Posts Tagged ‘Content curation’

Making Your Online Marketing Resolutions for 2013

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2013

A New Year means new beginnings, for both your personal and professional life. At this time of year, we’re all about making goals and plans to better ourselves and our careers. Some people abandon them by the third week of January while others stick with them, but one may argue that it’s the thought and optimism that’s important.

In a way, it’s true. Even if you only work out every day for a few weeks, that’s a lot more than not going at all. The same is true for professional goals, even though there’s more riding on meeting your professional goals. Some action is better than no progress at all, so it’s important to look ahead. Make goals, and try your best.

We want to help. Of course, we can’t tell you what your goals for the year should be; every business is different. But we want to give suggestions for deciding what your resolutions should be. There are also a few things any company should be paying attention to before they get left behind.

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eZanga’s Top 10 Online Marketing Posts of 2012

Friday, December 28th, 2012

Well, folks, it’s that time of year. We’ve devoted a few posts this month to predicting the future of digital marketing, from mobile marketing to SEO and online advertising. But what we haven’t done yet is reflect on the past year. 2012 was huge for all facets of digital marketing, from online advertising to social media marketing. We would be remiss if we did not do something to acknowledge this as the year comes to a close.

Last year, we rounded up what we thought were the best year-end wrap-ups other blogs posted. But a year ago, our blog was still somewhat in it’s infancy and online marketing was just one of the things we wrote about. Since then, we’ve become more focused and in one way, this post is an homage to that. Last year, we may not have been able to even write a post about our top online marketing posts. But now we can, so we will!

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Content Curation as a Social Media Filter

Wednesday, April 25th, 2012

As soon as a wake up in the morning I unlock my iPhone to find 4 Facebook notifications, 7 emails from LivingSocial, 2 LinkedIn updates, 10 Foursquare notifications and 3 Twitter mentions. This doesn’t even include regular text messages.

The amount of information delivered to us from social media is growing rapidly and it’s becoming difficult to distinguish what’s a Facebook comment from an old friend and what’s a meaningless advertisement on LinkedIn.

With the ever-expanding presence of social media, smart consumers are finding ways to filter out information that’s worthless to them, and creating tools to organize the information that matters. These filters make it more important for businesses to assert their brands in a way that consumers won’t tune them out.

Content curation is one way thought leaders are emerging as a critical filter. Curation is the act of individuals with a passion for a content area to find, contextualize, and organize information. Curators provide a consistent update regarding what’s interesting, happening, and cool in their focus.

When brands find a way to act as content curators for their consumers, adding meaning or value to their daily lives, they are truly engaging brand loyalty. For example, “Eat This Not That”  shares exercise and eating habit tips on its Facebook page daily, engaging thousands of consumers.

It is important for brands to recognize the “to-do” list for their audience. For example, clothing brand Free People found that the music festival Coachella was an important event for their customers, so they made a how-to video on DIY body paint for the trendy festival decoration. This shows how closely Free People was listening to its customers. A key aspect of content curation is listening to the web and pulling out breaking news, trends, wisdom and inspiration related to your audience.

Pinterest, the fastest growing web service, creates tools to organize information, which can work well for brands also. Whole Foods Market’s Pinterest profile has over 11 thousand followers. It frequently re-pins other users’ pins, reflecting the interests of its followers and embracing the social-sharing aspect of Pinterest. A less obvious brand on Pinterest is General Electric, which features inspirational pins, “badass machines” and other boards that bring GE to life.

Some important questions to ask yourself when utilizing social media are:

  • Is this content worthy of a share?
  • Will this content add value to my consumer’s life?
  • Is this content unique from the other million posts out there?
By Stephanie Wight

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Weekly Wrap – Twitter Tuesday

Tuesday, February 28th, 2012

First open heart surgery on Twitter

Memorial Hermann Northwest Hospital in Houston, Texas paved a new road for healthcare and social media on February 21 when they were the first to live tweet an open heart surgery. During the double coronary bypass of a 57 year-old male, surgeons tweeted and posted pictures and even YouTube videos. The informative and groundbreaking Twittercast used the hashtag #MHopenheart for users to follow.

The doctor performing the surgery, Dr. Michael Macris, wore a helmet cam that sent photos and videos to a computer. There was an additional camera in the operating room, and his colleague Dr. Paresh Patel provided updates on the surgery via tweets. The hospital later compiled all of the content from the Twittercast into a Storify that can be found here. Warning: pictures and video are pretty graphic.

Pope Benedict XVI brings Lent to Twitter

The Pope has already tweeted from the Vatican’s Twitter account, but now his Lenten messages will be on Twitter and he will soon have a personal account. His new account will not always have tweets written by him, but he will approve each one.

The Vatican also launched a social networking project on Ash Wednesday called Pope2You. Each day of Lent, the account will tweet themes from that day’s papal message in several languages. Over the coming months, messages from other papal speeches and documents will be tweeted as well. Msgr Paul Tighe, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, explained “many of the key Gospel ideas are readily rendered in just 140 characters…”

Twitter celebrates J.K. Rowling

On Thursday, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling announced that she would be taking a stab at writing adult fiction, and Potter fans rejoiced. Several hashtags including “Thank You J.K. Rowling” and #rowlingreturns were Trending Topics, including some relating to Harry Potter, even though the new book will reportedly be very different from the Harry Potter books. Even fictional characters such as Rowling’s characters Lord Voldemort and Professor Snape tweeted about it.

Oscar gets Social

The Academy Awards were this past Sunday and while the social activity was nowhere near that of The Grammys, it still generated over 4 million social comments/mentions. Some fast facts about the award show from Mashable:

  • The “most social” moment was when Octavia Spencer won Best Supporting Actress with 31,216 mentions per minute
  • The most mentioned actor and actress were Jean Dujardin and Meryl Streep
  • The most mentioned movie was The Artist

Another measure of how “social” an award show is how many comedic Twitter account spring up from it. In this case, we have @OscarsAudioGuy making fun of the show’s sound problems, @AngiesRightLeg inspired by the slit in Angelina Jolie’s leg, and @JLosNipple which “may have” made a brief appearance onstage.

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