Skip to content
Article

5 “Secret” and Disruptive Content Curation Tools

Secrets In Content Curation Execution

We received great feedback after writing Why Content Curation Is Disruptive for Jan Gordon’s new Curatti.com Editors of Chaos website. Half of WHY content curation is disruptive is missing. Execution is more than half of our content and social marketing battle.  This post shares secrets on how we use 5 powerful content curation tools in “secret” ways:

  • Haiku Deck.
  • Scoop.it.
  • Paper.li.
  • Pinterest.
  • GooglePlus.  

Haiku Deck

Think of Haiku Deck as a vast improvement on PowerPoint and you miss half the value. Haiku Deck is a brilliant founder’s comfortable easy to use User Interface (UI) for the creative commons. The engine is intelligent. Images are well tagged. When you create a slide Haiku Deck grabs keywords and makes image suggestions. Click on a keyword to see Haiku Deck’s suggested creative commons images. Cool right?

Cooler still is what happens to your marketing.Presentations become much more TED-like with arresting visuals supporting great storytelling, but the tool really works on the right side of the brain most powerfully. We use Haiku Deck to SUGGEST ways to visually communicate ideas AND we use Haiku Deck to suggest new ideas by wandering around its visual content.

How many free tools do you use that help CHANGE (for the better) your thinking? Every tool on this post does change the way we create, curate and publish content, but Haiku Deck wins the “suggest new ideas from simply wandering around” award.

Scoop.it

Scoop.it is the “hub” of our content marketing strategy. My Scoop.it “Revolutions” passed 100,000 views a couple of months ago. That’s great, but we can’t pay rent on views. We pay rent with knowledge and information and this is where Scoop.it excels. Scoop.it helps content creation and curation in many ways including:

  • Spiders the social web based on keywords you supply & grabs related content you can scoop. 
  • Creates a beautiful magazine from your curation. 
  • Has an amazing community of power curators and Internet marketers (several of these power users have more than 1M views on Scoop.it btw). 
  • Increases curation reach (via community and SEO) while decreasing creation costs and risks.  
Once your website, blog and other properties are modeled in Google think of every new blog post or webpage as a risk. Back in the “optimization” days Google depended on links with anchor text to confirm a page’s value and content. Google evaluated WHO was linking, and the higher PageRank the better, and what they were linking. Links remain important to Google’s algorithm, but links aren’t alone anymore.

Social signals, Facebook LIKES, shares, Pinterest pins, Tweets, StumbleUpons and Diggs all influence Google’s mathematical “understanding” of your content, rank and value. If your blog typically gets X support and you write a post that gets X- support authority is harmed. Authority is so hard to win never HARM IT is a good rule.We use Scoop.it to lower content risks and costs.

Scoop.it lowers risks because we blog about content that earns “legs” on Scoop.it. If content doesn’t set the world on fire as a curated snippet we move on. When content does trend for several days it goes into our “blog about this” folder. We leave 25% of our content calendar for posts on trending topics. Scoop.it is our most important source for “trending topics”.

Sure you can use hashtags and Twitter to see trending topics, but that content is trending out in the world with who knows who. When our Scoop.it community, a community formed over the several years we’ve used this magical tool, gives a THUMBS UP with a lot of views, shares and ReScoops we trust those results more. We know more about the community that provides our fast Scoop.it feedback. Our Scoop.it community comes from hard core curators and Internet marketers so win them, win the world (lol).

Scoop.it lowers our risk because we are LESS LIKELY to write a post whose social support is well below our Google modeled means thanks to pre-testing on Scoop.it. Scoop.it lowers our cost because we get exponentially more “testable reach” from curated content on Scoop.it than any other tool, social net or community (though GPlus is coming up fast).

Paper.li So Much For So Little

Think of the tens of thousands of dollars you spend creating Tweets (millions perhaps). Without Paper.li that money better do something in the tiny window of a tweet’s half life (less than a day) or record another strikeout and hope for better tomorrow. Paper.li uses a sophisticated algorithm to claw back your tweets mashing tweets into a “Daily Paper” constructed from a GENUS algorithm (perhaps the best we’ve seen).

Paper.li is as close to “set it and forget it” as any tool gets (if that is how you choose to use it). Set your Paper.li business rules and get tweets thanking you for including people you didn’t know until Paper.li’s magical algorithm introduced you. Paper.li is a powerful Business Intelligence tool too.

Content that wins, content that makes it through Paper.li’s filters, is content worth investigation. Sites that consistently win are sites worth following. Paper.li is one of those tools we’ve already made so much with, while putting in so little, we owe it a real sit down to figure new ways to take advantage a vastly underestimated tool but POWERFUL content curation tool. Could you disrupt a business vertical with Paper.li? Absolutely and have fun doing creating disruptive competitive advantage too.

Pinterest

Pinterst got a bad rap right out of the door. It felt “crafty” and so not like Pinterest could help businesses make money. We’ve built a bigger Pinterest community faster and cheaper than on any other social network. The funny story of how we created our 3,000 strong following by making a mistake we’ve written about, but don’t underestimate the power of arresting visuals. One our most “scooped” pieces of content was a startups resources Pinterest board (had legs for days and days).

Pinterest has two powerful angles few play.

First the “community board” creates User Generated Content on your boards (lowering content creation costs). Even better, your community boards appear as boards on those pinning to them creating a form of “widgetization” that creates vast reach cheap. If your community board pinners have 1M followers (collectively) each pin has a million sets of eyes. Widgetization, the ability to create something you control and others curate into, is powerful because it builds community and provides sherpas to carry your curated content up our content and social marketing EVEREST.

The other thing we love about Pinterest is how strangely “out of time” it is. Stuff you pin today may not do a thing for weeks. Then some “power pinner” takes a liking to it and you are off to the races. Talk about “long tail” of curated content. Checking our Pinterest today only one Repin came from things we’ve pinned in the last few days, yet we’ve had about 50 repins all on content from months ago – strange but cool and anytime you can get MORE out of content you’ve already published its a good thing.

GooglePlus

Remember when G+ debuted and everyone panned it? Those days are fading fast (darn). B. L. Ochman, a GPlus guru, said it the best in a Hangout on air last week, “GooglePlus is not simply another social network. It is a powerful set of tools revolutionizing online communication”. we agree and would add every SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis we’ve done (about 20) on a range of businesses show GPlus is a blue ocean. Other social nets are shark invested (and so red oceans).

If you can be the first to discover unique ways to use GPlus to curate, create and mashup content you will win BIG.

One of the ways teams I’ve managed made millions online is to look for undervalued assets, invest in them a little before the mob and create differentiation and competitive spacing thanks to a slight lead. GPlus is NOT a falling off a log easy set of tools (yet), so adoption is limited to those wiling to walk through the desert with little water.

Before it rains and everyone can make the trek we suggest using GPlus for its conversational power, ability to interact with leading experts (in almost anything) and help understand how your content is really landing with PEOPLE not bots. This “new Google” era can be summarized as PEOPLE not BOTS!

Don’t Forget

As amazing as these tools are you still need a BLOG and a website (and these can be the same things now). Blogs are great for SEO because they are flat and spiders understand them. Blogs are lousy for links because they are flat and spiders understand them (sort of). If your blog is your website read articles on how to make a blog WORK as a website. You will need to pay attention to how to categorize, menu and splash page your content. If none of that made sense, create a more traditional website and hang a blog off of it.

Conversation On GPlus
Great Neil Ferree comment about tools he likes added to my GooglePlus page. Share your favorite disruptive curation tools and we will add.

The Atlantic BT Manifesto

The Ultimate Guide To Planning A Complex Web Project

Insights

Atlantic BT's Insights

We’re sharing the latest concepts in tech, design, and software development. Learn more about our findings.

Questions & Answers

Are there differences in application architecture that are important for the cloud?
It is important to build applications and workloads specifically for the cloud. You will want to carefully consider what services the cloud provider of your choice has to offer and how your application leverages those services.
Learn More about Are there differences in application architecture that are important for the cloud?
Are there any drawbacks to cloud hosting?
Yes, there will always be some risks associated with any hosting option. You are relying on the resiliency and engineering of infrastructure that has scaled at an astounding rate.
Learn More about Are there any drawbacks to cloud hosting?
What’s the benefit of hosting in the cloud vs. traditional options?
Reasons not to host in the cloud are few and far between. If you don't host in the cloud, you will spend more in both CapEx and OpEx to manage your applications or websites in a traditional environment.
Learn More about What’s the benefit of hosting in the cloud vs. traditional options?
How can I improve the performance of my application?
There are several primary reasons that applications perform poorly, and in some cases it’s a combination of several. 1) Data latency: If your application is making calls to a data source (whether it’s an API or a direct call) and there is latency at the data provider, your application performance will suffer.
Learn More about How can I improve the performance of my application?
Should I move my application to the cloud?
The answer is ‘probably yes’. There aren’t many reasons for an application to be hosted elsewhere, aside from occasional compliance standards, or requirements to integrate with local services that would require large amounts of data to move from on-premise to cloud.
Learn More about Should I move my application to the cloud?
Where should my application be hosted?
There are many different options for hosting, but most applications would do well with one of the cloud providers -- Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure.
Learn More about Where should my application be hosted?