Can Facebook People-Centric Model Really Scale?
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
Read MoreHow to Turn Your Brand Into a Media
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 More4 Steps to Becoming a Modern Sales Professional
“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]
Read MoreAre current events the new keywords?
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 MoreWhy Content Curation is the Ultimate Compliment to the Creator
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.
Read MoreThe Thanks Economy: Companies & People Giving Back to their Communities
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 More5 ways to engage your audience through authentic communication
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.”
Read More9 Ways to Find Personal Contentment
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.
Are knowledge-sharing institutions showing too much bias?
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 MoreIntegrating with LinkedIn Company Pages – the Untapped Opportunity for SMBs (Study Results)
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…
Read MoreTrending: Social Calls To Action
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.
Read MoreLearning to Learn: The Path to Real-World Knowledge
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.
Read MoreBlogging for Dummies (and the time constrained)
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.
Read MoreThe Miley Cyrus Effect: Leveraging Current Events in your Content Strategy
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.
Read More11 Interests, 12 Curators, 13 Topics
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.
Read More6 Things You Didn’t Know You Could do with Scoop.it: Part III
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?
Read MoreThe Power of Brands: a 67000% Return in One Day & 3 Tips to Make your Personal Brand the Next Apple
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.
Read MoreScoop.it and a Hashtag: A social media knock-out combo every digital media agency wished they’ve invented
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.
Read MoreNew on Scoop.it: Mentions and LinkedIn Post Editing
Today might be just another Thursday, but there’s a few little sparks of excitement here in the world of Scoop.it. It doesn’t take much to get us excited, and that’s why we’re really pumped to tell you about the two little features we rolled out earlier today!
How much is twitter worth (to small businesses)?
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.
Read More5 Ways to Rethink Corporate Knowledge Sharing
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 to 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?
Read More6 things you didn’t know you could do with Scoop.it: Part II
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!)
Optimize your sources for the best suggestions!
Read MoreWhy Bashing Content Curation Is Not The Answer
Eric Wittlake uses a provocative title to list four reasons why content curation is not a silver bullet in b2b content marketing. While I agree with him there are no silver bullets in marketing, he makes some points which I disagree with.
Read MoreThe Like economy: how social gratitude affects content efforts
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.
Read MoreTwo years sharing ideas that matter to 100 million people
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.
Read MoreBecoming a Brand Journalist by Finding Stories from Within Your SMB
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?
Read MoreOK, Glass — inspire me: a post about the positive impact tech has on our lives.
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.
Read More6 things you didn’t know you could do with Scoop.it: Part I
The Scoop.it platform has been a perpetual work in progress for the better part of 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?
Read MoreLearning to learn: fighting cognitive biases
In a world with more information than ever, figuring out how to use the brain to its fullest potential, as well as filling it with as much knowledge as possible, is the main focus of a vast amount of people in this world.
I’ve made it clear on many occasions that I believe in the importance of being a perpetual learner. One of the key activities associated with learning is exploring and understanding the way the human brain functions, and using the results of this to properly hack the critical thinking process. For example, did you know that something called a cognitive bias exists? This term refers to the tendency to think in certain ways.
Read MoreMeasuring your ROI: learning to save money and time
The three little words “return on investment” may be the stuff of every marketers’ dreams or nightmares, depending on how their campaigns and initiatives are performing. Every company has limited resources and in order to justify continued expenses and expenditures, marketers are increasingly pressured to provide a reason, through excellent ROI, to keep or increase their budgets. In fact, nearly two-thirds of CMOs believe that ROI will be the principal measure of performance by 2015.
Read More