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From Content Curation to Content Amplification...

From Content Curation to Content Amplification... Blog post coming Content Curation 2.0



#FutureWebTrendsNow

Be a Personal Publisher - Future Media with Curated Online Magazines and Newspapers

The super cool idea is really simple one and elegant - you start acting as content aggregator and route quality content to your readers. Rohit Bhargava, author of Personality Not Included defines Content Curator as “Content Curator is someone who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online.”

There is a lot of quality articles and blog posts from various content providers available online. By aggregating this online content you become a personal publisher who defines what topics or actual articles are the quality ones that you want to share with your readers.

Content curation can happen in many flavors and models, and actually the simple model is your daily Twitter RE-tweet activity. There are a few innovative services online that let the user curate his/her own news magazine. Most famous one currently is the cool Paper.li service that creates your very own daily magazine from the links shared by the people you follow on Twitter and Facebook.

Other kind of approach is personal content aggregator applications that are available to smartphones and tablets like iPad. Apps like Flipboad and Pulse can be configured to aggregate the most interesting content just for you from various sources like news portals, Twitter, Facebook, and RSS feeds.

iPad Flipboard App

iPad Pulse App

Great new example of Personal Publisher functionality is Microsoft Fuse Lab Montage service, that provides you possibility to publish a very own Curated Online Magazine. Montage is really simple and fun to configure and you can create cool looking online newspapers and magazines with it.

Ready Montage publication

You can design your Montage Magazine around any topic or idea you can imagine by adding content that pulls information from variety of sources, including RSS feeds, Twitter, Bing News, and YouTube. For advanced user Montage also offers flexibility with several options to fine tune the structure and content of a magazine.

Montage content source selction

This kind of a Personal Curated Publishing with content aggregation and curation features will become more and more popular in future. So definitely a future trend happening now.

#FutureWebTrendsNow

Your Twitter Brand Tracking Tool - Tap11

With fast paced social media space one really needs all the help there is to harness the social media potential. Using the right management tools makes your job easier and more fun.


Tap11 is anvanced browser based Twitter client and management dashboard with usefull analytics tools. Tap11 features will help you to manage your online precense, monitor your brand online visibility, and support you to organize effective Twitter handling.


Using Tap11 is easy once you get familiar with the basic three pane UI structure:


LEFT - Feature Menu listing the core dashboard and stats functionality
TOP - Status Updates functionality 
RIGHT - Content UI pane with multi column drag / drop support

Starting with Tap11 is quite easy. Using settings dialog you can add your social media accounts, general alerts settings, and additional manager accounts. Tap11 supports updates to core set of several social media networks like:

• - Twitter
• - Facebook
• - MySpace
• - YouTube
• - Flickr
• - LinkedIn
• - WordPress Blogs

Status updates are easy to do and work fast as expected from quality tool. Tap11 supports also the needed multi account functionality and status update helpers like:

• - URL shrinking
• - Twitter list support
• - Scheduled Tweets support
• - multi manager accounts for team use 

Buzz Monitoring for Twitter with configurable buzzword alerts is nice feature for brand owner. You can set up all your key brand terms to be followed and then track how the brand online visibility changes ower time. 

For dashboard statistics Tap11 provides you account and Tweet level statistics features. Supported trend graphs are:

• - Followers trend
• - Listed trend
• - Mentioned trend
• - Retweets trend
• - media views trend
• - Retweets trend
• - Replies trend
• - Link usage trends

For all Apple iPhone, iPod, and iPad users Tap11 also provides a cool iOS App that makes it possible to analyse your Twitter space on the move.

If you need a full function Twitter brand tracking solution, with this kind of a nice set of tools the Tap11 is one to think about. You can start to evaluate Tap11 with free 30-day trial by requesting a trial from Tab11 website. 

#FutureWebTrendsNow

Manage your online identity and personal brand

Living online is like being in public all the time. What ever you do can come back and haunt you even after a long period of time. What ever you write or do by yourself is up to you, but what about if someone is doing it for you or against you? There is always danger that your content, brand, and your identity could be used by someone else.

Online identity management and personal branding tools and techniques can help you to fight against online identity theft. There are several services and companies that help you to monitor, track, analyze, and build online reputations.

Social media brand protection

Social media branding online is important for everyone because in fast online world your online brand defines what people are going to associate you with. Building a strong personal online brand requires you to register your name from at least most popular social media networks. Claiming your name and other high value brand keywords also helps you to own and control your presence online and eliminate brandjacking. It is advisable to concentrate your activity on 2 - 6 key networks and just claim your name from the rest. Services line KnowEm and Claim.io will help you through this process.

Online social media personal profile management

Now you have started the process of claiming the important social media network names. After a while you will notice that it's getting difficult to manage your overall online profile that is a collection of several social media network identities. For active social media person there is great need for general profile management solution that will help you to expand your online presence and boost your personal brand. If you are not yet using the profile management tools - now it is right time to start. There are various different services around like: kgbpeople, dandyid, and KnowEm. Using Kgbpeople people can search different profiles and monitor their profile on the Web, set alerts, and manage their reputation while online.

Online identity management

One last aspect of managing your personal online Me is to claim your online identity and think that through what online identity providers you will authenticate yourself to various online services. This is already possible and the big social media networks are currently important online identity providers e.g. Facebook makes it possible to log in number of other services. So claim your identity at least from Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft Live. I would also suggest you to register an OpenID identity from one of the OpenID identity providers like: Google, or myspace.

#FutureWebTrendsNow

Social Shopping - Apps for Consumer Feedback

We all have a passion for brands - we love some brands and we are not so excited about some. Riding this idea appears Socialsmack - a fun social media network for anyone to participate in conversations about their brand experiences while earning activity points, badges and gathering status in a social-shopping-game setup. So in a way Socialsmack is partly information network, partly consumer reviews website and also a social game.

The gaming idea with badges is quite similar than found in Foursquare and it can be quite addictive. It seems that more and more people are willing to share information about what they and how they are shopping and also participate in conversations about their brand experiences. This is a interesting and important social media trend that should be followed closely by businesses and corporations.

Socialsmack is not alone there are other similar social media services like Yelp,GetGlue, MyLikes, MyBrandz, and Hollrr. 

Cool social review service that also provides location based features with barcode-scanning is Stickybits. Stickybits service provides each product or brand dedicated product wall where users add comments, photos, and videos.