Curation Revolution

@Jaana Nyström is a great curator and she just beat me to the punch :). When she shared her EPIC journey of using G+ to move from "nobody" to "somebody" I planned to blog about her amazing journey. The content and message was too good to be trapped in comments.

Read this post CAREFULLY as you may recognize where you are on Jaana's timeline of personal brand development. There are several "inside baseball" tips to pay particular attention to including:

* Don't worry about perfection, start publishing.
* G+ is an AMAZING and vastly under used tool (start there add more social nets later).
* No matter what, keep turning the crank (keep going) since the only sin you and your personal band can't recover from is NOT PLAYING.

Great stuff from an amazing curator. What lessons did you learn from Jaana Nystrom? What similar lessons have you learned as you create a meaningful personal brand?

Marty's 5 Social Media Safety Tips
 

1. Your Website Beats Their Websites Every Time
2. Visualize Scenarios, Create Plans
3. Understand What Authentic Does and Doesn’t Mean
4. Hire the Right People
5. Stay Calm, Carry On

You now understand that you have to deal with how your customer chooses to consume your content but what do they really want? Whether you’d like to believe it or not, a mobile user will do all of the same things they’d do on a desktop as long as YOU make it easy and seamless …

Group boards on Pinterest can be your secret to increased followers, improved engagement, and reaching a larger audience with less effort.

Marty Note
Great Curation Revolution suggestion from my friend Bill Gassett (@MassRealty). I love group boards too because they crowdsource great Pinterest content. My Group Board include:

King of Pinterest (2,047 followers, 121 contributors)
http://www.pinterest.com/scenttrail/king-of-pinterest/

Queen of Pinterest (3,290 followers, 325 contributors)
http://www.pinterest.com/scenttrail/queen-of-pinterest/

Love these boards since the share GREAT stuff and my work load GOES DOWN even as they get better. One caveat is Pinterest can be strange about allowing you to invite contributors. I could easily have 1,000 contributors to both boards if Pinterest didn't have such a tight and strange grip on the invite reins.

Making Warby Parker's Annual Report VISUAL
As Beyonce proved when she rethought her last album to be more visual the visual marketing revolution is here (Beyonce covered here http://sco.lt/7Pci1p). Here are 12 GREAT Visual Marketing Tips from Column 5 the Infographics experts:

1. Be Visual. 
2. Show YOUR Personality.

3. Only share NEWSWORTHY news.

4. Let People See Your Engine (able to look behind the curtain).

5. Focus on and Feature Your POEPLE.

6. Make IT Easy To Share (and IT is everything).

7. Present DATA in context.

8. Don't forget the TANGENTIAL. 
9. Share the LOVE. 
10. Product Tie-Ins should happen NATURALLY and ORGANICALLY.

11. Share VALUES.

12. Pat yourself on the BACK every now and again. 

My favorite is FEATURE YOUR PEOPLE. Clients ask me and/or complain they have no good content. Nonsense you have amazing content sitting at desks or on the shop floor.

Telling your product's story by proxy, by telling the stories of the people that work on it, is a brilliant way to create STICKY content that isn't self-serving and feels more TRUE.  

What is content curation and how can it help SEO? This post shares how content curation creates more reach faster and protects your Internet marketing.

Note
This post is a response to Your Guide To Conent Curation for SEO by @jaysondemers (Jayson DeMers) for Search Engine Journal. Jayson's post is dissonat to my content curation experience in several important ways.

Your Guide To Content Curation For SEO is brilliant, includes orginal thinking and cagegorization I haven't thought of or about and gets more right than wrong.

That said, it felt important to sit on the ground and discuss where my content curation experience over the last three years differs from Jayson's declarations.

I linked his post and be sure to read mine and his, comment and share your thoughts since understanding what content curation IS and how it relates to SEO feels important :). M

Top 5 Reasons Today (5 more tomorrow)
This post got so good to me I had to break it into two. The top 5 reasons Amazon will be kicking ecommerce butt and taking names next year:

* Content Curation (they are better at riffing, snipping and spinning content than anyone). 
* Understand INFORMATION = more than half the "profit" of an online transaction. 
* Price Arbitrage (no prices is ever static on Amazon). 
* Arbitrage Everything (Amazon will trade anything and everything). 
* Amazon Thinks in web "scale" and that is BIG and BIGGER, Fast and FASTER. 

Don't despair. Yes Amazon will be kicking all of our butts for quite a long time online, but that doesn't mean we can't grab bull by horns and narrow the gap in 2014. Knowing what Amazon is so good at is a great place to figure what you can STEAL. 

Doesn't cost much to CHANGE your thinking and may win the day! 

Working hard on a SaaS set of publishing tools and was analyzing what it takes to "cross the chasm" from unknown SaaS to successful, well loved tool. Here is what I found:

* Critical that a new tool create community. 
* Haiku Deck demonstrates this idea with their feature gallery:
http://www.haikudeck.com/gallery/featured and Scoop.it with their posting wall. 
* Community must scale in size and diversity. 
* Diversity creates community "intelligence".
* Community intelligence helps monetize. 
* Money helps create new tools. 
* New tools help build community faster. 
and so on creating a positive virtual cycle. 

Tools can solve a problem like Haiku Deck (easy access to creative commons), plant a flag on an emerging trend (Scoop.it and Paper.li) and mashup scaled systems such as ZipCar.com.  

You may catch Marty combing through Vogue, Elle and Vanity Fair at B&N. Why? Fashion mags are great visual marketers - 8 Visual Marketing Tips From Vogue. Here are 8 Visual Marketing Lessons from Vogue:

* Be specific & BIG NUMBERS are great ways to be specific.

* Be branded – take advantage of existing brands such as Shades of Grey.

* Be topical – March is “fashion week” in NYC and both magazines have extensive features.

* Be welcoming – note how both models look directly out at the viewers (my favorite online engagement pose).

* Use SOUND – “Sexy, Shiny, Bouncy Hair sounds fun. “Full on Fashion Force” sounds forceful. Words create rhythm and sounds that adds to or detracts from compelling images.

* Juxtapose – “street chic” and “fashion force” are examples of creative juxtapositions.

* Use Action Verbs – which of these action verbs AREN’T on either cover? grab, be bold, upgrade, must have, takes on, and rock? Yep, all of those “action verbs” are in sub-headlines.

* Simple Colors – ONLY colors used for headlines and sub-heads are black, white and red.

There is only one way to break out of the rat race and eliminate all competing rats - create EPIC Personal Branding. Here's how..

* Create BHAGs NOW!
* Videos and Pictures.

* Think TEAM!
* Use Special SOCIAL Weapons.
* Fail Miserably.
* Give your Skills AWAY FREE.

Follow those hard won secrets, at least one of them tried to kill me several times, and your personal brand will be EPIC, your resume floats to the top and you win the promotion, can afford the G I Joe with the Kung Fu Grip and love the life you create.

Here are 7 Tips From MoMA Curator:

1. Focus on Goals

2. Have Empathy

3. Be Careful, Cautious and Selective

4. Editorialize

5. Provide Attribution

6. Understand What’s Timely and Trending

7. Have an Eye for a Great Title

and 3 From Scenttrail (Martin Marty Smith on Scoopit)

8. Cast A WIDE Net, Curate Disparate Content.

9. Don't Forget OPC (Other People's Curation).

10. Use Rich Snippets to Consistently Theme Your Curation.

Cast a "wide net" pulling seemingly disparate subjects into your curation using our curatorial skills to create connection and synergy. Don't forget the most powerful content on YOUR network is THEIR User Generated Content (UGC) and curation. Rich Snippets don't recreate the content wheel but do them your curation creating a consistent blanket of meaning and value.

Added a comment about putting a title in front of a masterpiece in comments on Scoop.it:
http://blog.scoop.it/2014/02/13/7-qualities-of-highly-effective-content-curators/

This post shares a story, a story of a piece of content written for @ janlgordon curatti.com. How did Startup Trends 2014 II go from being a laggard at social shares to outshining its brother post (Startup Trends 2014 I)?

Ongoing curation and GPlus provide the answers and proving why we are all content curators now. The piece also shares some "down the SEO rabbit hole" content curation and creation perspective.

Promise to write more "down the SEO rabbit hole" content soon.

Netflix data shows a propensity for "binge watching". How do we create content marketing to encourage a binge?

This Haiku Deck shares tips on how to make your content marketing "binge friendly". 

Amazon Ecommerce Mus Steals Fro 2014 Continues with #6 - 10:

* Gamification.
* Speed.
* Shipping.
* Algorithms not people.

* Think Different.

Add teset to must steal tactics 1 - 5:

* Content Curation.

* Information Is Half The Profit.

* Price Arbritrage.
* Arbritrage Everything.
* Think in SCALE.

and you have an RX for ecommerce victory in 2014. Steal any 3 of those tactics and you will make more money this year than last.

1 - 5:
http://www.scenttrail.com/top-10-reasons-amazon-will-kick-ecommerce-butt-2014/

6 - 10
http://www.scenttrail.com/ecommerce-steal-these-amazon-tactics/

Artist George Rodrigue Painted his last blue dog last week, but the "blue dog" virus lives on sharing valuable viral marketing lessons.

Here are the content marketing tips for #startups and #smbs shared in this post:

1. Create content before, during and after events.

2. Support great posts about you by writing about them.

3. Don't SELL, CURATE instead.

4. Create content with an eye toward what you want.

5. Tools matter.

http://scenttrail.blogspot.com/2013/11/5-quick-easy-content-marketing-tips.html