Curation Revolution

Top 10 Curagami Posts
Top 10 Posts shares how Banksy, friends and artists helped create Curagami's Top 10 Posts (by inbound links) despite our best efforts to the contrary (lol).

Here some BIG lessons from our Top 10 Posts from Banksy to Web Design:

* Tap Your Unconscious (and ramp risks)

* Friends Rock

* Shit Happens - Keep Creating

What BIG Lessons have you learned from your top 10? Share and we will curate your ideas, experiences and comments into the post:
http://www.curagami.com/top-10-posts/?v=7516fd43adaa  

http://www.curagami.com/top-10-posts/?v=7516fd43adaa

Quiz Power shares the engagement and excitement personality profile quizzes can bring to digital marketing. What Famous Painting Are You?

How To Make $30M Online
When people ask me how teams I've managed made more than $30M online I say it's simple - find your 80:20 Rule, double down on winners, leave laggards and hire great people.

None of those things are nearly as "simple" as they sound, but you must know what NOT to do. Any website has an enduring and constant fractal called the 80:20 Rule. This post includes a video about the importance of your 80:20 Rule, how to use what you find and a link to an earlier post on how to find your 80:20 Rule. 

http://www.curagami.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/fractals-cover-image.png 

 

Amazon Prime is brilliant online tribal or "club" marketing with great "stealable" lessons for small to medium sized online retailers (SMBs) such as:

* Importance of "movement" marketing. 

* Create CLUBS.

* Empower advocates. 

* Ask for help.

* Be social, mobile and unique. 

Lots of book recommendations and a riff on Rafi Mohammed's "Logic Behind Amazon Prime" shares online marketing tips for SMBs.l  

Market Makers Matter
Janet McKean & Drew Baird Are Market Makers. Market makers see what is next a fraction before the rest of us. Janet's gift of vision is in the specialty gift space. Drew Baird is the founder of Moon-Audio.com and the creator of Dragon Audio Cables. 

Market makers matter now more than ever. Our advice? Become a market maker and learn from Janet and Drew.l 
 

SEO Freakshow
Small to Medium Sized Businesses are caught in a vicious Chinese finger puzzle. The more they pull the more stuck they become. We say REJECT the CATCH-22 of trying to be us (SEOs, Internet marketers) and run away and join the circus instead. Here's why. 

Kelly's Community
@Kelly Hungerford is my friend even though we've never met. Kelly is also one of the best online community developers in the world something she proved working with one of my favorite "get more, do less" tools – Paper.li.  So we couldn't help but lay down a riff embedded within her great Why Your Business Needs Community post. 

Digital marketing is moving to real time CONTEXT & CONVERSATIONS. Curagami's Predictive Analytics Engine (cPAE) creates relevant web, email & mobile context

Lots of questions after our presentation of asking the right Ecommerce questions last week to a group of about 40 Small to Medium Sized Businesses in Raleigh sponsored by FedEx. Instead fo writing more, we took a different approach and developed short "Video Notes" adding Curagami YouTube links to our Haiku Deck:

Find the Haiku Deck Here
http://shar.es/1gssvu

Find Introductory Video Notes on YouTube Here
https://youtu.be/T3KVhY_yK10 

Find Video Notes about creating online community here
https://youtu.be/KXmON4U1I_E 

Will add more video notes soon.  

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.

Building Online Community

As we work on creating a new tool, a tool capable of helping ecommerce merchants and content marketers validate their social media and content marketing. We’ve identified five community pillars and share them in this Curagami post:

http://www.curagami.com/featured/everything-social-community-rules/

Online Marketing 5 Storytelling Tips shares 5 tips sure to help you tell a story from landing page backwards to create trust and win new business. 5 Storytelling tips shared in this Curagami post include:

 

• Create A Landing Page and Work Backwards
• Place your offer in context
• Repeat 3 to 5 key brand specific themes
• Share your creation story
• Define your audience

Adding Scoop.it Magazines
Adding Scoopit Magazines to a blog or website is a Curagami post that shares the easy how and why of adding @Scoop.it "magazines" (feeds) and content curation, to your blog or website. Content curation via Scoopit adds inexpensive reach and customer engagement generating loyalty and return on investment.

Why You Must Curate Content
We shocked a SEO Meetup suggesting 90% curation to 10% content creation. This deck explains why you MUST curate content. Content curation is a CSF (Critical Success Factor) for online marketing.

Among the 7 Reasons we share content are these three:

* Proof of "Digital Listening"

* Reach
* Costs

Discover 4 more reasons you must curate content at Haiku Deck: https://shar.es/1vwHY8 

Brilliant DIY Marketing 
Hack Your Headphones is Moon-Audio.com's way of helping customers find sounds they love with their dragon audio cables making even great headphones sound better. http://www.Moon-Audio.com gives customers 3 ways to "hack" their headphones:

* Buy Branded Hacks (off the shelf, ready to go with Moon's Dragon cables making  even the best cans sound better). 

* DIY A Hack (buy the cable and do the switch yourself if the headphone or earphone maker makes switching easy). 

* Mail In Hacks - Drew and his team of cable builders can hack any headphone out there so they encourage people who love their cans but want better sound to mail 'em in). 

The flexibility and customization speaks to one of the most emotional resonate products we buy - our music. Headphones are a concentration necessity these cubicle farm and airport days. Moon Audio's Hack Your Headphones creates brilliant DIY marketing you should steal. 

How Their Rank Teaches You SEO Lessons
SEO: Their Rank Talks To You, but are you listening, emulating category leaders and finding ways to disrupt your space to win hearts, minds and loyalty online is the "new SEO". 

So if your question is, "You talking to ME?" and you are asking Google the answer is YES.  

Why You Must Curate Content
Scoop.it is a great tool we've used for years. We finally had a chance to use the easy to use and understand feed embed tool. The ability to easily add feeds into your blogs and websites means content curation is easy to create and add into your content marketing mix. 

The linked post explains why content curation is a MUST. Content curation is less expensive, has more reach and develops more community than content creation alone. We seen the damage pushing more content with less support can create in engagement and SEO. 

Don't do that (push content at the expense of curation) is our best online marketing advice. 

The Medium Is The Message
We may have read a better explanation of Curagami’s raison d’être than Medium founder Ev Williams, but we don’t remember when. Ev’s discussion of the move from widget focus (adding features) to the Jungian thing – helping customers self actualize and so become more actualized in turn – is an ecommerce must read. 

Burn Down Your House
Talking Heads know an important internet marketing truth – sometimes you need to put on a big suit, jump around and burn down your web marketing house.

Watch David Byrne carefully. Everything happening is practiced but not stale, choreographed but spontaneous and crazy & planned. If there is a better example for where our near real time, content, community and commerce online world is going we don't know it.

Journey To Unique & Uncontested
We are presenting ideas to a group of about 100 SMBs in Atlanta on 4.16. The BIG IDEA is don't attempt to play a sequential, incremental improvement game. That dog doesn't hunt anymore.

Discover BLUE OCEANS where you can create Unique and Uncontested business models that rule, evolve and win hearts, minds and loyalty fast and over time.

How can you discover Blue Oceans in your business vertical? We suggest "Disruption for Dummies" where you combine 2 or all of these surfable trends:

* Appification.

* Gamification.
* Social Shopping Nowists.
* Friends of Friends Marketing.

* Community.

Hero Marketing combines passion, customer focus, exponential thinking and the creation of movements to help Small to Medium Sized Businesses (SMBs) compete with Amazon.

Created this new Haiku Deck for a conference in Baltimore sponsored by FedEx on 2.26.

Content marketers tend to attack the work like kids at a sundae bar – scooping up as many toppings as they can to have the most or best creation. Avoid the ice cream sundae syndrome with these steps inspired by Twitter’s founder.

Marty Note
Thanks to my friend and uber-curator Cendrine Marrouat I found this excellent Content Marketing Institute post about the nature of content marketing revealed by startup master Ev Williams.

I agree the Ev Williams quote is an important piece of startup Zen, but find the post's laboring application to content marketing strained. I do agree we content / Internet markets have the shinny lure syndrome.

We (marketers) are like hungry trout clustered together in a fast moving stream darting out for the next new bait an action made all the more frenzied by its proximity to the judging chorus of other trout. Truth is rarely so shinny, easy to digest and so hard to throw off.

Truth is listening + learning + bold risk taking = success. Listening to customers has never been easier or done do badly. Listening thanks to our mobile / social / connected world is EASY to do and remains hard to BELIEVE.

Listening must be matched with learning. Learning too has never been easier or harder to believe. We SEE the patterns, hear the customer and yet we do not SEE or understand. As good as the post is it also provides an example into our greatest problem.

Content marketing is flawed. Content marketing speaks too much ans listens too little. Content Marketing hasn't received Mark Schaefer's Content Shock memo (http://www.businessesgrow.com/2014/01/06/content-shock/ ).

We marketers can't get there (sustainable online community) from here (content marketing). The challenge in creating an "institute" is the isolation and over emphasis such emphasis creates.

Agree Easier Than We Think
The beautiful thread the CMI post picks up from Ev Williams quote is business and life isn't as HARD as we imagine or think. Find a human desire, preferably one that has been around a long time, and use modern technology to make it easy and cool such as:

Need A Ride - Uber
Want to buy online instead of going to the mall - Amazon

Don't want to wait for your car in the cold - FlashValet
Social connection without computers - Android & iPhone
Social Connection - Facebook, Twitter GPlus

I would modify Ev's statement a tad:

Find a human desire and use modern MOBILE technology to make it easy and cool.

Williams "technology" was heavily weighted toward mobile, but at Curagami we see an increasing trend - cool isn't cool without some mobile aspect. Mobile First is becoming a more important statement than it original UI intent. If you are creating ANYTHING new it better play amazing on a smartphone or life will be harder.

Recently I purchased a wireless speaker from Amazon. The speaker is cool and I like having good sound when I travel. The speaker is controlled by an app on my phone.

Here's the killer thing to understand - the app DOESN'T DO ANYTHING that buttons on the speaker don't do better, but the app does NOTHING in a very cool way AND the app ties the speaker to my phone.

That tie means the speaker doubled its cool enough so that I'm mentioning it here. WITHOUT the app no way I mention it. With the app, the app that adds NOTHING, the package is cool enough to mention.

SO, lesson is find a DESIRE (by listening to customers), wipe some cool tech on it, listen to customers some more and don't forget if whatever you are making or marketing doesn't play on a smartphone then it won't exist (soon).

Thanks to @Cendrine Marrouat - https://www.cendrinemedia.com for curating a great post my way :). Marty