You hear that content is king and the latest curations applications and tools allow you to take advantage of the content kings to manage your daily diet of news and information. With the large volumes of content being produced today by everyone from the major networks, businesses and local bloggers and enthusiasts, individuals have a huge amount of content to curate and share with others. RSS readers where the early innovators in curating the constant firehouse of information into our shotglass attention span but they were cumbersome and text heavy.
A few years ago I wrote about how aggregators like NetVibes and Pageflakes were allowing us to create mash up pages in minutes. These tools are great for listening stations and but lack the intelligence that the new generation of curation tools offer. These tools are also driving clicks like never before. These curation tools are helping us fill Facebook and Twitter streams, driving significant traffic volume, making corporate brands take notice. I’ve even noticed how Delicious has updated their interface since the last update a few months ago with the release of stacks.
Scoop.it is a nice tool to gather and distribute content from around the Web based on your interests and passions. Scoop.it creates a page with previews and links to content you “scoop”and has good community tools for following other curators. Most of these sites have the ability to “Re” post content another user has already flagged. Scoop.it has some great B2B curators in specific vertical markets and found it to be good resource to gather industry-specific content.
Marty Smith's "Business Intelligence Revolution" on Scoop.it
Paper.li seems to be the most used of the content curation tools among people I follow on Twitter and probably has the most traffic of any This site has really done the best job of attracting uses and generating links. The aspect of publishing a daily paper based off your articles of interest and giving recognition for the source as a key contributors via Twitter is both annoying and brilliant. Even though I don’t want a daily paper for myself I find myself clicking through to friends papers and enjoying the clean interface. And if you use Paper.li change your title to differentiate the daily tweets other than the typical tweets of “The YOUR NAME HERE Daily is out…”
Phil Buckley's "The 1918 Daily Amalgamation" on Paper.ly
Pinterest is the latest media story as it started popping into the list of sites driving the most traffic on the internet last month. For the most part the initial growth was driven by women using it as a virtual scrapbook for visual items of interest such as clothes, interior design and food. Pintrest is one part bookmarking and one part image gallery with a clean interface that allows you to create a more engaging curation. You can only “pin” images to a board, but the link is preserved to allow for the click thereby driving traffic to the source site. Also other community members can post comments similar to Facebook wall posts threads. Pinterest is different from traditional bookmarking sites like Delicious, Digg and StumbleUpon in that it pins an image, movie or other media object with link to page. However the ability to visually scan designs and rich media content is very nice.
My wife @MCDezigns showed Zite to me and we both love it. Zite not only has the best content for what I’m interested in reading it also has great one-click bookmarking, easy social sharing with flexibility using multiple accounts. I recently downloaded the iPhone app and use it everyday to quickly scan articles of interest and either read or bookmark them to read later in the day. Zite has simple thumbs up/down approval tool similar to Pandora to customize your content. The stream will even draw from your social stream with lesser presence than Flipboard. Zite has a large library of Sections to choose from and they have groomed their content well in terms of quality and frequency.
Flipboard definetly captured everyones attention when iPads first came out. Using simple swipe navigation it offers a great magazine of news and social media content. For social media content I like how photos are previewed in larger sizes and it’s easier to view photos than on your Facebook wall or Twitter stream as well as photos sites like Instagram. The latest release allows for multiple accounts so that you can share on iPad for multiple users as well as new iPhone version.
The latest entry tinto the curation space is Google Currents. Matching the new Google interface design it works best with Google+ but has sharing and bookmarking integration. No doubt that curation and clicks resulting from Google Current users are are going to factor into how the Google ranking juice is made. Currents has a library of major content sites as well as the ability to pull from any RSS feed in your Google Reader. There is also a trending list of links that you can browse that is similar to search results you would see in the “News” result of a Google Search. The clean interface and design is similar to Flipboard and Zite with the ability to simply swipe between pages and topics. What I think Google should have done was skip the redesign of Google Reader and instead migrated it into Currents with a website interface.
The last three tools listed here are only avaiable as a tablet or smartphone app. Scoop.it, Paper.ly and Pinterest all offer websites to create your pages and manage your account. These tools have bookmarklets and other simple tools to tag a page and categorize the content.
What’s your content curation tool of choice?
Last year Twitter was all abuzz about Yahoo! possibly shutting down Delicious the social bookmarking site. Myself along with several other quickly voiced our frustration with Yahoo! Within 15 minutes we were tweeting instructions on how to download your bookmarks and debating what site to migrate to. Eventually Yahoo! did sell Delicious to AVOS systems in April of this year.
About a month ago I logged into Delicious and noticed that the front page had changed. Gone was the clean and simple interface of links that I was accustomed to. Now the front page looked like every other media and news aggregator on the web. I know that people love pictures and I do as well, but I was not digging the change. Frustrated, I pondered once again about migrating my links to one of the other bookmarking sites.
I’m glad that I did not give up on Delicious. Upon further investigation I found that the new design offered some interesting new features to make my links come off the page more. Also the new stacking feature allows you to group links and display them in different layouts. Previously grouping links was done through what Delicious called link bundles. The bundles allowed you to group links but I found it unnecessary and just more work. Unless I was sharing link bundles there was not much benefit in grouping links that I could aggregate via the individual tags.
With stacking you are grouping links in a stack (i.e. bundle) but the big difference is now you can choose from and I’ll explain and provide a sample of each in this post. The example I’ll be using is the stack I created for the recent Internet Summit held in Raleigh.
List view is the traditional view of links, with description and tags that the legacy version of Delicious displayed. This is bookmarking at it’s most basic, text, links and tags. Nothing fancy here but good view if you’re a text scanner like me.
Grid view is the view that many news and aggregator sites use these days. The grid view snags a photo or image from the page and creates a large thumbnail. Some links will create a thumbnail of the whole page. Delicious should take a hint from LinkedIn, Google+ and Facebook where you can scroll through possible images to use. Grid view is good view if you want to create a more visually appealling stack.
Full view uses the same thumbnail as grid view in the left column and then displays the title, link URL and any description text in the main column. If you take the time to enter descriptions into your links or if the site uses excerpts this is a good option to list view.
Media view is good to use if most of your links are videos, presentations or photo libraries. This view will not include all links like blog posts or basic web pages unless they have rich media embedded on the page. Media view uses a left/right scroll bar for the thumbnails with the selected link media played below.
Some other observations from creating Delicious stacks:
This infographic from KISSmetrics shows and provides case studies on how online marketing can drive offline sales. It’s a great starting point when working with all types of business, large and small to determine where to start your digital and social media planning to meet business goals.
Click on the graphic below for an enlarged view:
About The Author: Sean Work is the marketing coordinator at KISSmetrics. Follow him on twitter (@seanvwork) and ask him for a free cup of coffee :)
I love discovering WordPress plugins that work and help with marketing your website. My first WordPress plugin post listed 3 awesome plugins for search engine optimization (SEO), link tracking and personalization. This time I’ve found 3 more awesome wordpress plugins for keywords, site performance and social share.
Keyword Statistics helps optimize your WordPress blog for search engines. It can automatically generate meta informations (like keywords and description for example) needed for the SEO of your blog. What I like about this plugin is that it scans your content on the page or post for keyword density and updates it every few seconds. The most common keywords are presented in lists of single words and optionally 2- and 3-word phrases.
Keyword Statistics WordPress Plugin
Keyword Statistics also will generate meta tags and page titles for a single page or the whole site. It features options for canonical URLs, 404 pages, robots, no follow, and the ability to turn on/off the setting so they don’t interfere with other plugins. The way I use it is to research the keywords and then write the meta tags using WordPress SEO plugin.
Page Speed Report dashboard widget
W3 Total Cache bills itself as the most complete WordPress performance framework that can improve site performance and user experience via caching: browser, page, object, database, minify and content delivery network support. W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your site by improving your server performance, caching every aspect of your site, reducing the download times and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration. With page load speed now a factor in search engine rankings this plugin is invaluable. The dashboard widget gives you a quick analysis of your page speed report listing areas for improvement. The dashboard report clicks to a detailed report with specific areas to improve load speed and performance. From there you can make the adjustments to your site to improve performance. W3 Total Cache promises at least 10x improvement in overall site performance. As you can see from my report above, I still have some work to do to improve performance, and now I know exactly what items to tweak.
I’ve tried most of the social share WordPress plugins and have finally settled on AddThis for a couple of reasons. First they have all of the networks with the ability to customize the buttons and the order they appear on the page. All you have to do is list the account codes in the order you want them to appear. They list what services perform best on their services directory page. Sign up for a free AddThis.com account to see how your visitors are sharing your content: which services they’re using for sharing, which content is shared the most, and more. The dashboard widget allows you to view stats for current day, past week and past month.
AddThis dashboard widget shows social sharing stats
I’ve also found AddThis to work well on iPhone while testing for my site. Some of the other social share plugins performed poorly in this area so that was a big factor in using this plugin. Other features include bit.ly and Google Analytics integration.
I saw the program for a social media conference recently that had 16 unique hashtags peppered throughout the agenda program. My first reaction was why? Some of the hashtags were the city and state name of the event location while others were plain generic like #Day1 and #blogging. The event had a unique name that should have been the main hashtag used to create awareness of the event. However by placing up to five hashtags for each agenda item the event hashtag got lost.
This is the wrong strategy for several reasons. First it dilutes the main brand that you are trying to promote and position. Secondly tracking the tags to measure chatter volume will be inaccurate when you have tags like #RaleighNC or #SeattleWA that may be used by tourists or economic development tweeters. Third and most important, you are confusing the very people attending the event that need to understand how to use social media effectively to communicate.
Most of the seasoned professionals in any discipline go to events for two reasons: to speak and to network. They don’t go for professional development and education. Sure they may pick up a few tips but they are not there to ramp up knowledge quickly. The attendees that shell out their hard earned money are there for that. They want to build up expertise quickly, find starting points for new projects and save time determining what thought leadership blogs they should be reading.
A novice may see multiple hashtags and wonder what they are, what purpose do they serve and how are they used? By bombarding them with multiple keywords in hashtags the event staf is confusing them and not teaching best practices. Part of me thinks that the reasoning behind putting multiple hashtags on a conference agenda or signage is to look sophisticated, smart and savvy. This is when I love to yell at these people through my screen, “You’re doing it wrong!”
Tom Webster (@webby2001) puts out a tweet when he speaks at or attends events stating, “For those of you following at home, the hashtag is…” Tom gets it and knows that there are interested people not at the event that want to share in the information and knowledge being presented. Multiple hashtags makes it frustrating and irritating for those following the event and not realizing that the hashtag they are tracking is only one of several.
What do you think? Is having multiple event hashtags smart or confusing?
Great initial comparison of Facebook and Google+ features, privacy and sharing settings. Early reviews on Google+ are favorable with its simple and clean design. Source: TechnoBombs
Some days I get down when reading blog posts, discussions, seeing speakers talk about new marketing channels like social media or paid search. I have to remind myself that we live in a world where everyone is getting their mega horn on to blast out opinions. Some are on target, others a bit skewed and some are extrapolating case studies into generalizations.So here’s my take on some current marketing myths I see. Please note that I’m not saying these tactics don’t work in a well developed marketing plan that works in conjunction with multiple marketing channels. I’m debating those presenting these tactics as a single, standalone strategy.
What do you think about these myths? Do you agree or disagree with my myth busting?
Google announced its latest entry into social networking this week with The Google+ Project. Today I received an invite to join the network and find myself at a difficult decision. Should I create an account, link to friends and create another online presence? Or should I wait and see if this sticks? Part of me wants to see what it is and how it works. For work I need to have a basic understanding of how social networks influence digital marketing campaigns.
On the other hand will this network be around in a year? Google’s past social media efforts failed. Google Buzz was poorly released and automatically pulled all your contacts into it with little warning. Then if you wanted to kill your account it had reprucussions with other aspects of your Google account so you felt a bit trapped. Google Wave was release with much anticipation and killed off quickly, even though you can still access the site. Like a fine wine, it needed some time to breathe and that did not happen. I know many people will say that it was around a year which in “internet time” is like 10 years but that’s nonsense. Wave had some great collaboration features and had a confusing launch to say the least.
As a marketing person I have to ask why Google has decided to create a competitor to Facebook. I know they are battling for website traffic and users. But part of me wants to say to Google, “stick to what you know and do best!” Search, analytics and collaboration tools are where Google shines. Users go to Google to search, use GMail to communicate, store and share documents on Google Docs and research and track site traffic with AdWords and Analytics. Do people really want to go to Google to share their photos, short messages, what they had for dinner and other minutua we see on Facebook and Twitter all day?
As users do we really want to have another Facebook? I think one is enough for me to keep track of and update. LinkedIn is great for business and I use Twitter to keep informed and update to date on specific topics and communities of friends and others. I’ve enjoyed connecting with people on Facebook. It’s clean, easy to use interface has made it simple to connect with friends and family that I don’t get to see in person as often as I would like. It’s more social than LinkedIn or Twitter. There is critical mass there that allows us to connect with a large portion of our community. Heck no system is perfect and I have several friends and family that Facebook is not a great connector as they are not present or active enough to have a relationship on the platform.
My guess, and I hope I’m wrong, is that Google won’t get a gazillion users on it in less than a year. They will deem it a failure and proably pull the plug. If so will it affect my Google contacts and other account features like Buzz does? If that’s the case then I’m less likely to join it. Do I create a basic presence there just to have an understanding of Google’s social network platform? Will it be worth my time or just another place to update what I’m doing?
So I’m back to my original question: Should I Google+ or Should I Go?
