Curation is becoming the big marketing trend for 2011. Brands, companies, influencers, evangelists, bloggers, everyone seems to be interested in the matter of curation. Keeping track of the latest articles can be difficult, so if you want to catch up on curation, keep up with this page.
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We all want it…that top spot on the search rankings. And the sites that are getting those top spots are sites that publish fresh, relevant content frequently.
In this exclusive interview for Woork Up, Maria Petrescu (Intervistato.com) talks with Brian about the meaning of social influence, use of social media inside companies, the problems caused by the lack of communication between divisions and asked to Brian a prediction on the future of social media. External link: Read the full transcription on Intervistato.
They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Done right, it can also help the imitator tap into the zeitgeist and pick up more followers as a result. That looks like it might have been some of the logic behind the relaunch of the website of Easy Living, a UK magazine published by Conde Nast, which relaunched this month with a Pinterest-like grid interface on its home page.
Check it out: http://www.easyliving.co.uk/
Make conversation better. Together.
A place to have meaningful conversation with the people you know and the communities you care about.
Find communities that share your interests, so you can talk about the things you're passionate about with people who care.
Easily find out who's involved in a conversation, so you can feel relaxed and speak your mind.
Not only should you control what you see and how you're seen, but you should have a say in the direction of the site itself! Ayloo is yours, after all.
If you were someone wondering if curation was going to have any future and was just a hype, this is the perfect example that curation is the future.
This is a big player, and this is going to hurt a lot of small curation services out there...
msnNOW is the only place that looks at the hottest trends from Facebook, Twitter, Bing and Breakingnews.com. We give you the inside scoop so you always know about what's trending, if it's true, and why you should care. And we're constantly checking the latest buzz, so just look for links with the gray speech bubble on MSN.com to make msnNOW part of your daily routine.
Start your own movement...
Pinterest is popular because it feeds our insatiable appetite to share the things we’re passionate about. It allows us to start movements of our own, pointing others to things we like and enjoy.
People share, curate...
Pinterest is now taking it one step further and allowing us to share anything we come across on the web. Buzzword or not, ‘curation’ is here to stay.
Visual inspiration...
And you tap into a digital world of curation, sharing and visual inspiration. It’s the future and it’s happening right now.
- Website visitors need a certain degree of serendipity in their online browsing and shopping experience. Give it to them.
- Content curation should factor in not just volume but quality – one will follow the other.
- A visually appealing website is more conducive to social sharing, appealing images have become front and center in today’s online experience. It also makes for a better experience for mobile and tablet users – typically a more affluent demographic. Invest in an in-house photo studio if resources allow.
- Design deep social integration throughout your site. Let visitors indicate how much they like the content via love/like buttons and comments and this will spur website engagement.
- Stay non-invasive. Put the user in the driver’s seat in terms of what and how much they’d like to share with others.
Publishzer is a tool to create magazines out of content that inspires you. Billions of content pieces are created everyday on the internet and no way can I browse through all of them. So we asked to ourselves, wouldn’t it be nice to have a tool to organize and share most of this content. A place to save all the amazing articles, photos and videos that inspires you online. Beside now you do not have to be sticked on feeds to keep up with the news.
Read their story here.
That's a good curation policy template you can use.
Ah this is something i have thought of but never seen before.
I guess, why not?
My wife (and it seems every woman in America) is now addicted to Pinterest. It’s the new magazine. I think it’s replacing time spent on TMZ. It’s graphical, beautiful, simple to consume, and has a wonderful layout. But that product is the perfect example of perfectly suited for the web given the real estate available.
Ah Pinterest, they do it all right...
Try to think about how leveraging the web will do the following:
- Create a differentiated product versus your mobile-only competitors. Use that as a source of competition.
- Have the ability to enable “content creation” and “content curation” in a way that makes all of the mobile consumption by other users a better experience. If you have a fashion-sharing product, wouldn’t viewing collections of outfits on mobile devices be a richer experience if there were more content and deeper content because your web product enabled your power users to more easily create it?
- Conversely allow your mobile products to shine on the web. Using the fashion-sharing example, imagine turning your shared fashion photos into beautiful magazine-like collages that can be scrolled through, Pinterest style.
- Build features that make using native-phone apps pointless. Case in point: Text messaging. If you use the native device your messages get purged eventually on most devices. You also lose them if you lose your actual phone. Having a web product abstracts the text message from the device and makes it a truly cloud service. When consumers realize this – who in their right mind would keep their text messages locked on their mobile device?
In creating its digital presence, Kate Spade has managed to convert the je ne sais quoi of its meticulously designed physical visual merchandising (read: eye-catching store windows in SoHo and on Fifth Avenue) and products into a decidedly on-brand experience. Using its blog, which is integrated prominently into its main e-commerce site, as well as varied social media presences, the Kate Spade team has developed and maintained a voice and visual point of view that reinforce the brand while avoiding heavy-handedness.
Branding, and the same theme for every platform they build a presence on: colorfoul collages of products, articles and media curated by their team. A publishing model that works.
When Kate Spade picks a direction, it goes with it, and all its content channels reinforce the same seasonal focus. It utilizes that same collage-like approach for its boards on Pinterest, which is perhaps the most well-suited platform for fashion brands to share its inspirations, and the pattern du jour, stripes, abounds. The Kate Spade Tumblr (also organized as a collage) takes the theme one step further, providing the shareable added bonus of downloadable iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, and computer desktops in –you guessed it – stripes. And, of course, Kate Spade’s Twitter page is decked out in a striped background.
Check it out:
@katespadeny on Twitter
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is looking to develop a Web app that can continuously monitor social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace, as well as various news feeds. The organization’s goal is to improve its real-time intelligence when it comes to current and emerging security threats.
They even provided specifications for the web app!
[...] the 12-page Request for Information document (PDF, half the pages are oddly blank) reveals in detail what the organization is interested in.
Are you ready to get your social media activity monitored by the FBI?
My takes...
"push button content generation."
Here's what he means: Clicking Pinterest's "Pin It" button, which can be added to your browser's bookmarks toolbar, will automatically grab the picture you want from the website you are on. What is different is that it immediately adds it to any of your Pinterest boards, allowing you to categorize your content then and there. The boards each have a separate page and can be easily accessed, shared and viewed on a sort of mother board on your Pinterest profile.
"Importantly, it was easy for new users to consume these sets of content visually as structured sets, and to share these sets with others," Gil wrote. "This next wave of social curation will fundamentally change how users find and interact with content over time."
Engagement is becoming important in the online marketing world. It is important not only to create quality content, but find a way to distribute it, build and engage with an audience to build value and sustainable business.
This is one great post i recommend reading if you are an online marketer.
That Independent Web is where you get high engagement and a lot of passion. It is also where a lot of social action like tweets, shares and commenting takes place. Marketers are increasingly seeing those kinds of actions as indications of engagement and that’s what they’re looking for.
At this point, marketers have pivoted: they're not just putting their marketing next to content, but actually creating content themselves – or underwriting the creation of content. And then they encourage the sharing of that content and creating ecosystems where that content circulates. They're starting to see an ecosystem of paid, owned, and earned media that they're very interested in feeding through social interactions and content marketing.
We've found that you need a few things to make social interactions online meaningful and valuable to both marketers and our Federated Media Publishing community of publishers and sites. Number one, you need scale. But number two, you need a platform so that that scale can be gathered into a single place – an efficient place so a marketer doesn’t have to, for example, execute a thousand ad units on a thousand different sites.
Is your content and strategy driving any value?
Marketers have been very interested in understanding how their content is amplified in the past few years. Was it tweeted a lot? Did people comment on it a lot? Did people link to it from other blogs and so on? We started at first by counting all of that by hand and then reporting it back to the marketer. That is now becoming an industry standard earned media metric.
The argument is valid. Some people out there flag "sharing", or their curaton, a form of expression. In a way it is, the content you share defines who you are, what you like, what you are interested in...
the 3 pillars of a good curation tool:
It's easy for anyone to curate, as it takes the best of what TumblR allows you (bookmark a content you like) and optimizes the way it's archived (boards are far more intuitive & explicit than scrolling a blog)
The problem is publishing is a lot harder than it looks, or rather it’s a lot harder to do it with the consistency, day after day, that’s needed to build a long-term audience.
Brands are trying to establish themselves as trusted sources of information.
“If a brand is an expert in a certain topic, their reputation might make them a credible source of information,”
Brands aren’t set up to be publishers.
Publishing content in 2012 can be immensely complex or surprisingly simple, depending on your approach. Curation straddles the line. It can be difficult figuring out not only what tools to use, but also what platforms and, of course, what content to share.
Brands need to be careful in not only what, but how much they curate.
Great interview from Beth @kanter and Robin Good (@robingood).
In preparation for Beth's presentation on Jan. 30th in NY http://socialmedia4nonprofits.org/nyc/
Don't just recite the first paragraph of the story, actually give them something they can grab onto and make their own.
This is a must read post, reading into the future of curation, newsjacking and business models...
Reblogging, on Tumblr, is so easy that the vast majority of Tumblr sites actually create little or no original content: they just republish content from other people. That’s a wonderful thing, for two reasons.
Firstly, it takes people who are shy about (or just not very good at) creating their own content, and gives them a great way to express themselves online.
And secondly, it acts as a natural amplifier for the people who do create original content — the average post on Tumblr gets reblogged nine times, and therefore reaches vastly more people than if it just sat on its original site waiting to be discovered by people visiting it directly.
...images nearly always do much better than words.
HuffPo is built on the idea that when stories are shared on Twitter or Facebook, that will drive traffic back to huffingtonpost.com, where it can then monetize that traffic by selling it to advertisers. But in future, the most viral stories are going to have a life of their own, being shared across many different platforms and being read by people who will never visit the original site on which they were published.
What is Newsjacking?
It works like this: a news story breaks. Journalists are under pressure to update that story for the next edition or broadcast. So while the core of the story (the first paragraph) doesn’t change all that much, the second paragraph does, with additional details or insights or related quotes. That’s your chance to swoop in with something a reporter can use that’s related — but not necessarily essential — to the main story to freshen it up. Then your part of the story gets repeated as other media outlets pick up the story.
How to do it?
To make this work for you, you have to be fast.
Yes, it is a race for media attention.
Search vs. Social Discovery is the epic war that will define the tech landscape for the next few years. Search Engines are morphing into Socially Powered Search Engines, discovery sites are booming and small businesses, and craftsmen are able to reach a whole new audience via the internet.
Pinterest’s user growth is a good indicator of what’s to come for retailers. Smart merchants will look for ways to drive traffic from these types of sites, by working with them directly or partnering with groups like Skimlinks that have discovery sites in their publisher base.
Product disovery engine, visual, interesting, fresh content, lot of trends for e-commerce in 2012.
It’s no longer enough just to blog. Collecting good posts, pictures and information creates value.
Very interesting section about the legal aspect of redistributing content from other sources...
We can publish or post somebody's headline with a link to their published content as often as we want without violating copyright law or acting against the spirit of copyright and intellectual property. (Link to this post with its headline and I’ll thank you.)
"Link to this post with its headline and I’ll thank you." Yes, and everybody should be happy to get a link back.
One more important aspect of curation is that it is not easy...
Initially, your reaction to the art of curation might be, “hooray, now I don’t have to write a new blog post every day. I can just collect and share my collection.” But the novelty of that wears off very quickly. Collecting good relevant content doesn’t happen easily. The best of these curation sites show the same level of work as an excellent blog does, sometimes more.
What’s next for Tumblr, which just raised a bunch of money
That's $4.5M in 2008, $5M in 2010 and Sequoia is leading a round that will add “between $25 million and $30 million” in funding at a valuation “in the ballpark of $135 million)
and brought in some senior management? Well, monetization, for one thing. Karp said Tumblr is pursuing “novel approaches to revenue,” including selling blog themes.
At 15 billion page views per month across more than 41 million blogs, “with that many page views we could throw AdSense up there tomorrow and be profitable,” Karp said. But that’s not what he wants to do.
Yeah Adsense is defintiely not the way, not something Tumblers will like to see on their blogs.
The most interesting thing here is his feedback about the network effect:
When the site really took off was when the curators — people who primarily respond to other Tumblr users’ content by “reblogging” it on their own pages — came on board.
Tumblr is about 10% content creation & 90% content curation - others sharing & grouping stuff they like." David Karp, CEO #DLD12
— Bill Gross (@Bill_Gross) January 23, 2012
When it comes to curation, I teach my students and clients that when curating content, there are 5 elements to every curation post;
- Catchy title
- Interesting intro
- Curated content
- Value add
- and strong call to interaction
Spot on.
Cool little tool to aggregate and save files very easily.
Skillshare is a platform for instructor-led, in-person classes. Teaching on Skillshare can help sustain your livelihood. Here's how.
Skillshare is one of those platforms that i think will be there for a long time. Basically it allows you, with your own knowledge, to teach others about what you know. Simple no? Genius i say.
Teach what you know
The issue is that, this tool will work great if you already are an audience. It's like everything else, if you have au audience and launch a new service, website or blog, you know you will get instant traffic.
So how do you fill up your classes?
Skillshare helps you by 'promoting' the classes you teach. People can search the site to find your classes, but that is not enough.
You need to keep your students engaged and sell them the next classes.
In order to fill up the next class, you need to either find new students or teach the students you taught a class to already, something new.
A platform like Shareist is perfect for this. Keep your audience (ie:students) interested in the topic of the classes you taught by curating articles, posts, news relevant to each class. Between classes, or as a follow up, teachers (you) can keep students engaged, listen to their feedback to come up with topics for next courses, and communicate with them directly or indirectly.
Skillshare is a great app, and I can see Shareist fitting perfectly in the mix to help you stay in touch with your students, keep them interested and discover new topics, engage easily with your students by sharing interesting information where they are (twitter, facebook, Google plus, via newsletter), and grow your audience, and your income, even more.
1. What would your customers & prospects want to read?
2. What channels will they use? Where do they want to read it?
3. Curate from the curators
4. Set everything up in advance5. Follow a daily process
6. Be consistent
7. Watch metrics for what resonates best
8. Curation does not replace good original content
My takes - must-read:
Go to where your audience is. Another, equally important rule: create strong and engaging content.
Consider the fact that nearly half of Americans get their news from as many as six media platforms on a typical day.
Good content is the cornerstone – knowing how to curate it in this day and age? Well that’s when the magic can happen.
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