Commere + Content Revolution: Why CrowdFunde Is Hiring Content Curators
Great Content Curators Needed
Working with Jan and Curatti’s amazing “Editors of Chaos” convinced us – CrowdFunde needs great content curators. CrowdFunde is our Durham, NC based startup being “accelerated” at Triangle Startup Factory. CrowdFunde’s mission is simple – help websites, brands and companies tap wisdom of crowds so commerce and content can help one another.
Creating CrowdFunde In Response To:
- How Social Media Marketing is changing the web.
- Our inability to make someone love us.
- Our inability to love something that doesn’t know we exist
We created a Haiku Deck to discuss how social media and LOVE is changing the web:
Love Means Curation
We owe Guillaume, Marc, Alley and the team at Scoop.it more than we can repay. Marc and Guillaume read Curation Is The Next Web Revolution on Scenttrail Marketing and offered to let me play with their new cool toy. This is what I wrote in Curation Is The Next Web Revolution in January, 2011:
Reading Steve Rosenbaum’s 4 Promising Curation Tools That Help Make Sense of the Web helped confirm a sneaking suspicion – curation will be the next web revolution. If Web 1.0 was about online access and Web 2.0 is about social nets Web 3.0 will be coring down to content that really matters. We won’t go back to the halcyon days of newspaper editors making decisions about what we need to know, but we will employ new tools to organize, search, sort and query the living organic thing that is the web.
Sometimes I write stuff that doesn’t suck (lol). Interesting things happened since early 2011. Amazon has FEWER pages in Google today. Amazon’s page reduction is a SOT (Sign of the Times). Google’s new algorithm prizes efficiency and social confirmation.
Social media marketing is EVERYTHING.
Social shares (likes, shares and links) confirm what’s hot and what’s not. Social signals help create brand advocate Sherpas. Brand Sherpas provide support any meme requires to thrive. Social media changes how we search too.
I rarely “surf” Google these days. What is different now? Surfing time is wasted motion. After curating content daily for several years on Martin Marty Smith Scoop.it and taking my friend and G+ Guru Mark Traphagen’s advice to use GooglePlus (Martin W Smith on G+) I’m close to having what every brand, company and meme needs – an army of contributors, helpers and supporters.
Strange things happens to search once a Sherpa army happens. My friends (Sherpas) keep an eye out for content they think I should see. Thanks to my Sherpas I search differently and less. Most Google searches now START from a conversation on social media. I can’t remember the last time I searched using a series of keywords and Google to tighten the noose around information sought. Everything is social now.
CrowdFunde Is A Revolution
CrowdFunde is dedicated to helping websites, brands, companies and people tap wisdom of crowds so commerce and content can help one another. Once crowd wisdom was easy to find at a search engine near you. As social media marketing makes conversation our most critical information exchange we use search engines differently and less.
What is the crowd talking about, thinking and feeling? CrowdFunde is developing new Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). KPIs for a commerce & content revolution.
New Commerce + Content Revolution KPIs:
- What content creates awareness and traffic?
- What content converts traffic from readers to contributors or supporters?
- What is the Lifetime Value (LTV) of conversationally engaged customers vs. others?
- What content types play best with visiting personas or archetypes?
- How can a publisher insure their content gets better faster?
- How can publishers test content marketing ideas and then predict results.
Great content curators know how to find content moments before it explodes. We explain the CrowdFunde Content Curator mission on CrowdFunde:
We look for GREAT curators. Great curators consistently do three things:
- Find next generation trending content.
- Fit seemingly disparate content into an evolving “jigsaw” of themed content curation.
- Help readers, followers and other contributors understand macro concepts.
Most curators use a variety of tools including, Twitter, Scoop.it, Pinterest, Facebook, Storify and GPlus. We are tool and platform agnostic. We look for process, philosophy and creative approach not HOW a curator achieves their content goals.
Community
If the emerging web’s ethos is social its structure is community. No single marketer, brand or company can buy their way to the top. For an idea to win it must be relevant and responsive. When I worked for M&M/Mars (1981 – 1989) Snickers spent $500M in print and TV advertising yearly.
Even if CrowdFunde could spend $500M (and we can’t lol) such a massive spend is a BAD idea. Once marketing battles for customer hearts and minds everything changes. Brands are under attack by “5 Ninja” as I described on Scenttrail Marketing recently. One attacking Ninja, Social media, changes how we BRAND too. Instead of spending $500M on advertising Snickers should spend less on traditional TV and print and create community to win hearts and minds. .
Love is an expression of community online.
Do people support your content with social shares? Do readers become subscribers? Do subscribers become advocates? We know from books such as Citizen Marketer your website will attract three kinds of visitors:
- 1% Contributors – Willing to write comments, reviews and share ideas ON YOUR platform.
- 9% Supporters – Want to support contributions from the 1% and, eventually, you and your ideas.
- 90% Readers – Important since their visits = traffic and rankings but harder to see and engage.
Great content curators form the pillars of any successful online community.
People willing to sacrifice, support and share make the “wiki-ization” of the web possible. I’ve gotten to know world-class curators such as Robin Good (Italy), Brian Yanish (Canada), and Curatti’s creator Jan Gordon (New York) thanks to the amazing team at Scoop.it in San Francisco and France.
Realizing how social media changes the web I left my Director of Marketing position at a Raleigh agency to start CrowdFunde, my fifth company. Realizing how CRITICAL great curators are to CrowdFunde’s mission we’ve started a journey of discovery for the rest of April.
If you love to curate content on Scoop.it, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram or GPlus APPLY and thank you.
Apply To Be A CrowdFunde Top Curator
Learn More About CrowdFunde Content Curator Positions
Walker Evans & Today’s Content Curators
Who is the guy? The man is American Photographer Walker Evans (1903 – 1975). Evans’ depression era photographs including this self portrait were heroic. We see content curators as contemporary heroes. Content curators sift, massage and cajole an impossible amount of information from an ever expanding group of sources so we understand what is happening better, faster and thanks to their creativity, intelligence and courage.
Latest posts by Martin (Marty) Smith (see all)
- The New Ecommerce: Current Best Practices - August 18, 2014
- Can Subscriptions Smite The SEO Giant? - August 11, 2014
- Invisible Giant: Why Its Hard To See the New SEO - August 4, 2014
