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A pragmatic ( and fantastic) presentation: a six step content marketing model by Steven van Belleghem. 
6 top tips for ensuring a harmonious agency - client relationship 
I've just published Matt Langer's rant agains the curator code which opens up interesting questions but this is another must-read on the whole curator code debate; this time by Instapaper founder Marco Arment - someone I've read many interesting pieces from and who's been an amazing entrepreneur building a great App in the new Content space.
Marco says the curator code is tackling the wrong problem when it comes to curation, link sharing or whatever you want to call it.
By the way, we're still investigating what the Curators Code means for Scoop.it users and how to deal with it. So please send us feedback if you have ideas on it.
On the previous posts, I've listed some of the questions that we have but let me repost them here too: "Is the curator code redundant with the Web's fundamentals such as the hyperlink? Does it add complexity for readers? Will it make sense if only a minority use it?"
The other observation I'm starting to make is that this makes 2 posts by smart people that I would consider curators (at least part of their time) and that have reacted to Maria's initiative by saying they didn't want to be called a curator because of that. So another question is "will the curator code bring standardization or will it devide people who are great at discovering and sharing content?".
Love to hear your thoughts! Via gdecugis 
Brilliant sketchnotes by Craighton Berman summarizing the curation discussion "The Curators and the Curated" at the SXSW 2012.
Check out it to see the three sketchnotes: http://j.mp/wSTJWh Via Giuseppe Mauriello 
Great round up of tools by Daily Tekk's Chris McConnell.
Useful list for any size business ( or for personal use) looking for a concise overview or services.
Chris has broken the tools into 5 categories:
Content Gathering and Personalized Newsfeeds iPad curation Social Media Curation Website Bookmarking and Collection Tools Topic Pages
Great Blog post from Christopher Butler on the importance of content that matters as a valuable marketing strategy :
"there are instances in which written content marketing works quite well. At the product end of the business spectrum, those manufactured for businesses, rather than consumers, are typically heavily researched by buyers—who make active use of search engines to do so—before purchase. Case studies, white papers, blog posts, and other articles can satisfy the researcher’s need for sharable, decision-reinforcing information, especially if they are enabling a buying decision that will ultimately be made by someone else. And obviously, the same dynamic exists within any “knowledge industry” service. For professionals in design, advertising, marketing, public relations, law, or finance, the essential intangibility of their expertise must be carefully described in-depth in diverse ways to qualify the specific nature of what they do and for whom they are best suited to do it (...)
Congratulations, you just became a publisher. Who is your editor? "
Christopher mentions the need to respect a process as any publisher will do. Without compromise with the qualities of content you share, if you have great platform to help you doing so without spending hours on it, it's even better.... Via axelletess 
Once you determine what kind of content your audience wants, you need to focus on presentation and delivery. Here's how organizing your content into three levels can make better content planning an understandable and achievable goal.
We’ve found four main objectives for using a content strategy to create value for your company:
1) Make yourself known as an expert in your sector. Relevant and strong content reinforces your company’s positioning. Show that you follow the trends, read interesting articles, and launch innovative campaigns. Content marketing is not just about content creation but also well-executed curation. By sharing useful articles on topics that are relevant to your industry, you show the world that you are up to speed on the latest insight.
2) Maintain a positive relationship with your customers. Sharing your content regularly will keep your clients and consumers in continuous touch with your brand. It’s best not to bother them with offers or discounts, but rather to offer them something that will add value.
3) Get new customers. If the content you share with existing customers and fans is strong enough, they will share it with their friends and business contacts.
4) Increase your reach on social media platforms.
The world is swamped with information, so it is extremely important to make the content you offer relevant to your intended audience. To start, think about what topics your company can offer unique content in. Secondly, investigate the market’s needs. Find out what topics your target group is looking for more information on.
Once you have combined the internal (level of uniqueness) and external (what people are looking for) dimensions for your content efforts, you will find that most of your ideas fall into four categories:
1) Focus topics: These are topics on which the market is looking for information, but competitors are not offering satisfactory solutions.
2) Competitive topics...
3) Niche topics: These are topics that may interest fewer people, but that your company has a unique perspective on. Even if some of your content is only relevant to a smaller group of customers, if you have a unique story to tell it’s worthwhile to cover these topics to help foster trust.
4) Topics to avoid...
After determining your topics, the next step is to effectively plan the specific types of content you will create. When doing this, your ideas can be divided into three levels: - content updates... - content projects... - content campaigns...
[read full article http://j.mp/yKHckg] Via Giuseppe Mauriello 
Crafting the Perfect Content Curation Strategy... 
If you can't be the source, why not be the resource? This post explores three reasons to embrace content curation. 
This article focuses on Twitter, but is applicable across the board. Good and thorough! ![The History of Content Marketing – How Brands Have Become Storytellers [Part 1] | Business 2 Community | The Content Chronicles | Scoop.it](http://img.scoop.it/DiyIX31JpqfRqhy7bTyrfjl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVaiQDB_Rd1H6kmuBWtceBJ)
A very practicle post by Joe Pulizzi
"Content marketing is not easy" --and it's not new either.
Over the past twelve months, we’ve been noticing a few differences in what separates those organizations who excel at content marketing and those that are just hanging in the game.
This article summarizes who, what and hows of what separates those who excel at content marketing, from those that do not.
The post is full of practicle links and references and it great for pulling together an overview or presentation in order to inform others.
In this article, written for Content Marketing Institute, Adria Saracino explains why outeach at every phase of the content life-cycle is very important, and demonstrates why you should not limit your outreach just to the publishng phase.
As written, the article focuses on the life-cycle of an infographic, but can and should be adapted to every type of content, just as surely as it must be applied to all aspects of business.
Quote: "Even a robust outreach strategy can have lackluster results if it is simply tacked on at the end of a campaign."
To paraphrase:
**You need to build profiles of your target audience, including understanding the stories of each profile.
**Early aspects of outreach include reaching out to members of your team or tribe during the brainstorming and research phases.
**Gear your content to specific profiles, or, as I like to say, speak to their listening.
**There are no guarantees that everyone who your content is geared towards will see it.
**Use analytics and keep track of those you reached out to in earlier phases
Another important aspect I would stress is that whereas you reach out to your community to collaborate on the content you produce, also gear it to the further building of community.
Outreach isn't only the act of reaching out, as described in this article.
**It also refers to your potential audience.
**Nurture your existing relationships and seek to expand your community with each piece of content you produce.
Curated by Jan Gordon covering "Content Marketing, Social Media and Beyond"
Read article here: [http://bit.ly/y2mqrC] Via janlgordon |
***** Yes I see the Visuals beating the Textuals now as we edge away from the dock of the Internet Revolution and as text becomes so noisy cutting through clutter is harder and harder. Great scoop from my friend Michele (maxOz) The Rising Power of Visual Content The speed of change in social media is intimidating but certain trends emerge that can help guide marketers as they continue to promote their brands and seek to optimize their social presence. Over the past few months the importance of visual content has reached an explosive level with all platforms showing impact in different ways.
VISUAL IMPACT ON SOCIAL MEDIA As companies continue to look to social media to help humanize their brands, there are more and more opportunities emerging with the launch of new platforms and updates to existing ones. NOV 2011 Google+ launches brand pages DEC 2011 Twitter releases brand pages DEC 2011 Pinterest breaks into top social networks MAR 2012 Facebook Timeline transition for brands 2. These Slides show examples from G+; Twitter; Facebook; with emphasis on Pinterest Download- http://bit.ly/Jfx2no ; Via maxOz, Martin (Marty) Smith 
Have you noticed that everyone around you now seems to be an expert at something? How your boss gives you unsolicited career advice, based on his own (self-proclaimed) stellar career? 
Robin Good: Maria Popova has just launched a classy and laudable initiative, focused on increasing awareness and in highlighting the importance of honoring always where or via who you have got to a certain article, report, video or image.
Credit and attribution are not just a "formal" way to comply with rules, laws and authors but an incredibly powerful emebddable mechanism to augment findability, discovery, sinergy and collaboration among human being interested in the same topic.
She writes: "In an age of information overload, information discovery — the service of bringing to the public’s attention that which is interesting, meaningful, important, and otherwise worthy of our time and thought — is a form of creative and intellectual labor, and one of increasing importance and urgency.
A form of authorship, if you will.
Yet we don’t have a standardized system for honoring discovery the way we honor other forms of authorship and other modalities of creative and intellectual investment, from literary citations to Creative Commons image rights."
For this purpose Curator's Code was created.
Curator's Code is first of all "a movement to honor and standardize attribution of discovery across the web" as well as a web site where you can learn about the two key types of attribution that we should be using:
Each one has now a peculiar characterizing icon that Curator's Code suggests to integrate in your news and content publication policies.
Additionally and to make it easy for anyone to integrate these new attribution icons in their work, Curator's Code has created a free bokkmarklet which makes using proper attribution a matter of one clic.
Hat tip to Maria Popova and Curator's Code for launching this initiative.
Whether or not you will sign Curator's Code pledge, become an official web site supporting it, or adopt its bookmarklet instantly is not as important as the key idea behind it: by providing credit and attribution to pieces of content you find elsewhere, you not only honestly reward who has spent time to create that content, but you significantly boost the opportunity for thousands of others to connect, link up to, discover and make greater sense of their search for meaning.
Read Maria Popova introductory article to Curator's Code: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/03/09/curators-code
How to use the Curator's bookmarklet: http://vimeo.com/38243275
Healthy. Inspiring. 9/10
Curator's Code official web site: http://curatorscode.org Via Robin Good, Giuseppe Mauriello Robin Good: John McCarus, SVP for Brand Content at Digitas, ignites an interesting panel about content creation vs content curation.
This is the second in a series of three videos highlighting a 2012 conversation on the future of media on the social web organized by Ben Elowitz, CEO of Wetpaint.
From mere republishing and copying of someone else materials without attribution or credit (certainly not something to be categorized under "curation") to the new cadre of emerging journalists, who not only write, but also monitor, research, pre-digest and cull the most interesting content - not written by them - for their own audiences.
Key takeaways:
-> Curators help to expand a publisher’s reach, but the publisher risks losing credit (and traffic).
-> Curators who link back and republish only enough to pique interest will keep publishers happy.
“It’s like the forest episode of Planet Earth: the animal eats the nectar and sort of destroys the plant but spreads the pollen all over.” Jason Hirschhorn, Media ReDEFined
Interesting. 7/10
Original video: http://vimeo.com/37553245 ;
Full article: http://digitalquarters.net/2012/02/video-rebooting-media-think-tank-content-creation-vs-curation/ ; Via Robin Good, janlgordon 
This post was written by Charissa Grandin on Lingospot Blog I selected this because I thought the suggestions for using content whether you're creating it or curation it to build, retain and do business with a loyal customer base through using content were very helpful.
Having the right online content for your business can help you retain customers and attract new ones.
Excerpt:
**What can you do to keep your existing customers coming back and invite additional customers to your business?
**Below are some tasks you can get started on today to improve customer retention through content.
**Needs and concerns - What are your customer's needs?
**What are they worried about?
**What do they most need?
****Create content that alleviates their most urgent concerns and offer solutions
**Keywords
**Make a list of keywords and phrases they may be searching for that will lead them to you
**create content around those topics
**Frequently asked questions
**Make a list of all the questions people ask and create content around them using the word solutions in your title
**Create lots of content
**Put out as much content on your site, twitter, Facebook, etc.
**The more content you have online centered around your key subject, the more likely you are to rank highly in search
**Be Active
**Engage with your audience, be active in online communities
**Include links to your content that address concerns you come across in your online interactions
**Promote your content
**Tweet it, tell everyone abaout it, if your content is useful, people will share it with their networks as well
Curated by Jan Gordon covering, "Content Marketing, Social Media and Beyond"
Read full article here: [http://bit.ly/ylR5p1] Via janlgordon 
Susan McKittrick, an analyst with Patricia Seybold Group, wrote in this her article:
"We hear a lot about content curation these days. Some call it a top trend for 2012 and a must-see new technology for marketers.
A content curator assembles a quality collection of third-party and original content that is of keen interest to a particular audience, selects the best content for presentation, adds commentary valuable to the audience and publishes to the audience’s preferred channels. Content curation tools use technology to facilitate these steps.
Marketers use content curation to establish a reputation as a trusted resource in a particular area, to build an audience (that eventually buys) above the funnel, and to foster interaction with a community of people who share specific interests.
You will find a good example of content curation in action at www.cmo.com. Curators of this website draw on top quality content created by others combined with their own original content to present.
An enterprise content curation tool will: - Help you find the best content;
- CIThread - http://www.cithread.com
read full original article http://j.mp/A3lI0R Via Giuseppe Mauriello 
French startup Pearltrees just scored another $6 million to help scale up its social curation service that helps people save, sort and share what they find on the web. But with dozens of services in play, is this a bubble waiting to pop? Via Carli Spina 
Good writing matters in marketing; being able to articulate ideas clearly is key to capturing the attention of prospects.
Let's discuss some key copywriting lessons you should apply to the process of crafting successful calls-to-action.
1) Begin With Subjects & Verbs: Verbs and subjects help us to quickly glean the meaning of a sentence, acknowledging this when crafting your online call-to-action is crucial when the attention of readers is more elusive. Verbs are the part of speech that generate the most shares on Twitter.
2) Include Numbers: Numbers are a great way to break through the clutter of ambiguity, be specific about your offer, and set the right expectations. A number tells visitors exactly what they’re going to get, how much of it, for how long, etc.
3) Use Adverbs Sparingly: Marketers should use adverbs in their call-to-action only if it aids in the understanding of the message. Adverbs are the part of speech that gets the fewest number of shares on Twitter.
4) Keep it Between 90 and 150 Characters: The standard advice for calls-to-action has been to keep them short and concise. Your CTA should contain enough information about the benefits and specifics of your offer.
5) Make Language Less Technical and More Practical: Emphasize the benefits of the offer and how it can make your prospects smarter. Stay away from overly technical jargon.
[read full article and view the presentation here: http://j.mp/w6fw5h] Via Giuseppe Mauriello 
This morning I learned a new word for information overload - "content fried" from a colleague at the Packard Foundation. It resonated. We have so much content in our professional lives. 
"It doesn't matter what you call it, as long as you do it." 
There are many advantages of the Discovery approach for information consumption
Romain Goday says "Content discovery tools offer a new approach to information consumption that brings a series of advantages over search engines"
I believe discovery engines will play a role in developing a 360 degree view around a topic and help us remain "outside"of the echo chamber. 
Thoughts on content curation, IP and what this means for education. |
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