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.
Post-apocalyptic 