Curation Revolution

5 Super Secret Marketing Trends
We see 5 big marketing trends for 2016. Yet few seem to be discussing these five trends as a group. More so individually, but these 5 trends work hand in glove. Maximum return comes from combining synergies from all five 2016 Super Secret Marketing Trends including:

* Become A Nowist

* Give Keys To Your Digital Kingdoms To the Kids (community)

* Conduct a Symphony of Feeds

* Appify and Gamify

* Disrupt and Find Blue Oceans

Each of those fingers makes a powerful raised fist of change for 2016. Even if you only believe in or adopt 2 out of the 5 you will be better off next year than this.

5 Super Secret Marketing Trends for 2016
http://www.curagami.com/5-super-secret-marketing-trends/?v=7516fd43adaa 

How Their Rank Teaches You SEO Lessons
SEO: Their Rank Talks To You, but are you listening, emulating category leaders and finding ways to disrupt your space to win hearts, minds and loyalty online is the "new SEO". 

So if your question is, "You talking to ME?" and you are asking Google the answer is YES.  

Kelly's Community
@Kelly Hungerford is my friend even though we've never met. Kelly is also one of the best online community developers in the world something she proved working with one of my favorite "get more, do less" tools – Paper.li.  So we couldn't help but lay down a riff embedded within her great Why Your Business Needs Community post. 

More than a loyalty program, Amazon prime is ecommerce's future. Amazon Prime builds community, reduces customer risks, is easy and fun so steal this...

Content marketing must serve a higher purpose & featuring people not things is how websites win hearts, minds & loyalty creating online community.

Post includes a Fareed Zakaria interview with hedge fund manager Ray Dolio because Ray shares 5 tips for how to become a great web marketer:

* Think more about how "the machine" works (Google in our case).

* Be in the middle of it and expect to get banged up.

* Have great humility and FEAR.

* It isn't KNOWING that matters it is what you do when you DON't KNOW.
* Find smart people who disagree with you and LISTEN.

I couldn't summarize how teams I've led have made over $30M in online sales learn to think and be. Ray may be speaking of how to manage a hedge fund, but he may as well be outlining how to be a great digital marketer.

This post explores an eternal truth - people not things sell.
http://www.curagami.com/magical-thinking/marketing/5-ways-people-fix-content-marketing/

Journey To Unique & Uncontested
We are presenting ideas to a group of about 100 SMBs in Atlanta on 4.16. The BIG IDEA is don't attempt to play a sequential, incremental improvement game. That dog doesn't hunt anymore.

Discover BLUE OCEANS where you can create Unique and Uncontested business models that rule, evolve and win hearts, minds and loyalty fast and over time.

How can you discover Blue Oceans in your business vertical? We suggest "Disruption for Dummies" where you combine 2 or all of these surfable trends:

* Appification.

* Gamification.
* Social Shopping Nowists.
* Friends of Friends Marketing.

* Community.

Why Content Curtation Rocks SEO
The slide deck from @Scoop.it about how content curation impacts SEO is an excellent SEO & content curation primer (embedded in the post), but let’s do a deeper dive to understand how content curation ROCKS SEO and every site's Uber-Goal of creating sustainable online community.

This Curagami post creates an interesting comparison between Oprah and Amazon. One knows how to create online community one doesn't. Both have great tips to share.

Building Online Community

As we work on creating a new tool, a tool capable of helping ecommerce merchants and content marketers validate their social media and content marketing. We’ve identified five community pillars and share them in this Curagami post:

http://www.curagami.com/featured/everything-social-community-rules/

Medium Rocks
We love using Medium. Medium is the perfect blend of blog, Scoop.it and about 5 other tools we can’t live without. We had a Medium Rocks post that seems to have escaped, so we wanted to reestablish how important we think this micro-blogging tool is becoming. Fellow Scoop.iteer @Cendrine Marrouat - https://www.cendrinemedia.com is on Medium. 

What about you? If you are on Medium let us know so we can follow and feature you in our people to follow on Medium list.  

Trending AND Best Sellers
Good idea to have TRENDING and BEST SELLERS categories. B2B SaaS companies may not have "best seller". "May not" because we believe every online marketing team should have an ecommerce store, but few B2B marketers take us up on that belief.  

Trending  is what is happening NOW. Best Sellers are what has happened over a longer period (say a month, quarter or year). Trending is a great word since it implies the influence of the "mob". 

The best "trending" is where the guts of the trending engine is shared and easy to see. Digg's voting engine or Facebook's thumbs up / down make it easy to SEE the tribe and their votes.

We added Trending as a category today, but are manually calculating what should be in the category form Google Analytics. Better to automate it all and then share what you automated. If you count sales, shares and subscriptions (immediately after)  TELL YOUR CUSTOMERS and they will give you the kind of feedback your system needs.

If you aren't that sophisticated yet do something like what we are doing. Share your GA results so customers know how you are calculating "trending" (reminds us we need to add that). Not as good as trending based on easy to SEE feedback loops, but trust creating nonetheless.  

Building Online Community
The Uber Goal of all online commerce and B2B sites is creating online community. Few KNOW that is the UBER GOAL, but it is, trust us. Because when everything is social community rules.

The Platform Revolution "
Google is all about big brands now," a frustrated customer said. The complaint was about how this Small to Medium Sized Business couldn't win organic listings anymore. We disagreed. Google isn't rewarding top organic listings to Big Brands. Big brands look and feel more like platforms and that is why they are winning in spite of themselves. 

Learn more about why you MUST think in platforms NOW: http://www.curagami.com/magical-thinking/new-seo/the-platform-revolution/  

Some finally "get SEO" as tactical advantage ends. Online marketing must win hearts, minds & loyalty. Brands must build online community SEO not so much anymore. Those and other reasons are why I'm not an SEO. 

Burn Down Your House
Talking Heads know an important internet marketing truth – sometimes you need to put on a big suit, jump around and burn down your web marketing house.

Watch David Byrne carefully. Everything happening is practiced but not stale, choreographed but spontaneous and crazy & planned. If there is a better example for where our near real time, content, community and commerce online world is going we don't know it.

Everything Is Harder Suddenly everything online seems harder. Or there may be a slow drip with energy and value leaking out seemingly unrecoverable. Google’s algorithmic haircuts hurt no matter how realization dawns. This post is about how to recover, regain and reposition your website after traffic, conversions and money are dealt an injury by an algorithm:

Take These Easy Steps To Recover:

• Stop, Wait & Listen.
• Analytics Deep Dive.
• Create New KPIs.
• Back In To Blue Oceans.
• Create Community.

Thanks to FedEx
Sharing our Hero Marketing Haiku Deck last week with a group of Small to Medium Sized Businesses taught us how to tune the message. We noted how the TACTICS of competing with Amazon sparked real interest.

There are two components to competing with Amazon:

* 4Cs.
* Everything Is Everything.

Four Cs
Content, Customers, Commerce and Community are the four pillars of creating successful online marketing. The Uber-Goal is creating sustainable online community, or a community growing faster than its costs.

You create online community by curating more than you create and moving from US to WE. Content is how you signal customers your site, brands and company GET IT and want to create community.

You know you've created community when following increases, heuristic measures such as time on site, pages viewed and bounce rates improve and your site is getting closer to the magical 50% returning 50% new visitor mix.

Everything Is Everything
We've been struggling to explain how interconnected everything is these days. SEO, content marketing, content curation, email marketing, social media marketing and mobile marketing are working hand in glove now at increasingly faster pace. This more, faster, better loop means today's commerce is tomorrow's content, today's community is tomorrow's customer and round and round like a furious merry go round.

You win hearts, minds and loyalty today by understanding how to work the 4cs into a sustainable online community, a community of advocates wiling  to sacrifice and support you, your brand and ideas.

 Riffing Tableau
I have great respect for Tableau Software. Solid team producing cool tools and the content needed to sell them. Their analysis of 2015 BI trends was so good I’m using it as a template to riff and add my thoughts.

Top 10 BI Trends 2015
1. Death of Gate Keepers.
2. Social Arbitrage Creates Competitive Advantage. !!!
3. Analysis Not JUST For Analysts Anymore.
4. Rise of the Sustainable Online Community (our #1).
5. Everything Integrates (BELIEVE).
6. Cloud Things is REAL.
7. Near Real Time DOMINATES.
8. Data & Journalism Finish MERGING.
9. Mobile Matures. !!!
10. Smart Analytics Begin.

http://www.curagami.com/featured/top-10-bi-trends-2015/
Team Curagami riffed the first 5 today and will finish up tomorrow. So much great content we had to STOP and think about it again tomorrow or melt down (lol).