Curation Revolution

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.

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.

Creating online community is HARD. This Haiku Deck shares "behind the curtain" secrets to help you build an engaged and engaging online community.

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...

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/

Over Planning Can KILL Your Content Marketing
We see a lot of experts, gurus and people who should know better sharing yesterday's advice. We've read thousands of words about the importance of goal setting, planning and objectives for content marketing.

People talk about creating content marketing calendars and planning everything to within an inch of your life. Good luck with that. Might have worked 3 years ago, but today's social / mobile / connected world means you need to become a NOWIST.

This Curagami post embeds the influential Joy Ito TED talk about becoming a Nowist by pulling from the network to meet demand. Your content needs to do the same.

AND You need to digitally listen. We riff a few paragraphs about what it means to digitally listen such as FOLLOWING those who follow you, Retweeting and curating content from your customers and brand advocates.

Next time you read 1,000 words on planning your "content calendar" STOP and read this Curagami post so you don't over plan your content marketing.

Haiku Deck Rocks Visual Marketing
If you haven't used http://www.haikudeck.com yet you should. Mark Traphagen turned me on to it and it is the best visual marketing tool out there. Here are 5 reasons we love Haiku Deck:

* SO EASY - the creators of Haiku Deck may have made the easiest to use tool on the plant.
* Free - Amazingly the tool is FREE (at the moment).
* Visual Marketing - we use the tool to find images from the Creative Commons. Content marketing is hampered without great images & Haiku Deck helps you find 'em.
* Their Community - great marketers creating awesome decks makes the Haiku Deck community one of our favorites (right up there with Scoop.it).
* Their team - the Haiku Deck team is responsive, social and they want to help.

If you aren't using this awesome content marketing tool yet, you should be.

Turns out Game of Thrones is a great analogy for building online community because winter is always coming online too.

Online Community Is…
* Always under attack.
* Full of surprises, vicious attacks come from least expected sources.
* A place where surprise is rarely GOOD news.
* A “kingdom” where a little bit of power is a DANGEROUS thing.
* A state of mind where What you THINK is valuable rarely is.
* A state of mind where What you think is WORTHLESS rarely is.
* Strange because time accelerates some changes, slows down others.
* Where having 1 Fire Breathing Dragon is GOOD, 3 is Better.
* A place where today’s STORM is tomorrow calm before the storm.

Take Game of Thrones Favorite Character Poll:
http://www.crowdfunde.com/magical-thinking/creating-online-community-like-game-thrones/