The Scoop.it Content Curation Blog

How content curation can help you to engage your audiences

2013: What You Read

Posted on
December 26, 2013
by

Ahh, 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!

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Posted in
Content Curation

How Content Curation is reshaping learning organizations

Posted on
December 23, 2013
by

A framework for using Curation in a learning organisation

Guillaume Decugis‘s insight:

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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Posted in
Content Curation

Can Facebook People-Centric Model Really Scale?

Posted on
December 20, 2013
by

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. 

Guillaume Decugis‘s insight:

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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How to Turn Your Brand Into a Media

Posted on
December 19, 2013
by


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?

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Posted in
Opinion

Are current events the new keywords?

Posted on
December 11, 2013
by

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.

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Posted in
Opinion

Why Content Curation is the Ultimate Compliment to the Creator

Posted on
December 4, 2013
by

Before 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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Posted in
Guest Writers, Opinion

The Thanks Economy: Companies & People Giving Back to their Communities

Posted on
November 27, 2013
by

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.

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Posted in
Opinion

5 ways to engage your audience through authentic communication

Posted on
November 26, 2013
by

Communications 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.”

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9 Ways to Find Personal Contentment

Posted on
November 25, 2013
by

It’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.

Yoga

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Posted in
Learning Resources

Are knowledge-sharing institutions showing too much bias?

Posted on
November 21, 2013
by

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).

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Posted in
Guest Writers, Opinion

Integrating with LinkedIn Company Pages – the Untapped Opportunity for SMBs (Study Results)

Posted on
November 19, 2013
by

Several 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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Trending: Social Calls To Action

Posted on
November 18, 2013
by

Social media has been changing recently with the advent of cool new curation tools like us and RebelMouse, all of which extend the life of your social content by significant margins. With this in mind, tweets and other posts that are simply headlines with a link are no longer good enough. As social media continues to morph, you need to think about social like you think about SEO — optimized for clicking. A million retweets don’t count for much if no one ever actually interacts with your brand. As you create positioning for your social content, consider these new Social Calls-to-Action, or SCTAs.

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Posted in
Learning Resources

Learning to Learn: The Path to Real-World Knowledge

Posted on
November 15, 2013
by

It may be hard to get into learning again after being out of any type of educational establishment for some time. It’s either because education loses its luster once we’re not being rewarded with letters and pieces of paper, or because we’re so used to being passively taught. We didn’t have to read the whole history (or economics or Philosophy of Man’s Infatuation With Bacon) book. We got an abridged version in class (okay not the bacon one) between daydreams and texting under the desk.

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Blogging for Dummies (and the time constrained)

Posted on
November 14, 2013
by

When you hear the word blogger, what image comes to mind?  A sacred group of people anointed by the All Mighty with special powers who unleash their acerbic editorial tongue lashing from 40-story skyscrapers in major cities around the world?  Or is it men and women in pajamas scattered across the country eating cereal while pontificating on vacuous subjects?  Maybe it’s paparazzi celebrity stalkers with 50MM zoom lenses camping out in a rental car waiting to assault a model cheating on her husband with a sports star.

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Posted in
Opinion, Web Trends

The Miley Cyrus Effect: Leveraging Current Events in your Content Strategy

Posted on
November 13, 2013
by

Recently, I’ve noticed a spike in the rate at which pop cultural current events get picked up in both major and minor media. A quick google search for “Miley Cyrus VMA” yields a shocking 71,600,000 results, many from massively influential media sources, such as CNN, the Huffington Post, and Mashable. Many of these sites don’t even include a commentary or any original content at all, choosing instead to simply re-post the notorious video. I also recently came across this post, where the author was so frustrated by the lack of views on his other, much more brilliant content, that he falsely labeled an article with “Miley Cyrus,” simply to get his content in front of people.

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Posted in
Opinion

11 Interests, 12 Curators, 13 Topics

Posted on
November 12, 2013
by

In case you hadn’t realized (or been on social media all day), today’s date is quite fun. It’s November 11th, 2013, also known as 11/12/13. Did you know that a couple even got married at 9:10 am, on live television?

For the sake of being extra cheesy, and a little bit due to not wanting to miss out on the date-related fun, I found this to be the perfect opportunity to showcase some of the amazing things you can find on Scoop.it. With the recent addition of Interest categories, discovering fascinating content is easier than ever, and connecting with likeminded individuals to build communities of interest is extra fun.

In that spirit, I present to you 11 interests / 12 curators / 13 topics that you might not have found before on Scoop.it.

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Posted in
Product News

6 Things You Didn’t Know You Could do with Scoop.it: Part III

Posted on
November 12, 2013
by

The Scoop.it platform has been a perpetual work in progress for over two years. During that period, we’ve had lots of exciting accomplishments and releases, and it’s no secret that some features have remained hidden in the shadows.

As a part of the team working on building Scoop.it as the ultimate knowledge sharing hub, I like to think I know a thing or two about the product – and what fun is knowing things if you don’t get to share them?

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Posted in
Scoop.it Hacks, Series

The Power of Brands: a 67000% Return in One Day & 3 Tips to Make your Personal Brand the Next Apple

Posted on
November 11, 2013
by

I’m a child of Descartes. I grew up in a rational world where logical thinking was the best weapon against ignorance, the right way out of dogma, and I still think today that it’s a decent objective.

I had believed in rational behavior when it came to my credit card, too. I had never considered lining up for two hours (let alone two days) for the privilege of buying an expensive phone bearing a fruit logo. At least, not because of the fruit logo. I had believed that specifications, performance, price and ROI should be essential contributors to my buying decisions just as math, physics and other sciences are essential contributors to my understanding of the world.

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Posted in
Opinion

Scoop.it and a Hashtag: A social media knock-out combo every digital media agency wished they’ve invented

Posted on
November 8, 2013
by

Marketers want their community to produce content without losing control and getting lost in the “user-generated” madness. So, most marketers default to containing the conversation risking the brand’s authenticity. Now, there’s a better way to leverage community contributed content for building brand reputation and engagement. This scalable, simple and effective social media strategy has been created, tested and proven not by a fancy digital media agency in New York City, but by Thomas Listerman, Director of e-Communications, from the University of San Francisco.

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How much is twitter worth (to small businesses)?

Posted on
November 7, 2013
by

Today the third major social network is becoming a public company. As with all major IPO’s, we will read a lot of diverse and conflicting opinions on its valuation: to some Twitter will be an overpriced money-losing startup, to others it will be the next major player of the Web and undervalued.

To add a data point to the debate, the Scoop.it team decided to study the value of social networks to small and mid-size businesses.

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6 things you didn’t know you could do with Scoop.it: Part II

Posted on
November 5, 2013
by

The Scoop.it platform has been a perpetual work in progress two years now. During that period, we’ve had lots of exciting accomplishments and releases, and it’s no secret that some features have remained hidden in the shadows.

As a part of the team working on building Scoop.it as the ultimate knowledge sharing hub, I like to think I know a thing or two about the product – and what fun is knowing things if you don’t get to share them? (hint: you can tweet your new knowledge too!)

Today, I bring you part two of this series. With the Scoop.it platform, you can….

Optimize your sources for the best suggestions!

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Posted in
Scoop.it Hacks, Series

The Like economy: how social gratitude affects content efforts

Posted on
November 5, 2013
by

Studies have shown that our brain reacts positively to our content being “liked” or shared on social media. Social gratitude, and notoriety among a peer group, are really the only reasons individuals post content to social media. If no one likes your post, it even can bring you down, or make you feel like no one cares. This is especially prevalent among the youth, with 52% of the teenage Facebook users of the iGeneration (born in the 1990s) clicking “like” daily or even several times a day. Generation Y were a close second with 45% daily “like” clicks, followed closely by 32% of Gen Xers and 24% of Baby Boomers.

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Two years sharing ideas that matter to 100 million people

Posted on
November 4, 2013
by


As Scoop.it turns two today, we are excited to share a great milestone: we’re only a few weeks away from reaching 100 million cumulated unique visitors on the platform! That’s right: 100 million different people have been to Scoop.it to discover the awesome content of our amazing community of curators. How much content you ask? Well, a few months ago we counted 50 million curated pieces.

When we started working on Scoop.it, the horizon wasn’t that far. Out of a failed project, we needed to be quick to apply the lessons that we had learned.

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Posted in
Product News

Becoming a Brand Journalist by Finding Stories from Within Your SMB

Posted on
October 31, 2013
by

Let’s start out by addressing the giant elephant in the room. Yes, brand journalism is one of the most recent buzzwords to have taken over the world of Internet and content marketing. A brand journalist has been defined in many ways; from “one who tells journalism-style stories about a company that make the reader want to know more,” to “one who records what happens to a brand in the world and creates communications that, over time, tell the story of the brand.”

Chances are, your startup or SMB is unlikely to find a specialized brand journalist, let alone one you can afford. This leaves most businesses between a rock and a hard place. How will you be able to supplement your traditional content marketing with brand journalism that tells interesting stories and keeps your audience interested?

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OK, Glass — inspire me: a post about the positive impact tech has on our lives.

Posted on
October 31, 2013
by

I recently got back from some travels, and as I walked around Germany, Italy, and my hometown near Washington, DC., I could not help but think about my relationship with technology and how it has evolved throughout the years. Living in San Francisco and working in Silicon Valley, I often forget that other cities are not as inspired by technology. Not so long ago, I too did not quite comprehend how technology could and would change my life.

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