Curation Revolution

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.  

Piktochart is an easy infographic design app that requires very little effort to produce simple and high quality graphics. Create free infographics here.

Marty (@Scenttrail) Review
I used Piktochart yesterday to create an infographic to support my 5 Easy Email Marketing Tips (http://sco.lt/7T6pTF ). I am NOT a graphic designer, but I found Piktochart helped me think like one.

Creation of my first "infographic", and I put infographic in quotes not to offend any true infographic pro, took about two hours. Piktochart's User Interface is excellent, intuitive and drag and drop friendly.

At first I tried to do everything IN Piktochart. Then I noticed they have a robust import tool so I created a draft in the tool, took a screen shot, sized the screen shot up to their 600 x 400 and worked on it in photoshop.

Piktochart, if you are reading this, you may want to make an export tool that is as easy to use as your import tool. If I could export a block at a time it would be ideal. Even when I was finished and published I manipulated some spacing of the infographic by selecting and moving blocks in Photoshop.

The tool comes complete with icons like the bulls eye and pad. I couldn't understand how to color my fonts (their styling options seem to not come up the way they are supposed too) so I added the text color in Photoshop and important the resulting block overlaying what was there.

My process made the graphic HEAVY since I had 2 copies of everything, so it would be great to export, work on a block in Photoshop, import it back in and then overlay on a blank canvas. The only way I can see to do that now is start over.

Creating visual support for our blog posts is so important Piktochart is a great new tool for any content marketer / blogger. Interesting to note my infographic of 5 Easy Email Tips got 3x the views and shares of my written Scoop. We know the visual marketing revolution is upon us, so getting as good as someone like Mark Smiciklas (http://www.intersectionconsulting.com/ ).

Piktochart is a great and timely tool! Highly recommended. Marty

Content Director Should Rock Content Marketing
I'm excited that th etalented @Scoop.itteam ( @Guillaume Decugis@Ally Greer@Marc Rougierand many others) are launching a new content curation tool called Content Director. As team Curagami shared in our 7 Reasons You Must Curate Content (http://shar.es/1ohSrO over 5,000 views now) knowing what content is making you money and why is a CSF (Critical Success Factor).

Can't wait for our demo tomorrow PM. Will report back.

Using Paper.li to create Heroes Cure Cancer Daily (http://paper.li/CureCancerHero/1378227914 ) today and fell in love all over again. Wrote this piece a few months ago and boy does it apply because Paper.li does ROCK (i.e. creates a lot for a little). 

I created the cure cancer hero daily in about an hour.