brand as publisher – Post-apocalyptic

While a lot of attention is on content, brand as publisher and the ways a brand can push its message through the social, shareable formats of the social web, growing interest is in the curation aspect of establishing a complete brand presence. Content curation can bring another dimension to a brands presence online, showing that it’s aware of and a proponent of those individuals and organizations interested in similar or related topics. Being a convener of, as well as a participant in, the larger discussion alleviates the content burden and puts the brand in context.

One of the new tools to help accomplish this is Scoop.it. The following is a review of the platform as posted on the Scoop.it platform where I used a free trial of the pro version they offered to kick the tires, create two curations (“Curationist” and the co-curated “MDigitial” curation with Greg Matthews.)

Usability Overview – Curating the Content Stream

As brands begin to find more options to tell their own story, they’ll look beyond the brand as publisher model and to the brand as curator – or becoming a convener of conversation around a topic or industry. Scoop.it promises to make finding, reviewing and curating content an easy proposition.

One of the challenges of curating content around a topic is being able to easily select from a stream of good content. Scoop.it allows you to use keywords to pull in possible content to curate. The challenge is that the search tool isn’t refined enough to eliminate unwanted content. This returns results from individual Tweets that may not have anything to do with the topic other than a keyword. It allows you to remove sources from consideration, but this can be a bit more time-consuming that it’s worth. Having only spent a few hours with the platform, there may be an easier way to refine results. (Originally began reviewing the platform Dec 20. Additional time revealed additional and compelling features – included below.)

Other Curation Options

In addition to pulling potential content in through keywords, Scoop.it also lets you enter specific URLs for the content that you’re interested in curating – a good option for adding a specific post to your curated selection.

Scoop.it also lets you create your own blog post to be published alongside of the other content you’re curating. It’s the feature I’m using now to provide these reviews of the platform.

Curation Platform – Pros & Cons

As my free trial of Scoop.it’s pro edition ends, I’ve had a chance to test the features and functionality as a curation platform. My experience with the platform has been generally positive.

The features I liked the most include:

The ability to share curation responsibilities with others
The usefulness of the platform as a way to curate across keywords
Being able to add specific urls to your curation list
The browser plug-in that allows you to easily pull in items you’d like to curate
The blogging feature (which I’m using here) to add your own content to your curation
The WordPress plugin (although I haven’t yet set this up on my blog)
Easy to create and share new topics

Some things that could improve include:

Further refinement of the keyword tool to turn up more specific results, eliminating the number of results that are less useful
Spell-check in the blogging widget
The ability for those you share curation with to edit or add keyword filters
Overall UX could improve (some of the features that are hidden should be more intuitive)

I think platforms like Zite and FlipBook do a good job of bringing in content based on specific filters. Expanding the ability to pull in or integrate with Zite or FlipBook content over mobile and the addition of some of the features above could make the platform an indispensable tool.

At $79 per month for the pro edition, it’s a relatively inexpensive way for brands to test the waters and encourage curation.

UPDATE: Scoop.it President Marc Rougier left a nice comment related to the post. Specific to pricing he added, “I’d like to also complement your review: beyond the free version of Scoop.it, we actually launched three premium packages: Scoop.it Business ($79/month), Scoop.it Pro ($12.99/month), and Scoop.it Education ($6.99/month).” See more from Marc about the platform in the comments.

Final Assessment

As it stands, I like the platform because it’s a single tool with a single purpose and almost makes curation a simple task. It’s definitely worth taking a look if you’re considering ways to curate the broader discussion, themes and trends. The ability to plug the curated content into a blog is also a useful feature. If the filters were more refined, reducing the amount of work to dial in a topic, Scoop.it would be on to something. But, it’s a platform I’ll look at as some of the brands I work with consider curation options.

This is the first in a series of posts that will look at how the brand as publisher concept and the shareable formats of social marketing will impact and evolve politics in the upcoming election season. More political campaigns will embrace the tools of social media, bringing those tools deeper into the awareness and understanding of the general population. And, in turn farther into the marketers toolkit.

One of the tools in the brand publishing toolbox is the infographic. Using pictures to tell a story has been around for a long time. USAToday made the infographic popular in journalism. And, today, more brands are using pictures to tell their story and to feed the insatiable social appetite for more content. While slower to the social game, but catching up quickly, politicians and political campaigns are starting to see the value of the connected conversations of the social Web. And, many are starting to take a deliberate look at their publishing models.

In the pending context of an election year, the tools of the social publisher, from blogs to Facebook and video to infographics, the strategy of telling your story through multiple channels and in multiple formats will expand. It’s in this context of need and ability that the infographic will take off as a standard communications vehicle. The ability to easily tell a story in pictures in a way that conveys data is a natural tool for political campaigns. There are few places where confusing data meets confounded meaning than in the context of a political campaign. Conversely, there are few context where clearly conveying a message though a single image can help convert those 63% of people who consider themselves visual learners into activated, educated, engaged and committed voters.

Below is just one of the early examples where an infographic, or data visualization, can be used to convey a political point and message. (No political affiliation implied.) While I can argue that this isn’t a true infographic, I think it’s one of the many formats data can take to help convey the point of it’s message.