Must Market

Brands are under attack by 5 Ninja: clean slate, social media, death of old media, mobile & User Generated Content. How defeat attacking Ninja horde?

Content Curators Added To Curagami
Content curation may be the ultimate team sport. Together we are smarter than alone. As we changed our startup http://www.Curagami.com look and feel today we added a place to share 3 favorite content curators each month.

December's Must Follow Content Curators:

@Cendrine Marrouat - https://www.cendrinemedia.com

@Neil Ferree

@Brian Yanish - MarketingHits.com

Significant curators across every social net these special marketers sift a mountain of content daily so we their lucky followers are smarter, wiser and better informed. If you are NOT following Cendrine, Neil and Brian on Scoop.it, Twitter, Gplus and wherever else they contribute (blogs and company sites) you are missing the easiest way to learn content curation and Internet marketing we know.

Happy holidays to three of our favorite content curators, Scoopiteers and people. We will share 3 curators a month and won't have a problem filling up our 2015 content curation dance card.

Marty Note
Wait long enough, or in my case live long enough, and it gets to be YOUR TURN (lol). I loved this Justin Gray post on Forbes explaining that MARKETING is the last thing an online play needs.

Couldn't agree more.

I was trained in a different kind of marketing than we practice now at our startup Curagami. I was trained to invade Russia in the winter. THEN messages were few enough and far enough between capturing territory and holding it was possible.

Not so much anymore.

These days capturing hearts, minds and loyalty is the game and everything is happening all at once all the time. The skills needed to play this game, as Justin so astutely notes, are different. Here is an excellent summary of those skills from his Forbes post:

• Content creators. In an era of shrinking attention spans, the ability to craft compelling stories into engaging online content is key. That’s why marketers need the same skills as a journalist: ideation, writing and editing.

• Analysts. Marketers need to know how to extract insights from data and use it to make meaningful decisions. They also need to create models to collect data and feedback easily.

• Designers. Modern marketers must have an eye for aesthetics and be able to capitalize on trends in real time. Look for candidates who can create high-quality, consumer-facing assets at a rapid pace.

• Planners. Marketers engineer a brand’s interface with the buyer, including when, how and where they’re interacting. That means creating workflows and campaigns based on buyers’ behaviors while paying attention to other messages and campaigns.

AGREE and not just because I'm benefiting from such an analysis. I imagine EVEN if I was still working for one of the largest Consumer Products companies as I did a lifetime ago (P&G, M&M/Mars) we wouldn't be invading Russia in the winter anymore.

UNLESS, we were invading with a tribe of brand Sherpas, telling the story as we went and watching our analytics and pivoting based on what we learn in near real time.

In today’s millennial-inspired economy, social media marketing is dead. I didn’t say social media is dead — just the idea that social media marketing is the most effective approach to win over millennials. Here's how you should react.

The New New Marketing
There was a time before the web when "digital marketing" was somethign you did with your fingers. Then everything changed. Change came fast and furious thanks to Moore's Law - Integrated circuit POWER goes up exponentially even as costs plummet.

Once our digital world got to a certain point, let's call that point X, acceleration accelerates. Mobile throws gasoline on the social fire and gets answered by social media marketing with rocket fuel on the fire.

The resulting explosion in a kingdom called BRANDING in a land far, far away once upon a time...

Read the Curagami Story and worry less :). M

We Are All Media Companies Now
Working on how to create community with our new tool (http://www.crowdfunde.com) has me realizing sometimes you write things that don't SUCK and whose meaning becomes more clear as we move forward in time. 

Red Bull's Branding Lessons: We Are All Media Companies Now is reading that way. Evergreen content? Not quite yet. We need to think and write some more, but glad to see shares continue to increase as that means we've touch a nerve.

Social shares increasing over time also means as new people come in they find the piece valuable and that is an indication the content's sell by date is still off in the future. I'm thinking on a Red Bull II. If you have suggestions for similar GET IT social or content marketing companies please share in comments or email to martin(at)crowdfunde.com.

Much appreciated and glad to provide attributions and links back once Red Bull Redux is written. Red Bull On. Marty  

Remember those great, “This Is Your Brain on Drugs,” commercials? New neuroscience research shows benefits of your brain on content curation may be equally startling: I think there are some promising avenues of discovery in the work of Gary Marcus that could one day help address how we learn. Gary Marcus describes deep learning this …

What About You?
Are you seeing conversations and social media becoming increasingly important to your marketing? Share your experiences, fears, concerns, comments here, on CrowdFunde's blog or social media (linked on the post).

Thanks, Mary, Phil & Team at CrowdFUnde

http://www.crowdfunde.com/magical-thinking/your-brain-on-content-curation/  

Great list here, but "ultimate" not even close (lol). A few of my favorite content curation tools NOT mentioned include:

* Google Plus (duh, G+ is a great tool never included in these lists).
* BuzzSumo (tells me what's trending).
* WordPress is another often overlooked curation tool. Wordpress is really thousands of tools thanks to plugins.
* Guess obvious tools like YouTube, Vimeo and Twitter they left off due to how obvious they are.
* Also surprised they don't extend to inbound marketing tools like Marketo, Eloqua and Pardot.
* On the same vein I would include leading CRMs like SalesForce.
* Testing tools like Optimizely are missing too.

Guess the question is where do you draw the line between content sourcing, sharing and blogging. I tend to mashup all of those things and that means "ultimate" would look more like that huge Brian Solis graphic and I suspect that is what this post was trying to avoid.

About half the apps on this list are new to me, so will have fun exploring...again.

Netflix & Amazon know something most new to web merchants miss; Information creates online scale becoming the gold at the end of a means rainbow.

We shocked a SEO Meetup suggesting 90% curation to 10% content creation. This deck explains why you MUST curate content. Content curation is a CSF (Crtical Success Factor) for online marketing.

This Haiku Deck is the fastest to 2,000 views we've ever created. Discover the 7 reasons you MUST curate content:
http://shar.es/1XxuSs

Content Curation is the "new marketing" & this post shares 6 reasons curating content should be your online marketing's elephant:

6 Reasons Content Curation Should Be Your Elephant
* Easy to curate content for any receiving device (great for mobile / social web).

* Encourages Sharing.

* More Reach Faster.

* Content Curation Great & Subtle Value Add.

* Great way to test.

* Protects valuable modeled digital assets.

How about you? Is content curation your digital marketing elephant? This post helps define content curation and shares 6 reasons why you will be curating more content next year than this:

http://www.curagami.com/featured/6-reasons-curation-becomes-elephant/  

Streaming Downton Abbey via Roku and Amazon Prime this weekend struck a nerve. As the web continues to destroy middlemen and gatekeepers concepts like “CBS” and “Time Warner Cable” are in play. Watching Amazon move from webpage arbitrage to web services platform to streaming video seller got me thinking about tips every content marketer should steal …

There is no wizard to conjure an audience for you; you must build it for yourself. Do it by publishing content in front of Other People's Audiences ("OPA").

CrowdFunde is hiring great content curators. Curators form the pillars of every successful online community & community wins customer hearts and minds.

Content Curators may be the most important and least understood skill set on the planet. Critical to content creation content curation helps test a wide range of ideas, content combinations and personas. You can test more faster in content curation than creation.

This post explains why our Durham, NC based sartup CrowdFunde is hiring great content curators and why you should too.

Major Scoop.iteer Jan Gordon launched Curatti.com - The Editors of Chaos website over the weekend. Jan's mission is important. She wants to save the golden content marketing goose before its killed by its own popularity.

Great mission and a Free "Insiders List" when you sign up for email (I did just that today). Be sure to stop by Jan's new website:

http://www.curatti.com