How does content curation affect a business and community, offline?

I know firsthand the value of using online content, some of it curated, to build the brand of a new brick-and-mortar business.

Curation is a tool that gets a lot of play online, for obvious reasons. Serve up related content on your business website or blog, and you’re offering visitors one-stop-(information)shopping, while building your brand at the same time. Content curation on the Web plays an important role in offline business building, too.

Although counterintuitive to most, my husband and I have always considered our neighborhood grocery/café/beer garden as much a media business as a place to find craft beer or artisan cheese. That’s because all of us today are capable of producing media, and people expect it, even from a two-person “micro-business” like ours.

When you start looking at a business, any business, through the lens of a “media business,” you begin to understand how content is a necessary element to build a brand, foster trust, and, ultimately, make sales.

Since every business should rightly consider itself a “media business,” content curation, as it relates to media selection and placement, is a viable marketing path. It is also a key sales tool. → Read more

Twitter is one of the best platforms for sharing news and topical information within a niche area of interest. But how do you keep up with posting all the best news when some topics are covered in dozens or even hundreds of articles on a daily basis?

You can find the RSS feeds for the best blogs and news sites in an area and share every article. You can also just re-share every post that contains a particular keyword or hashtag. Both these approaches have significant shortcomings. For instance, blogs and news sites often cover a range of topics and if you share every post then a number of them will be off-topic. Furthermore, the most popular blogs and news sites publish 100s or 1000s of articles per day (e.g., TechCrunch or the New York Times). If you share every post, you’ll inundate your audience. If you re-share every post on Twitter with a keyword or hashtag, you’ll encounter similar issues. You’ll likely overwhelm your audience with a mixed bag content. In short, both approaches will yield, at best, uneven results. Furthermore, these approaches may violate Twitter’s Automation Rules and Best Practices.

There’s a better approach for generating an automated Twitter News Stream that provides value to your audience, and in this post I will give you detailed instructions. → Read more

We recently enabled RSS feeds for all interests in Intigi so that you can automatically share to any site or service that can consume RSS feeds. Our customers are using this new feature to experiment with all sorts of integrations.

There is a great service called IFTTT (stands for “If This Then That”) which lets you take two services and mash them together to create new functionality. And because IFTTT can access RSS feeds, it makes perfect sense to use them to integrate Intigi with dozens of other services.

I’ve been trying out Intigi’s RSS feeds with IFTTT.com to set up my own Google Alerts style notifications for one of my interests. It’s been working so great that I wanted to share how I set this up. → Read more

I came across this great presentation by Karen McGrane who talks about “Adaptive Content”. Content that can make its way onto various different devices and platforms more effectively to get more value out of it.

So… “Responsive Design” maybe? Well, kind of but Karen puts more of an emphasis on platforms and APIs. Citing NPR’s approach to getting their content everywhere, they called it COPE — “Create Once and Publish Everywhere”. NPR uses a CMS that has an appropriate amount of structure that allows them to provide meaningful metadata that allows the content to be re-used in a variety of formats: web, podcast, iOS, Android, and Radio.

→ Read more

UPDATE: Intigi is now ContentGems!

Buffer is a fantastic social media sharing tool for scheduling your posts throughout the day. This means you can post consistently, to multiple destinations, and not have to think about it. So instead of sharing 5 interesting articles all at once in the morning, Buffer will post those throughout the day (or week) automatically for you.

It’s awesome sauce.

But what if you have a difficult time keeping your Buffer full?

Don’t worry, it happens to all of us and that’s why we’ve integrated Buffer within Intigi.

Now you can take all that highly-relevant content that Intigi suggests for you (every. single. day.) and fill your Buffer up. → Read more