With Sulia, Flipboard & Twitter, it’s never been easier to keep abreast of topics that matter to you

Guest post by Brian Blondy

Crowdsourcing and aggregation are two key functions for the modern distribution of real-time content within the online news industry. If used properly, each is a powerful method for processing and delivering your interests in a clean and concise manner on information networks like Twitter, Flipboard and Sulia. To maximize the potential for how you follow the issues you enjoy hearing about, both must be embraced and utilized to supercharge your knowledge of online news.

You should know that visiting particular websites to keep up to speed about a specific topic is almost essentially a waste of time. Web surfing is inefficient, time consuming and runs the risk that you may not actually find what you were looking for. These days, one article or one opinion is not enough, especially when you’re making a concerted effort to find information on the topics you care about most. Instead, you need to tap into crowdsourcing to target your precise interests online.

Sulia

1Sulia is a crowdsourced and aggregated social network platform that organizes tweets and tweeters into real-time topic streams. As a user, you can choose the precise topics that you want to listen to, and then the platform feeds content from publishers in your area of interest onto your own personally curated Sulia news feed. From there, you have the ability to interact and discuss the content with other users who are also following the same interest. Sulia’s mission is a brilliant spin on both Twitter and Flipboard, while not competing with either because its content comes directly from them both.

Sulia’s niche has enormous potential for giving you the option for focused content and allowing you to engage in a global discussion around the topic. While it will not replace Twitter and Flipboard, Sulia brilliantly embodies the evolution of the market by combining a real-time content stream with nichified discussions longer than 140 characters.

Flipboard

2Start using Flipboard on your mobile devices. Flipboard is an absolute game-changer for consuming content because it consolidates and presents content in an efficient and spartan manner. Within the app, you can begin following excellent curated channels such as Tech, Entrepreneurship, Film, and Travel in order to gain a fluid look into the specialized fields of your choice. Each of these channels impressively displays content from scores of reputable news outlets and bloggers. Simply put, Flipboard is the closest embodiment to what the modern newspaper should look like, and it has revolutionized how the public consumes content on tablets today.

Twitter

3If you’re looking to expand the scope of your specific interests, it’s essential that you use Twitter to digest news and content outlets on the topic itself so that you hear from a variety of sources. You also should also be listening to the content creators and influencers who are evolving and analyzing the topic online. By consuming online news in bulk, you’ll give yourself the liberty to see the news from a much wider angle, giving you an expansive view of what is actually going on. Crowdsourcing your news will give you a good opportunity to become better informed on the topics you enjoy.

To begin, join Twitter and become an active listener on the social network. In particular, Twitter houses a massive spectrum of voices that will inform you and provide short, concise perspectives on the exact topics that you enjoy hearing about. Be aware that having to seek out the right voices on Twitter is often a tedious and long process. The real question is; who should you be listening to? To answer this question, you should leverage the knowledge of the crowd and outsource your search to others who have already identified and categorized influencers on the platform that are the most relevant to follow.

Start by following the main influencers (in tech, see Robert Scoble) in the field of your interest and begin looking at aggregated lists that they have been added to on their profile.  Through the crowdsourced knowledge of others, you can subscribe to topic specific aggregated lists that will give you the most value. Chances are that if they are influential enough in their specific field, they will have already been listed and included on an aggregated list. By subscribing to lists, you’ll instantly transform your Twitter account into a powerful tool for content consumption within the areas that you’re most interested in hearing about.

Using the public to crowdsource relevant, timely content

With information dynamos like Twitter, Flipboard and the emerging Sulia, never before have you been more capable of being empowered for expanding your daily knowledge of the things you enjoy hearing about most.  Since both news outlets and individuals are constantly pushing out content to the world, all you have to do is tap into the right pipelines to reap the benefits of the exact information stream you desire. These days it’s a shame to just be an intermittent fan of your interests. With platforms like Twitter, Flipboard and Sulia being fully customizable and always updated, there’s really no reason why you shouldn’t be informed. (Could this be one reason Google killed off its RSS tool Google Reader?)

In a bigger sense, it would be wrong to say that all three are better or have replaced newspapers. After all, Twitter, Flipboard an Sulia do not employ journalists. While print journalism has changed dramatically, content creators are redefining themselves in the digital age by making themselves much more dynamic and visible through the public’s crowdsourcing of their content and their aggregated inclusion within the discussions of the niche itself. Today, it never been easier to follow, and discover anew, the topics, issues and news that matter to you most.

Brian Blondy lives in Tel Aviv, Israel, and has written for The Jerusalem Post’s arts and entertainment section since 2009. You can follow him on Twitter at @bblondy325. Republished from Blonde 2.0.

Related

• How Flipboard is changing everything (Socialmedia.biz)

• Take charge of the curation wave with these slick tools (Socialmedia.biz)

• Top tools to help you curate business content (Socialmedia.biz)

The post 3 ways to tap into customized news & information appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Flipboard, Foursquare, Instagram, memes & more ideas!

OK, we’re in the second week of January, but most of us are just settling back into work. So now’s a good time to think about where you want to take your digital marketing efforts for the rest of 2013.

Take what you want, leave the rest and let me know in the comments where you agree or (especially) disagree.

Start a blog

1I know what you may be thinking: Blogging is dead. However, if you’ll notice, most of what folks are sharing online via Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, and Google+ are articles via links. The only real way of creating and providing content that can easily be shared everywhere is via a blog or some other kind of bloggish platform.

With a blog-based platform, whether it’s your personal or professional site, sharing your content from a Web application you own and control is a no-brainer. A blog offers built-in RSS and the ability to easily hook right in to Google Webmaster Tools via a dynamically created sitemap. You can add plug-ins that automagically optimize your site for search as well reduce the friction associated with sharing by dropping share buttons into your content from Pinterest, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and even Google’s +1. And as each of your favorite “forever for now” social networking service fades and dies, you won’t lose any of your best content but will be able to maintain your own database of everything you have ever written.

Listen more online

2In our mad rush to create content every day, and with all of our impending blog post due dates rushing in, it’s hard to spend some time reading the tweets of your followers, the posts of your Facebook friends, the blogs of people in your space, and their latest videos and memes on YouTube, Slideshare, Pinterest, and Flickr. But you need to spend some of that time. I was overwhelmed until I adopted Flipboard (see below). It’s worth it, and I will tell you why shortly.

Become way more visual

3The biggest changes over the last year, 2012, were in how people consume new content and new posts online. More and more platforms search for an illustrative photo or graphic. Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon have always done this; however, now it’s even in the way we view our content on Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, and especially Flipboard (see below). So, you need to make sure every post, every article, and every column you publish always has a “cover shot” because in the content war, the spoils too often go to the book with the prettiest cover.

Start a meme

4While you shouldn’t set out to make a viral video, you can start thinking in memes. Not every meme will become a meme to say nothing of reaching MEME status. However, there are several things you can do to pre-package a bit of visual, informational, or video in such a way that you’ll maximize its chance of going viral and becoming a proper meme: 1) keep it short; 2) choose one thing, one message; 3) use both image and text; 4) make sure each meme is 100% self-referential and self-contained: to misquote Jacques Derrida, there’s nothing beyond the meme. By their very nature, memes want to mutate and as in poetry, you cannot control how your reader interprets your poem so you had better make it as explicit and clear as possible.

Make sure it includes source(s), creator(s), and its home URL. Make sure you don’t put all that stuff in a description because memes always leave the original platform behind. If you don’t make completely certain you have done everything you possibly can to not leave anything to chance then your meme will surely mutate most grotesquely a la The Island of Doctor Moreau. Even if your meme is completely self-referential, the more successful your meme is, the more it will want to mutate. However, if the Internet has decided your meme is popular enough to copy, corrupt, or mock, then you’ve batted a thousand.

Explore Flipboard

Photo by Johan Larsson via  Creative Commons

5If you think the idea of reading all the banal and self-indulgent chaff your sundry followers, friends, and fans churn into the world is overwhelming, then you need to try out Flipboard. Flipboard is the best-in-breed social newsreader. It allows you to plug in your credentials for all of your social platforms, including Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, and Google Reader, and then it allows you to browse through other content based on category and subject — and, when you’re sorted out, it lets you browse, read, and share all of that content seamlessly using a very beautiful, visual, and easy-to-navigate interface from your iPhone, iPad, Android phone or tablet. I have basically replaced all the content sources on my phone with Flipboard as all the best of them are being fed through the News portion of Flipboard already.

Engage a blog

6I was going to write ‘Read a Blog’ but reading is only one part. Commmenting, counter-blogging, reblogging, and befriending the bloggers is maybe even more important than keeping tabs and reading. Bloggers and most journalists are no longer untouchable; rather, we’re very accessible and quite amazingly stoked by any and all attention that we receive based on our writing and insights. The best way to become a colleague, acquaintance, and then friend of the people who are writing, blogging, and influencing in your space is to engage with them — with us — online in the comments, via email, or on the social networks we haunt. Internalize it — every single one of the folks listed in the AdAge Power 150 are completely accessible to you right now — go get ‘em!

Listen to a podcast

7The best thing about Flipboard is that you can listen to podcasts and watch videos through it too, though I don’t. I am not that good at listening to “real” podcasts but I surely do get all my content from the CBC and NPR via podcast. However, though I am being quite a hypocrite here, I do know that there are loads of podcasters out there who act as industry aggregators, reporters, and curators. The best example is For Immediate Release: The Hobson and Holtz Report. Listening to relevant podcasts is a good way of passively keeping in the loop, especially if you’re not ravenously curious as to what’s going on every day online in your space. Listening to podcasts is similar to reading blogs: consider them your very own industry journals. The most modern of interpretations of the professional journal.

Finally figure out Pinterest

8It’s not rocket science and I am certain that I don’t use it well enough. I often forget even to share stuff to Pinterest. All I know is that whenever I share something from any one of my blogs via a nice image to my Pinterest, along with a cross-post to Twitter, a compelling image, and a link back to the blogs (happens by default) I get the most traffic back to my post from Pinterest. I don’t know why that is but there’s something amazing going on there. Again, I am a hypocrite here as well. I don’t spend much time at all on there except to always share everything I can there. Please make sure that your sites and blogs always include a Pinterest share button in addition to your typical +1s, Like, and Retweets. And I think I will take my own advice and spend more time both listening to industry-focused podcasts, blogs, and surely get to know Pinterest a lot better.

Give Foursquare another try

9It seems like folks are trying to call time of death on Foursquare but I believe they’re premature. Unlike Blackberry’s RIM, the reports of Foursquare’s death is greatly exaggerated. Although it has taken a while, I am seeing more incentives for checking in to Foursquare outside of just bragvertising your amazing life. My local Mexican restaurant offers 50% off my food bill every time I check in — every time (excepting happy hour and adult beverages). Over the last three years, since its inception, restaurants and stores have not rewarded everyone who checks in well enough to be enough of an incentive to encourage doing it every time; and, the badges have gotten stale and are harder to get. Restaurants and stores haven’t really even offered their Mayors very nice rewards — it was pretty pathetic. The only reason I still check in to Foursquare is because FS does a darn good job of linking up with other applications such as GetGlue and Instagram — so I tend to only use Foursquare via GetGlue and Instagram these days — until I realized that I am missing out, especially when it comes to checking in to restaurants and other venues where there may very well be worthwhile perks — such as the 50% discount I get at Taqueria el Poblano on Columbia Pike.

Check-in to movies and TV

10I must admit that I watch too much TV and love movies. And I must further admit that there’s a lot going on in the world of the second screen where the first screen is the TV and the second screen is the PC, tablet, or smart phone. I have been using GetGlue for movies and Yahoo’s IntoNow for TV whenever I am watching. IntoNow’s pretty interesting because it allows you to do two interesting things: 1) it allows you to let your device listen to and identify a show and the episode — sort of like Shazam does with music and 2) it allows you to create visual memes through application-aided and time-stamped screen captures directly from television that you’re encouraged to share on your social media stream. It’s all very interesting and very compelling and also a very good way to create content to your social media stream even when you’re kicking back and relaxing. Give it a whirl, it’s surely worth a couple evenings of prime time.

Figure out why Instagram is so hot

11There are three reasons I use Instagram, in order of importance: 1) Instagram is a gorgeous photographic community all on its own, even better than Flickr ever was; 2) Instagram shares directly and seamlessly with other platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, and 3) Instagram has the second best filters nex to Hipstamatic’s — and while Hipstamatic may well have better filters, the resulting images are small and it doesn’t have Instagram’s gorgeous community — and there’s the rub: Technology is one thing, but community is another and in 2013, technology is not nearly enough.

I surely hope that’s a good list for you to start with — like I said, take what you like and leave the rest. Please let me know what you think and what I missed as we forge ahead through the social media landscape in 2013!

The post 11 ideas for taking your digital marketing in new directions appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Mobile, social, geolocation, big data, marketing — Socialmedia.biz’s strategists eye the future

The social media landscape has undergone enormous changes since the current Socialmedia.biz team of strategists partnered up in 2009. With the end of the year fast approaching, we thought this would be a good time to offer our forecasts into what the next year may hold in store for social media, mobile, social businesses and more. Here are nine fearless predictions — including a look at the current state, predicted future state and our recommendations.

When in doubt, think mobile — and especially tablets

Current state

1While mobile usage has been rising for years and a majority of Americans’ cell phones became smartphones during 2012, tablet usage is now eclipsing the smartphone numbers by threefold in the case of the Apple iPad to iPhone adoption (source: 2012 KPCB Internet Trends). Now, 55 percent of adults access the Internet from their mobile phone, double the rate of what they did only three years ago (source: Pew Internet & American Life Project). Along with bandwidth improvements, visitors increasingly access your organization’s page from a mobile device, with 13 percent of global traffic coming from mobile (source: 2012 KPCB Internet Trends).

Future state

The computing environment – along with our lifestyles – is moving away from the desktop and even the laptop, with users relying more heavily on their smartphones and tablet devices to do business, stay connected and share. Increasingly, even the road warrior is ditching a laptop for a tablet, Bluetooth keyboard and a set of apps to get through the work day or while attending a conference. User expectations are exceedingly high in terms of navigating a site for informational purposes, to complete a task, to make a purchase or a donation. They expect a browsing experience akin to the simple, intuitive navigation found in buying a book on Amazon or the crisp visual experience of inhaling your Facebook stream via the Flipboard app.

Recommendations

Design your site expecting the mobile user in mind. At the top of the page, place a hyperlink to a mobile version of your site. Having an app available for your site is a nice-to-have, but a truly easy-to-navigate mobile site will work for multiple uses and keep your development costs down as you weigh business needs for an app. Make your site swipeable on tablets by using Onswipe, a free service that lets your brand publish content with more of an app-like appearance. (JD interviewed the founder here a year ago.) Another company doing innovative publishing around mobile is ScrollMotion, an inventive New York startup that animates sales, marketing and training applications on the tablet, turning them into more interactive and dynamic content assets. The user experience is enhanced and complex subjects gain more visual elements. No matter what your site is telling or selling, the end user wants to consume and interact with your content in a way that behaves more like entertainment, from a look-and-feel perspective. (To learn more about mobile-related topics, visit Socialmedia.biz’s mobile section.)

A wave of recommendations startups before the big consolidation

Current state

2I just got an iPhone 5 this week, after remaining content with my iPhone 4 for two years and skipping the iPhone 4S and the siren call of Siri (is it too late to join the party, Zooey Deschanel?). But despite the Big Brotherish visage of Apple looming over the landscape, 2012 saw the rise a number of new arrivals on the Recommendations bandwagon, so much so that it’s now officially its own sector. These are the spawn of Yelp, which itself is the spawn of review sites like Zagat.

Future state

With dozens of guns aimed its way, it may be tough for Yelp to shake its rep as the go-to place for untrustworthy reviews from strangers and hucksters. So make way for a new generation of social recommendation sites. I just wrote about the launch of social recommendations engine Snoox (“Recommendations from friends, not strangers”) and only this week heard about another one, BagsUp (“Find the best places to eat … shop … play … stay”). What, no recommendation engine yet on the best place to shack up and have an affair? Maybe that niche will be filled by Trover (a cool little bicurious — Apple/Android — mobile app), Raved, Villij, LiveStar or Stamped (just bought by Yahoo!). One thing’s for certain: There’s no room in the marketplace for another dozen photo-sharing apps.

Meantime, the current champ of geolocation, Foursquare, is working hard to reinvent itself as … ta da! A social recommendations engine! Check-ins and mayorships are so 2010 and will become quaint, even unhip, a year from now. But geoloco is for real and will be huge in the years ahead, so look for Facebook or Apple (dark horses: Microsoft or Yahoo!) to snap up Foursquare by Q4 2013. The only question is whether Dennis Crowley becomes a billionaire or mega-millionaire.

Recommendations

Facebook desperately wants to own the social recommendations space. But so does Apple with its kinda-sexy intelligent agent, Siri. Google, too, wants in, and will increasingly enhance its mapping capabilities not only right up to your business’s front door — but inside the place, too. After all, photo sharing apps are the new Google Street View. And now Yahoo’s new CEO, Marissa Mayer, smartly bets on mobile and local as the future hope of the dysfunctional behemoth.

While most of us aren’t about to log into Facebook to rave about our latest purchase from Bed Bath & Beyond, we may take a snap of our cool new crockpot with our iPhone 5 or Android, upload it to Instagram and share it on Foursquare and Twitter. Recommendation technology is seeping into our lives through social sharing activities that are becoming part of the invisible fabric of our lives.

Quick! That fabric’s now on sale, for 40 percent off, at Pottery Barn!

Shut up, privacy nuts! Some of us see a benefit in oversharing

Current state

3I have always embraced applications that follow me around. From old man Google Latitude to upstart Highlight, I am always trying to overshare. Checking in on social networks has become commonplace. Facebook, Google+ and many others (thanks, in many cases, to a generous FourSquare API) allow us to log in to our respective social network profiles and identify where we’re at and who we’re with, and then share that with both our friends as well as with the public, should we wish. A couple of startups that have yet to catch on are taking the next step, allowing us to just allow our apps to check us in and share our whereabouts with our friends — or the public — automatically, while the services begin collecting our social data and begin sharing it with advertisers, business partners, etc.

Moreover, once all of this silliness about privacy is finally put to rest and folks learn to trade some of their privacy for convenience and value, there are so many other things that your devices can offer. I recently bought a Nexus 7 tablet with Google Now. Now offers users like me access to what I might need to know right now: what’s around me; how long it’ll take to get to my next appointment and how, based on traffic; what fun stuff is going on around me, and where I might want to get a drink or eat, as well as anything else Google can sort out about me. I have become obsessed with carrying it on me all the time so that Google can spend all of its time stalking me so it can become more and more useful — to me. The same thing is happening to Apple owners as they embrace Siri and other location- and context-aware platforms with calendar, search engine and inbox integration.

The RunKeeper app: automated updates.

Future state

Until now, social stalking software companies have been so afraid of being accused of privacy invasion that they’ve intentionally limited the amount of share one is able to provide with their friends. This will soon end. The value of being able to actively passively share where you are, what you’re doing, even when you’re not going out, is too high to prevent the boldest of us to participate gladly. Even Google Latitude, which allows its users to “automatically check in here,” restricts that share to only fellow chums on Latitude with whom I already have a connection. As more and more applications integrate Google Maps, Foursquare and the like into their social networks (such as GetGlue, Facebook, Google+ and Instagram), giving them the ability to actively and intentionally check-in into the store, restaurant, gym, cafe, and home — but only explicitly and with exceptional intent. We all know that running your GPS on your phone burns the battery, but batteries are getting better and external battery packs are becoming more common, so that barrier will soon fall. One of my happiest personal states is when I’m running or walking and have my RunKeeper tracking my trip and sharing my entire route and performance with not only my friends in the RunKeeper community but also with everyone I am connected to on Facebook and Twitter, including the public.

We Americans are like frogs: We’re easy to boil if you drop us into a nice bath and then bring the water to a roiling boil rather than throwing us directly in to blanch. So Google, Foursquare, Facebook and the like are wooing us over time with tempting morsels, addictive functionality and set-up-and-forget convenience. 2013 will be the year when Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Google and Bing will have convinced you to cross-integrate your calendar, email, search history and privacy setting in such a way that there will be a small, easy step — infinitesimal, in fact — toward location- and context-awareness, with opportunities to share everything: what you’re doing, where you are, how long you’ve been there, and whether you’re a regular (the mayor). It’ll happen implicitly, frictionlessly and whether I think about it or not.

Recommendations

While the tide of passive participation and frictionless sharing on social media is a tidal wave and is bound to come to pass, the self-proclaimed privacy police could very well spook Google, Facebook and the rest into hibernation, especially since Foursquare is having business and revenue challenges. Erring on the side of discretion and safety has kept the vast usefulness of location- and context-awareness in a box.

I’ll be honest, I think the real reason why these companies are unwilling to allow us to throw open our doors and windows is because there’s so much information — contextual, location-based, historical, as well as gleaned from search, email, browsing history, and online shopping and orders — that they’re truthfully afraid to reveal how much they know about us.

But without doubt, this will all come to fruition. And once we get over our jitters, we’ll discover how awesome a personal Web valet they can be. The obstacles are not technological but cultural. The coming year will mark a watershed, and privacy will no longer stand in the way.

Making sense of Big Data for analysis, metrics & sales leads

Current state

4According to IBM, every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data — so much that 90 percent of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. But the Big Data challenge isn’t only about the overwhelming volume of data available, it’s about how to make sense of that much data. To date, traditional data analysis tools have been inadequate and infrastructures not robust enough to meet the Big Data challenge.

Though the tools do exist – IBM Big Data Platform, Cloudera and Hadoop for instance – to take on the task, cost and lack of expertise has made it prohibitive for many companies to jump on board the Big Data bandwagon.

Future state

Aside from a lot of hype about investing in Big Data and the data scientist talent shortage, there was relatively little discussion about advances in Big Data technologies in 2012. What we did see in 2012, however, was the rise of the cloud. Advances in cloud computing technology is what will bring Big Data analysis capabilities closer to the mainstream in 2013. IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) cloud services like Amazon Web Services Big Data and Google BigQuery will help close the gap for smaller enterprises.

Cloud technologies offer cheaper and more robust storage options for emerging Big Data platforms, so we are likely to see more of these platforms emerge, and existing platforms bloom.

Recommendations

Though enterprise is still the “big” winner as far as advances in big data technologies and predictive analysis, small- to medium-size businesses can still benefit. There are tools available now that help companies tap into Big Data for real-time analysis, application tracking, business metrics and long-tail sales leads.

Here are a few to keep your eye on:

• Infochimps

• Appfirst

• Bloomreach

And for those who don’t mind tackling a learning curve, there are a number of big data open-source technologies that can also be applied to IaaS technologies like Google’s BigQuery.

Time to reimagine mobile ads as supporting users’ goals

Current state

5Websites and social networks have been seriously gnashing their teeth in 2010-2012 as the “third screen” (mobile) has overtaken the second (computer) in prominence, effectively crowding out the key revenue source: display ads. The sun is setting on interruptive advertising.

Future state

In 2013, mobile advertising revenue will continue to fall, although its collapse is temporarily dampened by the popularity of tablets which, despite having mobile functionality, are usually used to consume data. This makes interruptive advertisements somewhat more tolerable. However, the breakthrough will come to advertisers that realize interruptive ads “do things to people,” so they shift to “doing things with people.” This works by reimagining “ads” as software that supports users (of the device or site) who are engaged in what’s most important to them. Where interruptive ads take away from users, “software ads” support them.

Recommendations

At a minimum, begin implementing the Facebook option on some of your display ads. Even better, get serious by applying agile software development to ad design. Identify users you want to engage and map their workstreams; ask yourself what knowledge or tools you have that could support users in unique ways and design “ads” to deliver the support. Note that this will work only when your firm truly puts users first. This approach will align you with users and distinguish you in 2013 and beyond.

Twitter will reach its zenith, and then begin to recede

Current state

6Social networks continue to be born every few weeks — seemingly every day. That’s fine, but not all of them deserve to survive.

Future state

A new yet-to-be-seen major social network will rise as we’ll watch another one begin to fall. Just as we saw the dramatic rise of Pinterest this year, another major social network will rise from the ashes to become the new social media darling. (MySpace? Probably not.) But in its wake a major social network will begin to fall. I predict it will actually be Twitter. Twitter is becoming less and less valuable.

Don’t take my word for it. Take a look at your blog or website analytics. Isolate the traffic that comes just from Twitter. Notice the bounce rate is much higher than your average and the time on site is much lower than your average. Twitter is becoming more and more useless as a traffic driver as most of the traffic it sends is uninterested garbage. And the noise from Twitter is drowning out the signal. Today the only way to truly consume Twitter is by following hashtags and other searches. But for tent pole events such as the Super Bowl, that’s impossible as there’s far too much content from just a single hashtag.

Recommendations

Twitter’s noise is deafening and it will soon consume itself. So don’t put all of your brand’s eggs in the Twitter basket. Diversify. You should be doing that anyway — especially in a space that sees social platforms rise and fall and come and go so readily.

More businesses will become roll-your-own Community Companies

Betabrand lets customers design and choose which products they make.

Current state

7Mass-produced products are way 20th century, and B2C product firms won’t maintain profitability unless they enable customers’ serious input into what they offer.

Future state

In 2013, the Community Company social business model will break through big-time. The Community Company puts stakeholders in charge of one or more of the firm’s key business processes. Ready examples are Threadless and Betabrand, which let customers design and choose which products they make. Threadless is the most “pure” in that its customers drive the product process, where BetaBrand is a hybrid whose “Think Tank” invites customer input.

Recommendations

Good practices here are creating various roles for stakeholders that are meaningful to them and harmonious with your core competencies. Use a hierarchy of social actions and workstreams to engage stakeholders who have various passion levels. Support each role with (online) tools, functionality and rewards. Design your innovation process to enable increasing stakeholder involvement over time. In the Social Channel, product significance falls in favor of stakeholder experiences when using products. Increase your competitive advantage by aggressively moving to give stakeholders key roles in how your firm works.

Firms will go cross-platform to raise the bar in social business

Current state

8With few exceptions, most firms’ social media processes are primarily organized around platforms, which add some value to stakeholders but leave money on the table. Marketers are driven by metrics, and platforms’ social actions are measurable, even though most are still not tied to real business impact.

Future state

In 2013, firms that want to make impact will jettison their platform-centric mindset, and focus on workstreams. Warby Parker shows how it will be done. They use Twitter to source and respond to the most popular customer service issues, and they digitize responses on YouTube, then provide links to the YouTube videos on Twitter. Note that the videos enable them to be personal, funny and helpful while harnessing massive scale.

Recommendations

To outperform using this technique, you’ll need a taxonomy of “problems” and naming for videos and links that will scale once you have hundreds of videos. You’ll also need some design standardization for videos, so they reflect the brand and become more useful to stakeholders. By no means does this mean they should be formulaic. Note that stakeholders don’t care for platforms; they have problems or goals, and they seek the most expeditious solutions. Firms need to align with them by knitting platforms into seamless business processes to support stakeholders.

In mapping out success, become the solution

Current state

9The Internet is full of advice on how to get more Twitter followers, Facebook fans and blog readers. Each of these “how to” articles are designed to teach you how to become more successful in social media.

Future state

The reality is that the only way to truly succeed in social media is not just be the guy who follows others’ advice, but to be the first in plotting out a roadmap to success. To pull that off, you’ll need to experiment … a lot. We’ll see more glimmers of that innovate-or-calcify approach in 2013. Some companies, such as TiVo, have established a reasonably safe haven for social media experimentation. Their philosophy is to try and try again. If you’re going to fail, fail quickly and cheaply. It’s the mantra of Silicon Valley, where TiVo (perhaps not coincidentally) is based.

Recommendation

The companies that will continue to succeed with social media marketing are the ones that don’t look for proof points on what to do, but rather become the proof points that others point to as markers of success.

What would you add?

Obviously we just scratched the surface of what may lie ahead in the new year. What’s your big, brash prediction for what we’ll see in 2013? Please add your thoughts in the comments below — we promise to respond!

The post 9 social media predictions & business recommendations for 2013 appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Give more than you take — and get rewarded for it

I’ll get to the point: My secret to being amazingly and profoundly engaged with so many of my followers on Twitter, my friends on Facebook, and my circles on Google+ is because I cheat.

Whenever I am between things, in lines, waiting for something, and even on boring conference calls, I pull up Flipboard and read what my followers, friends, and circles are sharing and I generously retweet, +1, like, favorite, share and comment. I believe that Flipboard is my secret weapon when it comes to improving and maintaining my Klout score. Why? Well, the more I give, the more I get. The more items I honestly and earnestly retweet, favorite, +1, like, and share, the more willing and game the people I share are also willing to take the few seconds it takes to retweet me back.

One of the hardest things to do when it comes to participating in social media is trying to give more than you take. In order to really grow your reputation online you really need to be perceived as giving more than you take. Generosity is always rewarded in this marathon of social media engagement. In order to make the most of your work online, you need to work on becoming connected with your online community. Social media demands not only commitment to feeding the beast — the 24/7 maw of content-creation — but it also requires that you take an interest in what your followers and your friends are posting as well.

Begin with the automagically generated personalized newspaper

Flipboard makes it easy to do this. When you install it, immediately go to the red ribbon with the magnifying glass on it. Here you can login, link up all of your social networking credentials and Flipboard will automagically generate a personalized newspaper for you to peruse. Of course, you can also follow various topics and news sources and so forth — and I do that as well — but the real juice happens when you share the content of real people with whom you’re connected via reciprocal connection rather than just sharing content fed to you directly from online media sources.

And since I really only like, share, favorite, +1, and retweet stuff that resonates with me, it helps build my character online, allowing me to build not only my personal and professional brand with my followers but it also allows these real people to get to know me better based on what I like, as well. Additionally, all of this great content aggregates right to me, so I become not just more broadly informed but also way more deeply informed as well. Why? Because birds of a feather flock together.

This is especially important for us social media experts, social media ungurus, and social media marketers. We tend to be a little heavy-handed and tend to do a lot more egocentric and self-serving posts than other folks. It’s our business. Tempering our perceived abuse of these platforms with authentic sharing and an engaged back-and-forth is essential, otherwise people will tune out and we risk being unfollowed for being a little spammy.

Flipboard even knows how to set up an editable RT the right way

Because Flipboard isn’t an open mic, you won’t be tempted to read your own poetry, to just speak about your own brand. Since Flipboard is a reader that allows full social engagement and wraps it up with a very gorgeous bow (the UI is amazing and makes even the simplest blog posts feel like a full-color glossy magazine), it’s no pain to consume all the share of everyone you too often ignore. Instead of being painful torture, it’s actually quite amazing.

Even more, because of how easy it is to navigate through the cross-platform interface — including uniquely designed Apple iOS apps for iPhone and iPad and a very attractive interface for the Android as well — it’s easy to breeze past the articles, tweets and posts that don’t interest you and then move on to content that catches your eye. You can easily favorite, +1, retweet, or retweet with comment. And, for you Twitter grammar geeks, Flipboard knows how to set up an editable RT the right way, conveniently adding an RT before the quoted tweet and none of that stupid quote stuff that some of the other tools offer.

It reminds me of when I was a young poet in college. I would go to poetry readings and I would spend all of my time on my own poetry — as was everyone else. Everyone was reading, reading, reading, and nobody was listening to other poets. The audience was full of people who were spending all of their time reading or prepping to read and no one was listening.

Same thing with social media. Most brands and companies are spending all of their time talking talking talking, sharing sharing sharing, link-dropping link-dropping link-dropping, that even just listening a little, engaging a little, even responding sometimes, is really appreciated — and really unexpected, too.

Spend some time every day giving back. Before Flipboard, it was still essential but a pain in the neck. With Flipboard, it’s actually a very informative and entertaining pleasure.

The post How to boost your Klout score with Flipboard appeared first on Inside Social Media.

My recommendation for you individuals who are interested in just growing your experience, mastery, equity, and inclusion as deeply as you can in as many relevant and germane communities as possible, you will never be rewarded unless and until you really commit to reddit. I have been with reddit way over 5 years and I have yet to get any traction there. Like I said last week in Reddit is the 800-pound Gorilla in the room, commit to reddit completely. Eschew Facebook and Twitter for a little while and replace Flipboard on your iPad with reddit. Commit making reddit your morning news and the novel you read before you go to sleep. This week, I want to add a few more specific tips.

Of course register, but register as yourself and not as your brand, your company, or you business, though naming yourself after your hobbies or passions or best feature, your sport, your team, your OS, or your geolocation seem to be popular ones. Many people use the same handle on reddit as they do on YouTube, message boards, and on Twitter, which is smart if you want to be transparent and let people on reddit who casually Fisk you know that you have nothing to hide and have an online historical context (but stupid if you want to elude detection or don’t want me – or someone like me – to find you, actually).

Just in case this isn’t obvious to you, part of listening includes reading threads and not just clicking through to the links. You need to read through all the comments, all the nested comments, all the internal dialogues and the OT (off topic) conversation. Most of the best intel that I have collected in the crisis work I neither confirm nor deny is deep in the conversation after a reddit submission has fermented for a while.

Once a comment thread really build some steam and folks pile in, people lose themselves and you can see people doing research, Fisking, checking facts, and lowering their guards. People really reveal themselves deep in the comments and you can really get to know, especially after the submission is stale enough to turn into a de facto place to chat, to compare notes and to do a little fencing for status, dueling for geek cred. It is here where you can learn more about community pecking order, status, intelligence, competence, context, what people do behind their anonymity, how old they are, where they’re from. This is where the community coalesces and builds, in the secondary and tertiary conversations – the chats you’ve ignored because they’re no longer really about the new Microsoft Surface – except they are. It is in these deep contests where young bucks can – and do – challenge the alphas for dominance. It is also where folks can work on their post count – places they can just chew the fat while positively effecting their reddit karma and reputation.

Let me explain in a way you’ll understand: you know how much you talk about frequent flier miles with your friends and how much of a pissing content you’re in with you workmates over what level you are with your respective airlines and hotels? Well, consider reddit Karma and message board post counts to be analogous to flier or hotel miles. And even though you spend most of your time drooling on yourself, looking like an idiot in your inflatable neck pillow, you fancy yourself a road warrior just because every mile you travel in the air at 600-miles-an-hour gets you closer to the hallowed “million mile club.” (Man, yuppies are lame!) Same thing with reddit (and most of the other contribution-based communities and platforms, including many of the top file-sharing sites).

Don’t worry, gaming post count is a open secret and people are pretty up-front about it. It is essential because when you play silly post count games such as “word association” you really really get to know how game folks are, how willing to be silly they can be, how tolerant people really are, and how well they play with others.

Here’s a new flash: company happy hours, lunches, dinners, and team-building exercises are not optional, they’re analogous to games meant to jack your post count. they’re stress-tests that your employers and those sneaky HR managers use to see if you belong – if you’ll ever make it to VP or partner, and if they actually like you. You can’t just blow them off because you really should be back with your toddlers and your loving wife and ailing mother. Those yearly trips to Vegas are as important as your yearly performance review – and your success and popularity – and discretion – at these (mostly) harmless events very much color your yearly reviews by either enhancing or diminishing them and what management is willing to turn a blind eye to or really obsess about. Remember that when you decide to take a winter holiday instead of attending your company’s Christmas party!

Well, the same is true for reddit and communities like it, both online, virtual, communities as well as in real life. When you’re wading in to the shallow end of the reddit pool, people are going to be judging you based on your swimwear, your fitness, your abs and how cute your butt is, like it or not. they’re going to haze you if you get a little deeper; and they’re going to be suspicious of you as you swim deeper, and they’ll jealous of you if you become more popular or prove yourself more useful or interesting.

Come on, if you’re over 30 you already know all of this stuff. Why don’t you think it maps exactly and perfectly the same way online. We in word-of-mouth constantly de-humanize the natural humanness of online communities, assuming that simple tricks of seduction and incentive – what’s in it for them – can trick thousands of people who are in a very real, albeit virtual, family. I made the same mistake when I dismissed the entirety of Second Life with a turn of my quill without thinking that maybe the heart of Second Life has nothing to do with their exceedingly heavy and mobile unfriendly-app and more to do with the beautiful universe of furries for whom Second Life is their real home. My bad. Never again.

Once you’ve checked your ego at the door – who you were in high school, what college you attended, how much you make, how hot your spouse is, and how good you look in skinny jeans – dive in. Just remember that nobody knows you in this, your new school. They don’t know how hot or successful, they’ll just know you don’t know the difference between they’re, there, and their, and they’ll crucify you for it.

I do recommend you don’t do three things:

1. Don’t comment right away as this community has a lot of history and people all sort of know each other and until you get a little context, reserve your judgement to an up or down arrow for now).
2. Avoid being sarcastic, snarky, or a troll until you have enough history and reputation – acceptance – that folks know you’re not a dick but just dry-witted or dickish-but-with-a-heart-of-gold
3. Don’t start a fight you know you can’t win, meaning, no matter how good a case you have and no matter how correct you think you are, reddit is not rule of law it is mob rule – reddit is not (yet) your home so the locals are under no obligation to support you just because you have the evidence when their allegiance and loyalty is to their friends and family.

Oh, and final rule: prepare your armor and take nothing too seriously because any community that does not enforce real names, like Facebook does, tends to be pretty brutal since everyone has a veil of anonymity. You might very well be bullied mercilessly by the very 98-pound weakling you terrorized in high school. Just desserts is what I call it, but be forewarned and don’t forget to gird your loins before participating.

That said, what I recommend to everyone is spending more money on brand representatives and social media community managers than you do on technological solutions. Learn from the CIA, the FBI, the NRO, the DIA, and the NSA: no matter how awesome your spy tech, you live or die on how many and how good are your analysts. The top online analysts are worth their weight in gold – don’t I know – and even the top big-data-munching-and-interpreting “carnivore” platforms need online analysts online to check for false-negatives, false-positive, and blindspots.

And, unlike monitoring and responding platforms, the longer you have worked with an online analyst, the better he or she is – be it in experience, corporate knowledge, or just because the best employees should be inexorably linked to your brand and surgically removing them can be the gut wound that never heals or it can result in a dangerous shift if (when) your (former) employee takes up with your competition, lending all of his or her equity – that was portable, after all – directly to your competitor. Whatever you believe, company-who-thinks-their-social-media-community-managers-are-fungible-assets, when you let a social media asset leave, get poached, or go, that person is leaving with 80% of the equity they developed while working with you. Are you ready to be 80% poorer as a result?

As an aside, deep infiltration is still going on, I am sure. In full disclosure, I participated in deep infiltration on behalf of many very high-profile clients from until I started my own company back in 2006. While there are many disclosure laws on the books and “everyone” has reformed, I can’t imagine that any of it had gone away. I am sure it has either submarined, distanced itself from the operators, or just expatriated itself to nations where this isn’t a thing.

The only reason why my past company, Abraham Harrison, or my new company, Social Ally, don’t do this sort of black ops thing is because we don’t need to because you really don’t need to be sneaky on social media – you don’t need to master NLP or have a nom de guerre or even wear a trench coat and disguise your voice with a synthesizer – you can just waltz right in, say hello to the owner or high priests, and tell them what you want and what’s in it for them.

But no, folks are still spending too much time listening to Bernays and Freud, assuming that American consumers are ever vigilant and informed and in order to sell them anything you need to come in nap of the earth, under radar, by the inky cover of the night in order to drop your paratrooper and payload. Advertising and PR has earned its reputation by constantly buying into better and better anti-radar and radio-jamming technology and not enough on proper diplomacy and diplomatic channels, that’s for sure. More money on our special forces than on our diplomatic corps.

Reddit’s a little bit like a unicorn: you’ll only see a unicorn – and make it to the front page of reddit — if you’re pure of heart. You can start by faking it ‘til you make it, but at the end of the day, most of the folks on reddit are smarter than you so being yourself is really the only way that this is ever going to work out for you if you ever want to become an influencer on reddit, so give it a go and let me know what happens.

Good luck, soldier!

The post Don’t mess with Texas (or reddit) appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Now, illustrating your content is not just preferable, it’s mandatory. Facebook, Google+, and Twitter have become much better at following links and automagically populating your shares with photos, videos, titles, and teasers (instead of just making your Bit.ly links hot); aggregator sites such as The Huffington Post and link-share and social bookmarking sites also spider the link, proffering a selection of images to choose from to be associated with each submission.

If your goal is to be shared or read and you’re participating in social media in order to further your personal or corporate brand, then blog, tweet, Facebook, Tumbl, and Posterous without illustrating that content with a photo, chart, illustration, pull-quote, logo, portrait, or infographic at your own peril.

I have sort of known this for years, especially since I share like crazy. I knew that digg and reddit always looked for an illustrative graphics file every time I would submit a link and I knew that Facebook and Twitter would even give me the option of choosing which photo would best define my thousand words — I knew that.

But it wasn’t until I heard that Flipboard had really grown up and matured to include Google+ and Instagram — as well as rich-content like in-line podcasts and videos — that I took another look and my hat blew off! And I bloody love it (and I get why you all have loved it forever, but I was very old school and did my reading via Google Reader on the web and Reeder on my iPhone).

Flipboard is an app for smart phones and tablets. Until recently, it only offered apps for iOS devices but it’s now Android-friendly. It takes all your own personal social media walls and streams and mashes them together with breaking news, sponsored content, topical content (you can choose from a dozen topics, including Fashion, Style, Design, Technology, Entertainment, etc), and my very mature and awesome collection of RSS news feeds via my Google Reader and reformats and displays them to look very much like an eBook or digital version of the New York Times, Wired, National Geographic, or whatnot — rife with illustrations, cover stories, pull quotes, and panoramic photos.

It is really mesmerizing. Now my Klout score is going through the roof because reading content from the 12k folks I follow on Twitter and the 4,800 I follow on Facebook and on Google+, and the thousands of feeds I have imported to Google Reeder is a morning breeze! I love it. I am engaging more, I am listening better, I am missing less, and I am generally entertained. I am finally doing what I said that you should do: listen 80% and talk 20% (who has the time, right?)

I have been paying attention to my reading habits, too. And I am drawn to pretty things: embedded video content, audio content, infographics, photos of pretty girls, photos in general, scenics — actually, I am almost only drawn to content that has an associated visual element.

It’s impossible not to be drawn to these rich-content posts because Flipboard always gives them at least a quarter of the page but often gives closer to 1/3 to half the page — even for content that is brief. A good, high-quality, high-resolution image always gets you better visibility as simple tweets or Facebook posts without a visual component always just gets pulled together into a list to the side, crushed together with all the other text-only tweets.

Links to other articles with visual content also works because Flipboard populates your Twitter RTs with the destination’s graphic elements as well as makes it simple to read that target content inline with the Flipbook app — very seamless and also very easy to share, retweet (so, in many way, the very best solution is to Facebook, tweet, and G+ longer-form content that, itself, is well-illustrated with photos, videos, infographics, or attractive people.

One piece of advice for all the jerks who only share content teasers on their magazines or blogs, requiring me to leave Google Reader or whatever reader I am using and head off to your site, you had better put that illustration at the top because if it is below the “more” link, it won’t be of much benefit to sites like Flipboard and the other aggregators — though I hate that tactic, I understand that you have an ad revenue model and that you really would love to control the conversation a little bit more and maybe get some new readers and maybe a few comments — I get it, I get it. That said, heed my words and make sure there’s at least one photo of Lindsay Lohan before the “click to read more” link — otherwise, you’ll not only lose me but quite a few others — who can resist good dirt on Miss Lindsay?

Since I am trying to relate to my friends on Flipboard, I try to slow down and read the naked tweets and Facebook posts that are just lonely, lonely, 140-character blobs — but if I were less in love with my friends, I would really just blow all of those off and, instead, just dance around the colorful expanse of the nicer, kinder, prettier world of the illustrated web.

Mind you, that’s just me — but I tend to do all of my best cultural extrapolation with just the one data point: me. Even so, if you really want to draw the attention (and clicks through, reads, Likes, stars, favorites, retweets and shares) from your readers, use a picture.

The post How Flipboard is changing everything appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Strawberry Jam, Zite, PostPost: Tools to help you identify content relevant to your business needs

First of two parts. Also see:
• Take charge of the curation wave with these slick tools

Guest post by Gianluca Fiorelli
SEOmoz

Target audience: Businesses, brands, social marketers, SEO marketers, website developers, Web publishers.

When it comes to the Internet, I imagine it as the warehouse where the Ark is archived at the end of “Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark.” The Ark is that outstanding content that someone has produced and no other will be able to see again, because it is forgotten and hidden between gazillions of other things.

Apart from the gigantic volume of pages present in the Internet, for a long time search spam has been making the discovery of reliable sources difficult. Social media has exacerbated this issue, because it added even more noise and dispersion. Actually, as Mitch Kapor once said, getting information off the Internet is like having a drink from a fire hydrant.

To tell the truth, this problem is not new.

What is content curation?

Since the beginning of time, people have collected the best that humanity has produced in art, literature and science. We invented museums, libraries and encyclopedias. We’ve written essays and done research. We’ve always looked at curators who knew how to identify the good stuff.

Content curation falls into that same tradition. Content curation is the process of collecting and cataloging only the most interesting things about a subject to share it for the common benefit.

We need this more than ever in the Internet era. As Rohit Barghava wrote in his Content Curation Manifesto, content curators will bring more utility and order to the social Web. In doing so, they will help to add a voice and point of view to organizations and companies that can connect them with customers – creating an entirely new dialogue based on valued content rather than just brand created marketing messages.

5 kinds of content curation

Let’s try to identify five kinds of content curation:

1. Aggregation, which consists of curating the most relevant content about a topic at a single location. This is the most common way of curating content, and it is how most sites do it.
2. Distillation, whose purpose is to distill the overall buzz about a topic to its most important and relevant essence. At its best, social content curation is supposed to work this way.
3. Elevation, where curators discern a general trend or insight from a mass of daily musings.
4. Mashups, where different material about a topic is combined to create a new original point of view.
5. Chronology, which could be defined as historiographical content curation. Usually it consists of presenting a timeline of curated information to show the evolution of a particular topic.

How to do content curation: The tools

There are a large number of sites and tools that help the content curation process, but none is useful without one essential skill: your ability in separate the wheat from the chaff. That means that at first a curator needs to collect all the information out there about the topic he is going to curate and then start selecting.

The best way to collect that information is listening. For instance, if someone would like to start curating the SEO topic, he should spend some time each day visiting sites like SEOmoz, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Journal, examining the sites/blogs of the people active in those sites, select the most interesting ones and use two starting tools, RSS and Twitter:

• RSS to track their own content production about the SEO topic
• Twitter to track the content related to the SEO industry they share.

This discovery phase can be facilitated by tools, two of which are not strictly Web-based but mobile apps:

Zite: A personalized magazine

Zite (for iOs, WebOS and Android and owned by CNN) is a “personalized magazine,” which not only offers the opportunity to connect your Google Reader, Twitter and Pocket (formerly Read It Later) accounts so that you have all the content in one place and organized into sections but also offers a large selection of content from other sources it crawled on the Internet. All of this content is presented in standard sections like Technology, Politics, Arts & Culture, etc.

You can also add sections based on your specific needs and interests thanks to a sort of “search suggest box.” For instance, I have personalized it with very specific sections dedicated to Content Marketing, Content Management, Copywriting and all those disciplines that can be included in the Inbound Marketing umbrella.

The “magic” is that with a simple rule of thumbs up/down, you can teach Zite which content you consider relevant. The next time you access it, the content proposed will be closer to the material you’re really interested in. For a curator, this is like having a robotic personal assistant.

Flipboard: Social accounts added to the mix

Flipboard, for Apple’s iOS only, is another “social magazine.”

It can be personalized in three ways: by selecting which sites we want to appear in the Flipboard app on our iPad or iPhone, from an interesting curators’ list in the app and by adding a larger number of social accounts to subscribe to: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Instagram, Flickr, 500px and Google Reader.

Strawberry Jam: What happened when you weren’t online?

The Strawberry Jam tool is still in beta (you need to ask for an invitation directly to the site from someone already using it), and it is an almost perfect tool to discover what is the most popular content that is published in your stream, for a keyword or for a hashtag and those Twitter lists you may have added.

This is especially useful for three reasons:

1. When you log into Strawberry Jam, it syncs with your Twitter account and shows you all the popular links in the previous 24 hours. This is an amazing way to discover what happened when you weren’t online (i.e., consider my case, living in Europe and sleeping when the Twitter activity is having its peaks in the US).

2. It facilitates the selection of links that are most useful and interesting for those searches.

3. It can help you identify keywords and hashtags.

Other tools that can be used for this discovery phase are:

• Evri (for iOs and Kindle Fire), which has the advantage of owning an API that allows you to access the data of your Evri “entity” or channels from their site.
• Feedly (for iOS, Android, Chrome, Safari and Firefox): The plus here is having browser versions that are always in sync with the mobile apps.
• Factiva (by Dow Jones) is a great way to access authoritative news content.
• My6sense (iOS) is an app with a very good engine that comes to understand your tastes the more you use it. It offers an API for third party development.
• PostPost is focused just on Twitter, but it offers the very valuable function of breaking the content shared in your stream into an organized navigation (links, photos, videos) ordered by priority: First the content from those contacts you interact the most, followed by the content most shared and cited in your stream and finally all the rest.
• Delicious, especially now that is starting to implementat some of the characteristics that made Trunk.ly, which it bought months ago, so popular.
• Faveous, which is a sort of Delicious on steroids. In fact, it can also collect those links you share in Gmail.
• Inbound.org, Hacker News and any other content curated news site. These sites are a great shortcut to find valuable content and, even more importantly, other curators specialized in one or two specific topics. In particular, Inbound.org, with its very well thought-out categorization of the RSS sources, helps skim the content published.

The Content Curation discovery phase is an ongoing activity, and of every source we should save its RSS in our reader if it’s possible in order to commit several useful SEO actions.

Tomorrow, see part 2: Take charge of the curation wave with these slick tools

Meantime: Which tools do you like best to help you discover content most relevant to your business needs?

Related

• How to become one of the most respected companies in your industry (Socialmedia.biz)

• Why I hate the term ‘content marketing’ (Socialmedia.biz)

The post Top tools to help you curate business content appeared first on Inside Social Media.

By now you may have heard the buzz about Flipboard, probably the coolest app invented for Apple’s iPad. (I’ll be getting both later this year.)

The Flipboard is a personalized social magazine that lets you flip through the content being shared with you across your social networks. (On Socialbrite today we have a Q&A with a developer of paper.li, a free service that lets you create media-rich publications based on any Twitter profile, list or hashtag.)

With Flipboard you can build a custom magazine, either by choosing from its pre-built curated “boards” or by importing Twitter profiles and lists. For instance, you can turn Robert‘s or TechCrunch‘s tweets into a sleek magazine-like interface that’s more fun and easier to read than any other reader.

In this 28-minute interview for RackSpace’s building43 series on cutting-edge technology, my buddy Robert Scoble chats with Mike McCue, co-founder and CEO of Flipboard, about his company, his business philosophy, where he’s planning to take his company — plus a demo of the new app.

Related

• Exclusive first look at “revolutionary” social news iPad app: Flipboard (building43)

The post Flipboard: Get social news on your iPad appeared first on Inside Social Media.