofit consultant, marketer, author, and trainer Beth Kanter. Beth put on one of the best presentations we’ve seen to date, with hands-on advice on curation in general, and specifically applied some best practices to the nonprofit sector.
In 2008, Mark Zuckerberg laid out his theory about people sharing content on Facebook. “I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and [the] next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before,” he said.
This article reminded me of my own post on Business Insider predicting that the Facebook people-centric model will see its limits. Two years and one IPO down the road, we’re exactly there: with 1,500 potential stories to show to an average user news feed every time they visit, Facebook has a tough time determining what’s really important.
Perhaps more importantly, Facebook lost its raison d’etre
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This is a talk that I gave at LeWeb 2013 and at the Cristal Festival in December.
While we’ve now seen the power of brand content, it remains very hard for even the largest brands to implement successfully. In addition, it doesn’t solve the question of how to engage an audience on a daily basis. To do so, brands have to become media.
But how?
Read More“The Internet has changed the role of sales forever (…) what’s even more interesting is the source of where the information is coming from. In most cases it’s not the brand you’re researching, but a highly regarded 3rd party expert – or influencer – in the industry.” [See on traackr.com]
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The “trending topics” section on Twitter has always been a fascinating example of virality to me. Sometimes, you get the weirdest combination of stuff (Pandora, women, and Christmas?), and it makes me wonder “how on Earth did that make it into the trending topics?” But, because of the power of trends on social media, I’ve begun to wonder how current events can impact content strategy. For instance, if I were to produce and publish a brilliant infographic and publish it on the same day that Kanye throws another Twitter tantrum — how does that affect the engagement on my post? How much traffic do I lose because the social web has its collective eyes turned toward Chipotle? It’s definitely an interesting (and possibly depressing) subject to ponder.
Read MoreBefore today, imitation was the greatest form of flattery. If your idea was good enough to be copied, then you were golden. But now, with the state of the web in our lives, this balance is shifting. While “copying” still does exist online, the concept of “copying” is now simply a way to bump your own Google ranking by farming someone else’s content. This, is not flattering. Even if correctly cited, 100% republished work is simply cheating to get ahead. Curation, on the other hand — the meaningful selection, enrichment, and sharing of existing media — combines imitation and creation. Curators have to create a new perspective or idea on top of the existing media which supports the content in the original.
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In less than 24 hours, households around America will be setting tables, gathering ‘round, feasting on turkey, and talking about what they’re thankful for. While these are typical family activities during the month of November, it’s easy to forget how important it is to spend time with the people around us and appreciate what we have during the rest of the year.
For businesses, remembering to give back to your community is equally difficult. With the constant focus on earning revenue, brand marketing, social media and content strategy, and simply clearing out those emails, who even has the time to think about giving? Scoop.it would – quite literally – not exist without our amazing community of curators sharing smart content across the web, and similarly, most businesses would be nothing without their consumers.
Read MoreCommunications from branded properties, celebrities, or anyone with a “following” can often come of as false, contrived, and sometimes insensitive, even if they have the best intentions. This article was inspired by a recent email campaign I received, where the “reply” email address was “no-reply@redacted.com.” This gave me pause. I don’t know why this particular email campaign set me off, but I was genuinely irritated that they would really prevent me from interacting with their brand. Who wants to be told they actively can’t reach out to someone who is proactively talking to them. That’s basically a brand saying “you don’t matter and we don’t want to talk to you.”
Read MoreIt’s not uncommon to feel a sort of emptiness in life. People try all sorts of way to fill that void in all sorts of ways. The truly best way to fill a void is to either help others or help yourself. Filling the void with superficial filler and material items may not lead to true self-actualization. According to Everest CEO Francis Pedraza, learning and understanding what people truly need are huge advantages in both inside and outside the office. Here are a few ways that you can find contentment in life.
Our knowledge sharing institutions of today are beginning to “humanize,” to focus more of their resources on creating readable, shareable media than on reporting cold, hard facts, simply to stay relevant and on top of peoples’ online radars. To make facts more palatable, many medias will interpret ideas with respect to their own unique brand Point-of-View, one only has to consider CNN versus FOX news here in the USA. But, do institutions who stand and a major knowledge source for world readers have a responsibility to keep bias out of their findings? Is “fact omission” or “spin” an appropriate way to interact with vital facts? Or, as I seem to see it, has major marketing technique got its claws too far into our knowledge sharing institutions and our own lives (because, really, we as readers are the ones who perpetuate this problem).
Read MoreSeveral studies have shown that small and mid-size businesses massively use social media as a digital marketing tactic. But at Scoop.it we wanted to take it a step further: how do small and mid-sized businesses use social media? What are their key opportunities? Over the past few months, we surveyed more than 3,000 SMBs: some within the Scoop.it user base, some outside of it. We asked questions, collected behavioral data and discovered intriguing findings which we plan to release in several parts – the first of which being in this SlideShare presentation.
The first lesson we learned is that LinkedIn Company Pages seem to be a major opportunity not yet leveraged by many SMBs. Though LinkedIn is THE business social network, SMBs still don’t see their future on LinkedIn and prefer to invest their time and effort in Facebook and Twitter. Interestingly, this is not because they don’t see the value: the large majority (67%) understands that LinkedIn is a great fit for them, but they simply don’t have the time nor the content they need to take advantage of LinkedIn Company Pages as an important marketing opportunity. Additionally, they lack ways to measure the impact their LinkedIn campaigns or content would have on their digital marketing strategies.
So today, we’re happy to announce that we’re introducing a solution to this problem by integrating LinkedIn Company Pages as a sharing option within Scoop.it…
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