When they first open up shop, every professional has a vision. It may be a simple like “I want to make enough money to buy that shiny gadget from the local store”, but it’s a vision and goal nonetheless. What motivates you is your business alone, and nobody can take that away from you.
Read MoreI’ve always questioned the efficacy of online dating websites that use robots and math to select possible partner choices between people.
I think that online dating, at its core, probably does “work.” But I think that math and robots will always return “safe” potential pairs and takes away the potential for the magic of human chemistry to create unique and sometimes non-sensical or non-typical pairings that are incredibly successful.
Is this okay? Of course it is. But I think that taking away the human component of match-making in preference of safe bets is a mistake. In the war of people vs robots and the automation of the entire world, romance should always be organized and curated by people.
See on citizentekk.com
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Be gone, irritating chain email about a fake virus scare that your head of HR sent out! Away, pictures of a random offsite meeting that no one actually cares about! Never again will your inbox show 298324 because everyone replied all on a staff-wide email about break room etiquette.
Read MoreI went to a huge college. And by huge, I mean almost 40,000 undergrads.
By nature, this meant that I spent a lot of my class time as follows: find a seat in a lecture hall among 400 of my “closest friends,” listen to one professor in the front of the room talk for 45 straight minutes, take notes, leave, repeat.
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Curating and sharing stories should be understood as part of a knowledge economy. If stories are tribal currency, then curators are money handlers.
The world has changed and so did the economy. From an agricultural to an industrial world, we’ve now moved into the post-industrial era where knowledge is the true currency and a lot of us are knowledge workers.
In this great post, Elia Morling explains how he views content curators as playing a key role as a “money handlers, changers and lenders all wrapped into one.”
See on tribaling.com
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I love this “secret of adulthood” by Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project: “Happiness doesn’t always make me feel happy.”
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Being a content curator is all about displaying information. We don’t create the content, we display it. We share it – and people read it. But, first you have to display it. There are several skills involved in displaying content. Here are some thoughts for you to consider when creating and curating a Scoop.it topic.
Read MoreThe challenge [for social networks] is to create something of permanent value for the community, to offer more than a temporary spotlight.
Austin Powell comes back on PaidContent the recent announcement by Tumblr to shut down Sotryboard and lay off the editorial team that was highlighting and curating Tumblr’s best content.
He makes a point that it’s been extremely hard for most social networks – with the notable exception of LinkedIn with its influencer program – to add value by curating its users’ best content.
I wonder whether that’s actually such a big deal.
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I recently partook in a discussion among some fellow community managers on the best ways to learn about the industry and how to train its future generations. When the conversation reached the point where we all shared the “training” we went through ourselves, the answers began getting interesting.
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The ubiquitous internet meme comes in many forms — from iterations on top of iterations of a viral video to a random picture of a cute animals with an ironic white Impact caption. They also seem to proliferate like one of those animals with an ironic white Impact caption, if you know what I mean.
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If you aren’t engaging your customers online, your business is missing out on a huge opportunity to generate sales and gain valuable new customers. Creating and maintaining an online presence isn’t easy. You can quickly become overwhelmed or waste money on unsuccessful outreach if you don’t approach it in an informed, strategic manner.
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One of the hardest things about becoming the “voice” of an organization is figuring out what in the world to say. Do you promote your group endlessly? Do you send out fun links you think your constituents will enjoy? Do you talk to your fans and figure out what they want? Well, the answer is yes to all the above. However, it’s very easy to fall into the trap many other organizations do and either promote the heck out of your mission or refuse to talk about yourself at all. Both tactics can result in you missing out on customers, constituents or funding and even chase your current followers away. So how do you find a good balance?
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Here in the US, the Dow recently tumbled almost 150 points in a “flash crash” caused by widespread digital panic. What was the cause of this panic? Twitter.
The bigger story is that someone hacked the official AP Twitter handle and tweeted a false report of a terrorist attack on the White House, which claimed that the President had been injured in said attack. This is significant in the grander scheme because the Dow essentially measures the health of the US economy and a hit of this magnitude means lots of people (deserving or otherwise) needlessly lost a lot of money in nanoseconds.
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NOTE: Eric is talking about the non-profit sector, but these rules apply seamlessly to for-profit operations, personal brands, and enthusiasts.
There are currently around 1.5 million non-profits registered in the US alone, with total contributions amounting to just under $300 billion. But while many charitable organizations do spend more than 66% of a donation on their actual mission, it is a rare case. Perhaps more importantly, donors have very little control over their money and how it gets used, or to what end.
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Presentations and slideshows have been historically one of the most boring and standard corporate media currently available to employees and management. They are meant to purely educational or purely for selling — they are very rarely anything but a pitch or a corporate update. But with the rise of Slideshare as a platform for sharing a new kind of presentation, a lean, value-adding, and stand-alone type of presentation, and its proof as a viable option for driving traffic, the “corporate presentation” can be leveraged for more than its functional purpose and optimized to spread the company or personal message via social media.
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Recently, Flipboard, the reading platform for iPad, announced a new feature allowing users to create their own personalized magazines with Flipboard content. Ironically, we also recently unveiled a new feature. We created Read.it, an interest-based reading application powered by Scoop.it content and curated by our community of users. Why is this ironic? Because the two huge platforms for curating and consuming content have simultaneously entered each other’s spaces at the exact same time.
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Some of you have asked, “How do we decide on making changes on Scoop.it?” We felt that this is an interesting opportunity to share the answer openly.
First, let me start by saying that it’s a process that has evolved to become much more complex now that millions are using Scoop.it every week. In the beginning, we were able to let our vision and intiution guide us, but now we have a responsibility to you, the Scoop.it community, who have decided to use this service as your content curation hub on a daily basis.
Sometimes decisions are easy: when you asked for curated newsletter capability on our feedback forum, it was just a matter of planning this together with the right resources and partner. It can take some time (bear with us…) but the decisions are simple. Sometimes, it’s a question of vision: we have strong values and a vision for what we feel content curation and the interest graph should stand for, and that of course. continues to guide us just like we recently experimented by launching Read.it.
At the UX (user experience) level though, this can be more difficult: not so much for the inspiration and the big ideas but for the little details that can have a big impact. Should this button be at the top or the bottom? Left or right? Should we give users one main option and a bunch of secondary ones or should we highlight the three that are the used most often? Did we make that feature visible enough? Or is it too prominently displayed and annoying? A lot of these questions don’t have good or bad answers you can easily guess: you have to try out to find out.
Read MoreScoopiteers,
It takes four legs for a service to run well and fast:
– a tangible value proposition
– an efficient and pleasant user experience (UX)
– a responsive and competent customer support
– a reliable quality of service (QoS)
Scoop.it helps people and businesses shine on the web by sharing content that matters. We are working hard to constantly refine your user experience, and to do so, we regularly conduct performance measurement, and listen to your invaluable feedback. We encourage our support team to create a close relationship with you as we value your continued support and engagement with our team and the product. (for more details, please #AskAlly).
But despite relentless efforts, March has been a very bad month with our QoS – meaning that we failed you on our product’s performance and service. Please accept our sincere apologizes on behalf of Guillaume, myself and the entire Scoop.it team. I’d like to also share some information about what exactly happened; and, most importantly, I want to reassure you: the problems are now fixed. We are up and running with lots of spare power, and it’s full steam ahead!
In the 3rd quarter of 2012, 1.03 billion smartphones were reported as active worldwide, which means nearly 1 in 5 people is walking around with the internet in their pocket. Nielsen recently announced that of these 1.03 billion smartphones, 42% of mobile users browsed and 23% purchased products via mobile in the last 30 days, which means there are 432,600,000 sets of engaged mobile eyes and 236,900,000 sets of thumbs actively purchasing products and services via mobile. These numbers are only growing.
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We are more than just shoes! Zappos is a service company that just happens to sell ________. These are two statements that sit at the core of everything Zappos is, and guide Zappos as a company that continues to innovate. As the Social Community Manager of Zappos, I want that answer to be clothing, fashion, snowboards, footwear, cookware, bedding, and so much more. But Zappos is typically associated with 2 things: Footwear and great customer service.
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For the past few months, the team here at Scoop.it has been focusing on “taking curation beyond the platform,” our own little bit of rebellion against computer-only or anti-mobile curation tools and platforms. We launched a fantastic re-design of our iPhone application, integrated Scoop.it with MailChimp to easily take your curation to the world of email, and some other great stuff too.
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I’ve been listening to all the feedback from our awesome community about our newest service offering, the MailChimp Newsletter integration feature, and have been hearing that many people would like the option of sharing the newsletter with their social audiences. This would require hosting the completed newsletter somewhere online with a public link to share. Unfortunately, this functionality doesn’t exist within Scoop.it yet (not to say it won’t shortly), but I’ve concocted a little work-around for everyone who wants to share their newsletter this way. It requires an extra tool, but its all free and pretty easy to do, and the end result is great.
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I admit it. It can be more than a little terrifying to find out what other people think of you. Up until that point you can pretend that all is well and you’re doing absolutely nothing wrong. The moment you say “What do you think about…?” your world might totally shatter. Therefore it’s a little nerve-wracking to ask.
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Putting the power of message amplification into the hands of the sharer equalizes the content landscape: the person who understands the myriad behaviors by the many types of people who would be interested in sharing your specific brand of content and then actually executes on these idiosyncrasies successfully will win. Not just the person with the biggest budget.
TechCrunch: Google just revealed plans to shut down eight of its services as part of what it’s calling an ongoing spring cleaning effort. Some of them are pretty arcane, but among TechCrunch writers, anyway, we’re pretty bummed to see that Google Reader will be shut down on July 1.
Here’s my take on it.
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This morning we released something really exciting — curated newsletter functionality! We recognize the role curation is playing in the evolution of the newsletter, and we wanted to provide an easy way for our users to expand their reach into the be-all-end-all of web communication — email.
Recently at a SXSW panel, the authors of the book Spreadable Media were discussing the future of internet media and how “viral” content is actually not viral at all. The panelists argued that virality (in the traditional medical sense) is passive — a host doesn’t choose to contract a virus and doesn’t choose to spread it through his body. The virus spreads by its own means. They made the point that “viral” content and media (think Gangnam Style) are actually active choices; that virality in media doesn’t just happen. A choice is made by a user to share that specific piece of media within their own networks.
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Isn’t it time for text to enter the mobile UGC (UGC) revolution?
When Facebook bought Instagram for $1B last year, some called it genius, others called it luck. But whether we think that deal made sense or not, it marked an important change in the history of the web in general and of mobile internet in particular: the rise of mobile user-generated content.
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We see the tides of media and content creation turning toward mobile as a preferred creation platform. What do you think?
