Content Curation Contest

This is a question that each person active on social media should ask himself a day or another. Have you ever thought? [note mg]

How many hours have you spent adding buttons, gadgets and widgets to your new blog or website? You research the right tools, share buttons, share bars, analytic tracking tools and more. You install them with a hope and a prayer that someone somewhere is going to use them.

However, unfortunately many business leaders find they don’t get used. The share buttons sit on their site with the lonely zero or default +1. Chances are your pocket book or wallet might be feeling a little lonely too.

What if you took the same time you spend on the share bars, share buttons and tools and instead first focus on something worthy of a share? I know it sounds like a crazy concept because after all it’s far easier to focus on the bright shiny objects, geeky tools and data analytics.

Trust me, I am a data junkie and could literally spend all day helping my clients dig into the heads of their target audiences with a goal of embedding their brand in their brains!

Is your content worthy of a share?

Read more: http://bit.ly/HNNTN5

Free Marty Whitepaper -
Gamification: Winning Hearts, Minds and Loyalty Online

Is Gamification the next big thing? Next? There are already something like 3 billion gamers weekly worldwide. The staggering amounts of time spent on games is hard to over estimate. My gamification white paper shares how to use game techniques and ideas (gamification) to drive up conversions, drive down bounce rates and increase loyalty in Internet marketing. Using gamification to drive positive ROI. 

This "How To" paper includes an example of using gamification for a carpet cleaning business. My idea, I stole it from Reality Is Broken author Jane McGonigal, is gamification can make any Internet marketing more fun, any site's content stickier no matter what the business vertical or segment (or country) and change the customer conversation from "lowest price" to "best value" or "most fun". One thing every Internet marketer knows is humor sells online and games and humor are closely matched.  

Will, as McGonigal believes, games save the world? We are in need of saving and games seem like a fun way to be saved. Games sure beat the Hellfire and damnation thing :).

Marty

In last week’s post I laid out a case for content curation – why it can be a great opportunity for companies to engage with their customers, provide them (Curation-ism, Part II: 4 Steps to Take to Go Forth and Curate http://t.co/dPHUghVe...)...

***** Doubt anyone on Scoop.it needs convincing about the importance of curation, but here is some more amunition to convert others :). Marty

The 50+ Best Ways to Curate and Share Your Favorite Social Media and News Content | DailyTekk http://t.co/HKrKUApX...

**** Gaggle of cool apps, tools and stuff in here. Wish I had the time to look at half of them. Marty

**** The Best SEO Is No SEO is a piece I wrote in my head after reading about Google's over optimization penalties. This morning was the first chance I've had to get what was banging around in my head onto ScentTrail Marketing.

The idea is great engaging purple content capable of generating social shares is now the best SEO strategy. Seth Godin's Pruple Cow idea is important now that content is king and purple content people want to share is queen. Marty

It's not official yet, but we're expecting it to be within the next few months: Search Engine Optimization is about to be turned on its head by Social...

Well at least the writer had the decency NOT to say SEO is dead lol

**** SEO isn't dead but different. Sir Martin Sorrell CEO of super agency WPP confirmed something I've been feeling for awhile - Google's resurgence - this morning on Squawkbox. The other much richer Martin said that his company's massive media buy, some $75B annually, is up 17% in Google flat in Facebook.

Sorrell described Google's position as "powerful" if they can master the five legs of their stool. Writing a ScentTrail blog post on Google's resurgence to put words to this feeling now that the other Martin has confirmed a gut feel. 

Excellent scoop by my friends at Level343. 

Marty

A few months ago we published a fairly popular blog post called, The 14 C’s of Content Marketing. While many inquired how we came up with so many C’s, we felt 14 wasn’t enough, resulting in the development of seven additional content marketing C’s.

Now, armed with the 21 C’s of content marketing, you’ll be able to deploy more powerful and efficient campaigns that tell your brand’s story, solve consumers' problems and/or entertains them in a robust and profitable fashion.

***** I like the 4 Cs (Content, Community, Campaigns and Conversion), but there are apparently a whole gaggle of Cs in content marketing :). Marty

With the rise of social media and with the notion that more and more organizations are taking content marketing more seriously, it appears that the King Content is here to stay, at least for a while.

Here are 11 tactics to help curry favor with the King.

***** I keep ending up with this same conclusion. In a world of MORE noise the best and perhaps ONLY way to cut through clutter is with story. Marty

This piece is from Evivio Blog - I selected this piece because today is the beginning of the Reinvention Summit where people from all over the world gather together to hear and share stories of change. All businesses are going through reinvention, telling the right stories to connect with their audiences in a new way is crucial. 

This is a review by my curating buddy Jan Gordon. I couldn't have said it better myself! Enjoy her review:

Here are some highlights:

**Stories are the new currency in digital marketing, as digital media allow consumers a surfeit of channels to listen to and engage on.

**Consumers want to be engrossed and entertained, and as with other entertainment media, they expect a story.

But stories are not just entertaining.

**Stories are useful, descriptive, beautiful, interesting: shareable.

**Shareable, and participatory: when your audience shares your content, they often add their perspective to it, adding social credence that can further enhance its relevance

**The iconic marketing goal of the social media era is ‘viral’ content – a video, photo or other content that spreads like a virus from host to host, making millions of people laugh, cry or think.

**But one must consider how many of those attempts at ‘viral’ marketing have succeeded.

**On a Wikipedia list of the most viral internet memes very few of them are associated with a brand and those that are were almost always created by a third party or viewed as a public joke.

**Trying to produce a viral internet meme is like trying to stand up on a water slide. The chances that you will fall flat on your face and look pretty silly in the process are very high.

**Rather than attempting to create ‘viral’ content, marketers should aim for ‘shareable’ content. That is, content that genuinely affects their target demographic; content that addresses real problems or communicates similar ideals.

Selected by Jan Gordon covering "Storytelling, Social Media and Beyond"

Read full article here: [http://ht.ly/aiwUY]

Imagine a CIO who had never configured a router. Imagine a CIO who had never led an IT project. Imagine a CIO who had never managed the implementation of servers into a server environment. Imagine a CIO who had never sourced, negotiated or selected a solution from an IT vendor.

Now imagine if this CIO had been asked to design your organization’s next generation network infrastructure. Would you trust her?

Remarkably, in our research only four CIOs in the Fortune 250 have an active blog. Only 10% have a Twitter account. 1/3 have either no LinkedIn profile or a profile with minimal connections.

**** Cool riff on the Top, Best theme I've never seen before "most social". Marty

The impact of Twitter is less significant than we think because most people who signed up for it don't use it. However, as this article reveals there is a major reason to use Twitter...!