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What’s The Deal With All This Curation?
Paid Content wrote a great piece about the amazing curation tools for online content, and how they plan to make money.
They’re all built on the same idea: a self-organized community of thousands people (see graph below) who pick up articles they like and put them on Twitter (and also on Facebook and Tumblr); the feeds are then re-aggregated and curated by the sites’ editors.
Then two questions arise :
– Does this model benefit publishers ?
– What kind of business models can the aggregators hope for ?Longreads’ business future lies more in a membership system than in anything else — maybe some sponsorship, Armstrong acknowledges. The contents Longreads promotes through its links addresses a solvent audience, one that knows great journalism comes with a price and so do good tools to mine it.
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Easy Upgrades For Your Site’s Navigation
Did you know that around 60% of the time are seeking out information on a blog, they can’t navigate the website right and therefore can’t find it!
Scary, we know.
Mashable ran a really great how-to guide on creating a clear, effective navigation bar for your site. A couple great tips included:
- action links on the right, info ones on the left
- give enough vertical and horizontal space for each link so that users don’t click the wrong page
- do the work for them - offer as much context and hierarchy for each link as you can,
Read more here, or check out more low key yet effective ways to amp your blog’s design.
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Do You Use LinkedIn Answers For Marketing?
Hubspot recently ran a post highlighting the best ways to use Linkedin Answers.
Apparently, the platform is a great point of interaction; “While personal and business profiles get most of the attention on LinkedIn, the social network has several other valuable features that can shine for inbound marketers,” they explain.
Their suggestions include using it for finding guest bloggers, staying current on jargon, and gaining authority. Read more here, or check out some other platforms we think you should be marketing on.
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What’s Different About Twitter
Mashable ran a great piece on Twitter’s new look and features update yesterday.
Here’s what changed the most:
Home: This is your old news feed, only better.
Connect: This is where all your @replies and mentions will be.
Discover: Besides trending topics and hashtags, this will identify stories and trends based on your connections, location and language.
Me: Your Twitter profile, made bigger, neater and with more activity recorded.
Read the whole thing here, or take a look at some good Twitter strategies.
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Do You Use Prose?
According to Copyblogger, the Prose Theme for WordPress has become the favorite for many large scale publishers online.
Thousands of publishers love it because of the extensive level of control. But a new update will allow users even more great features, like the ability to
- Customize virtually every element of your site
- Even more detailed control of your Genesis framework
- Easier custom header switching
- Effortless background image control
We’d love to know - what are you using?
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Brands Barking At Consumers Is Officially “Out”
According to PostAdvertising, 2011 was the year that consumers regained a voice in corporate marketing and branding decisions. Apparently, big companies like Dominoes, LL Bean and Ford made big changes in reaction to passionate customer feedback.
Their results for 2012:
Out: brands barking at consumers.
In: consumers taking control.
Do you agree? Or do you think things will head towards higher quality branding with less customer interaction?
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How The Blaze Pulls Hundreds Of Thousands Of Reader Interactions
According to Poynter, The Blaze is getting some spicy reader responses - but they aren’t comments.
They’ve embedded a social polling tool that grows as a community engages with it called Urtak.
The embedded widget lets readers ask each other questions, which helps increase user interaction self tailor as it grows. So while the same story received 264 comments, Urtak helped them rack in hundreds of thousands of “yes-no-don’t care” answers.
We use Urtaks on The Content Strategist, and they offer really interesting feedback.
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The Secret Life Of A Community Manager
This week we took a good look at the content strategy behind Get Satisfaction, a social strategy company that works with big name brands to encourage interaction, feedback and communication.
While researching, we came across an awesome infographic they made highlighting just what makes a community manager tick.
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How Buzzfeed's Recent Post Got 3 Million Views →
Yesterday, Buzzfeed had a post that was had 3 million views, 22,000 tweets, and 130,000 Facebook likes.
Nieman Journalism Lab did a great job breaking down the reason for the post’s success. They also got some great insights from founder Jonah Peretti.
“I think the future is going to be about combining informational content with social and emotional content,” Peretti said, and “the post did a great job of combining those two things.”
(via buzzfeed)
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Feeling A Little Lost In Your Analytics?
Hey Everyone -
Feeling A Little Lost In Your Analytics? Here’s A Quick Analytics Refresher.
- Make Sure You Are Measuring The Right Things, Like ROI and Engagement.
- Implement a Few Useful Tools To Help You Better Gage What’s Going On.
- But Stay Updated With New Features, So You Don’t Accidentally End Up Paying For Them Somewhere Else!
