DigitalDirections

You can be the leading "media company" in your industry. Make the choice, and bolster your content marketing efforts with these 7 moves that will give you the advantage over your media competitors.

Excerpted from article:

"Online content curation is a hot trend as business owners and professionals realize that content is vital to add value to their customers and prospects.

The trend was already evident in 2011 but 2012 saw an outright explosion of the phenomenon.

Content curation is the art of selecting content that is appropriate and then organising and publishing it in a way that is relevant for the topic of choice.

Editors with the aid of journalists create and collect content then edit and then publish.
Journalism is shifting more and more from the quest for the perfect “scoop” to a more organized and reasoned activity of content curation.

The technology of the web and the rise of the social media networks is providing sources of content that can provide curation in ways that were not previously possible.
The content curation platform Scoop.it is an example how we can all become magazine editors and content curators without the overhead of hiring editors or journalists. Scoop.it was established in 2011 with the goal of making content curation easy and accessible to everyone...."

In the guest post pubblished by Jeff Bullas' blog, Intervistato.com's Maria Petrescu interviews Scoop.it's co-founder Marc Rougier.

Read full article and watch video here:

http://www.jeffbullas.com/2012/09/26/insights-into-the-hot-trend-of-social-media-content-curation/

This is a very interesting piece by Erin Griffith (again!) on the potential scalability issues of content curation. You can pass quickly on her first part where she easily bashes the usual concerns about the curation word being overhyped and over used.

She makes a really good point on her second part, building on the experience of Behance, the platform to publish one's creative work: using a mix of algorithms and human curation is a part of the answer to this scale issue. 

But another way to scale curation is to add a topic-centric layer. In the problem she describes (which is typically Behance's problem), scaling up is tough because curation is being applied to sort out the best content on a unique dimension: a home page that's the same for everyone. "Behance’s front page could no longer display what algorithms determined was the most popular art within [the] site’s community. Because of boobs. They are universally the most popular thing on the Web, and not even a tasteful, creative site like Behance is safe when the “wisdom of the crowd” is involved. To be clear — boobs are welcome on Behance, but the site skews toward commercially viable work. A porn pit may entice creative directors but not in the way Behance wants to entice them." she funnily writes.

If you added topics to that, you can solve the problem by having people follow whichever topics they want. And I'm not talking about the usual 10-20 categories you find on any content sites. I'm talking about long-tail, user-created topics that any user can opt in to follow or unfollow. Boobs fans can then follow dozens of Boobs topics curated by other fellow users without having to pollute the experience for everyone else.

By mixing a topic-centric model with curation, you apply it to as many dimensions as your users will decide to curate. That's the model we've been using at Scoop.it and so far, it scales pretty well, doesn't it?

My name is Ally Greer. I’m a marketer with expertise in content marketing and curation. You’ve probably never heard of me.

With over 500 million users on Twitter, 175 million on LinkedIn, and over a billion on Facebook, you probably haven’t heard of most people on the Internet. The bad news is that this also means most of those people probably haven’t heard of you either.

"Jonah Peretti, a co-founder of Huffington Post and CEO of Buzzfeed, said at PandoMonthly tonight in New York that he doesn’t care about SEO anymore. He views it as a broken system that optimizes for robots, not humans." Erin Griffith reports on Pandodaily.

“Media and content are human businesses, and it’s a problem for humans to give so much power to Google, which is a robot” he said.

Without saying Google is Skynet and evil, more and more people now see the flaws compared to what information networks like Twitter can produce (not saying the latter is perfect either). His conclusion is that you shouldn't care about SEO anymore but I think there's an even more compelling reason to move to Curation. Google is increasingly taking social signals into account so that Social is becoming the new SEO no matter which angle you take it from:

- whether because your audience will find you first on social networks

- whether because your content will be well positioned in Search results because human curators will pick it up (and therefore Google too).

The debate whether SEO still matters or not is not important. What's relevant is that great content that please human genuine interests will surface more than it used to thanks to the work of human curators.

Old school SEO pros cover your ears, or be prepared to adapt your craft: Search engines are changing, and social media is a huge part of that change.

Bing, Google, and an increasing swath of nimble little search engines like Blekko and DuckDuckGo are incorporating social data into their results. This is potentially great news for new businesses trying to achieve visibility in search. It’s less great news for sites that rely heavily on link buying.

Both Bing and Google admitted in interviews that their search results are positively affected by social signals, such as tweets, Facebook Likes, and +1s.

“As ideas, thoughts, questions and answers are shared more freely and easily than ever, the increased amount of information from social sources provides great benefits to users,” says a Microsoft spokesperson for Bing.

“The links that you build through social media, the references, the authority — all can have an impact in various ways on how you are ranked and listed even in ‘regular’ search results,” says Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, in an email interview. “Social media allows for people to provide more trusted signals.”....

[read full article http://j.mp/nAZrnG]