Internet Marketing Secrets - Taxonomy, SEO and Scoopit

Guillaume Decugis, Scoop.it's CEO, ask me to explain my Scoop.it UI look and feel and functionality ideas. Since my comments were about to set a record for words in a comment box I've moved them here :). Here is some background:

What Is Scoop.it?
Scoop.it is an amazing curation tool that provides great tools to create beautiful magazine-like curations on topics Scoop.it spiders the social web on keywords users provide AND can accept manual URLs. I curate about 50% from information related to my topics manually from my writing, Tweets or using tools such as Zite, Flipboad and my Google RSS reader. Scoop.it's crawlers find the other 50%.

What Prompted Martin's Scoop.it UI Thoughts

Curation Revolution was my first Scoop.it topic. Marc Rougier, Scoop.it's other founder, read Curation The Next Revolution and offered access to Scoop.it's beta. Curation Revolution has had #1 (absolute i.e. non-float) on Google on the term "curation revolution" since weeks after we created it. Curation Revolution doesn't get many searches (yet), but it is close enough to "curation" and curaton's beautifully trending 500,000 searches a year to provide a way to capture the hill (have to explain how to use long tail terms linked together as an army to capture highly competitive terms later).

The Google trends chart on "curation" is exactly what I look for. A chart like the one above says a market is forming and I want to join based on the steepness of that curve and its predicted path.


Charts like the curation Google Trends chart are what I live for. It means the curation content train is leaving the station full of steam and promise. The next question is what to do about it:

• Create related content.
• Probe long tail keywords to see what has legs.
• Find tools like Scoop.it that can deploy network effects to help form the attack.

Some of my readers hate it when I use words like "attack", but there is no free floating, unassigned web traffic anymore. You aren't gifted your website's traffic you must take it from someone else. The cool thing about the Google Trends and Insights charts for curate is curation's big bang happend in 2010. Now take a look at Marketing across the globe:

Wrong direction right? Marketing is a vise. Its's already highly competitive and point of diminishing returns has been reached. This is another way of saying you are going to fight about 100X as hard for a diminishing result. Curation, on the other hand, takes less to become an authority and it is gaining share (some of marketing's traffic is getting hip to multi-keyword searches and breaking off pieces of Marketing's search volume).

This brings us to Scoop.it's amazing opportunity. Here is why I am VERY excited about Scoop.it right now:

• Scoop.it is better equipped to straddle the content/commerce divide than other tools (or Facebook). 
• Scoop.it creates blog-like SEO strength because Platforms Rule.
• Scoop.it's amazing new visual UI as Visuals Crush Textuals (major trend think Pinterest vs. Twitter, most of the things Facebook fans like are picture and videos, and etc..).

Straddle The Content And Commerce Rubicon

Finding a way to have content and ecommerce strength in the same location has proven difficult to impossible before Scoop.it. I struggled with this issue as a Director of Ecommerce. It seemed I could tell great stories or convert but not both. Content and commerce seemed mutually exclusive: winning on one meant a loss on the other. I also needed to create or curate at least 100X the amount of content my team and I could create on our own. The answer to our team shortfall were things like:

• Multi-author blogs and Wikis, Forums. 
• User Generated Content (UGC) via reviews, contests, comments and guest blog posts. 
• Plug and play tools that created network effects with little work (Scoop.it, Paper.li).

Here is a magical demonstration of Scoop.it ability to create a cherished "network effect":

See Scoop.it's magic? The blue bars are curation effort, the white line represents views. The white line's stability in the first gap when I got sick and couldn't curate for a bit and its growing ability to leave the blue bars of curation and create views without a 1 to 1 relationship between curation and views (or think of it as curation and work) mean this is a rare, magical tool. Pinterest has this same "network effect" dynamic btw.

Scoop.it has the rare ability to, after some building, become plug, play and forget it or, more accurately, plug, plan and reduce the amount of effort needed to create exponential returns. Since any content development team is too far behind to ever catch up, remember Amazon has 600M pages in Google as I write this, they must find tools capable of achieving multiple goals simultaneously.

Scoop.it is SEO excellent because they share benefits from their platform members / curators (Read Platforms vs. Websites to see why this sharing is so important to SEO). The first step in straddling the content / commerce Rubicon is to be able to create more content than a team can based on its natural 1 to 1 (one person to 2,000 hours a year roughly) relationship.

Scoop.it creates the best community benefits and network effects for YOU. Facebook crates these same benefits FOR THEMSELVES first and crumbs are left to the content creators. Scoop.it reverses this polarity placing mutual benefit on the table and sharing real power - thus the absolute #1 on Curation Revolution in Google almost since we started.

Here is the beautiful new Scoop.it UI:

The second part of any commerce / content bridge is a visual UI with taxonomy control. Scoop.it has half of this with their amazing update of a week ago. They have the visual dynamics. My first reaction was, "This is beautiful and cool." My second reaction was, "Where are the tools I depend on to curate such as current views?" The "missing features" issue was distracting but quickly fixed. Now I'm jacking the UI by:

• Changing my curation topics to be related (everything is a revolution now).
• Look at this page: http://www.scoop.it/u/martin-marty-smith.
• There is the "Magazine".

This is my admin page (above). If you go to Marty Marty Smith's page on Scoop.it you will see a different page. There is a "Follow" Call To Action (CTA) blue button on the bottom left of each topic. Not wild about that button as it is confusing. Would prefer a great CTA that is more general here like "Discover" and an orange button on that background might create more contrast and conversion (testable in any case).

"Discover" intrigues and makes "Follow" on the subsequent pages seem more like something I want to do. Have to earn permission before you use CTA's like follow and we don't have that level of permission for first time visitors yet on the master page. Easy to test, easy to fix.

I've never driven links into this master page because it didn't look near this good. I didn't see how I could use Scoop.it to bridge the Content / Commerce Rubicon until this beautiful new page. Now ideas are leaping all over :).

There are still UI issues including:

• Flatness of the presentation makes everything look equal when it never is. 
• There are no L2 or L3 subcategories within topics. 
• There is no internal search (that I am aware of). 
• There are no ways to expose the analytics to visitors such as:
• Top Commented Content.
• Top Read Content.
• Top Rescooped Content.

The list above are my favorite turbo-charge curation tactics.

When something is trending I call attention to it as trending and it trends more. When something blows up I share that because what IS blowing up is always more likely to blow up more than something that is not lifting off. Here is one way I might complete the content / commerce fit. Take the topics that is dominant, in my case Curation Revolution, and do more with it. Make it the backbone of the store.

How Marty would cross the Content / Commerce Rubicon with New Scoop.it (hastily created and NOT a graphic designer, but you can see what is in my mind if somewhat roughly):

Here is the Curation Revolution menu that supports the image above:

Curation Revolution Store.
Curation Revolution Main (portal page to L2 categories like StoryTelling).
Curation Revolution Sale (compiled across L2 store categories such as books, travel, electronics and with a canonical URL so no dupe content penalties from Google ).

We could use the far right column to create different content cuts (these are all already in the analytics they just aren't faced out to visitors where the money is) such as:

Top Searches (could do content, products or content and products in the return set and I would probably opt for the later).

Deal area (where the Free Shipping Is now and a curated space controlled by business rules or hand curated depending on the complexity of the driving database).

Top Content - I would like to business rule the top commented, rescooped and viewed content. This kind of reach in and grab tribal data creates a feeling of the tribe, "like me" comparisons and increases speed and adoption of trending content. I learned a valuable Internet marketing lesson from my old direct mail bosses.

Feed The BEAR

This means spend more time on trending topics than anything else. You would rather have a page 1 listing on any term than page 400 on any term. No one sees the page 400 but some traffic will see you on page one, so feed the bear to make trending topics blow up bigger and faster. If an idea is a dud MOVE ON. Page ones play, page 5 on don't (unless they are trending up and will be on page one soon).

Current Scoop.it is a little too flat and non-hierarchical. This means we can't create hints other than the page view and those are BIG and IMPORTANT hints. Problem is the page view hints are now out of order. Nothing drives visitors more crazy than seeing the most important thing tucked in the 2nd position. The current presentation is left to right alphabetical.

When you see my total scoops at 19,000 with 11,000 coming from Curation Revolution you want to know more about Curation Revolution (it is only natural). Current layout depresses the natural response instead of feeding the bear.

The current UI makes visitors work too hard and doesn't put enough control in my curation hands. I would use that control to focus the trending topics, reinforce their tribal nature, tease the next related thread and find ways to bridge the content / commerce Rubicon.

Guillaume made a suggestion and asked a question. Here is my response:


Guillaume,
Used your idea to create a "portal-like" page on Is Branding An Artifact Of The Past just now. Here is the "portal" page that summarizes 2 previous scoops and links to a blog post linking the entire thread in a single place: http://www.scoop.it/t/curation-revolution/p/2225942199/q-is-branding-an-artifact-of-the-past-a-yes-what-to-do-about-it

The permalink does create good portal leaps. To be most effective I probably need to carry all links on all pages. The problem with the permalink is it gives up the visual clarity of having those posts stacked on top of one another. In this case the 3rd post is actually a summary of the other too plus a little more so could more than cover it with the permalink.

But, if I'm curating a story where A leads to B leads to C and back again AND I'm telling that story visually it would be great to always cluster the look in stack (straight up and down), column (2 on left, 2 on right) or leading on left with 2 stacked on right.

If I could visually link article together so they move through time as one unit then I tell more complex stories over time. I'm discovering this on our Atlantic BT blog. Currently our blog is very one off. One article stands alone and so encourages visitors to come in, read that article and leave. When we add other suggested and connected reading our Time On Site and Pages Viewed go up exponentially.

Same idea for Scoop.it. Right now the only taxonomy comes from the topic, but within the topic may be several subcategories of interest. Storytelling would be a good example of a subcategory in Curation Revolution. I might have three great storytelling scoops from

Karen Dietz that tell more of a story together than the do apart, so it would be great to create a visual link, a layer if you will, where these stories are combined and there is an overlay explaining the uniting thread.

Tags can do this of course, but I don't know how to use tabs to tell subcategory-like stories yet. If I tagged all 3 Storytelling Karen Dietz and defined their common thread, narration tips for example, then we have the join. Now I need the three Scoops to move together through time (as a subcategory would).

Ever seen a cotton candy machine? Here is the taxonomy: Curation Revolution (L1), Storytelling (L2), Narration (L3). As the cotton candy content is scooped the candy forming in L2 and L3 grows in density and contributing strength.

I wrote a piece on Siloing and bleeding (PR) recently  and I'm attempting to organize my scoops in a way that could allocate the strong SEO we've earned on Curation Revolution to other subcategories of keywords within Curation Revolution.

Curation Revolution is so strong I wouldn't pass rank down to Storytelling. Not a good idea to pass rank DOWN so much. I might get to a point where Storytelling needs to break out and be its own topic. Right now it would be hard to see that tipping point in the analytics because the taxonomy's only definition is at the L1 level. I have no way of knowing if Storytelling is getting enough juice inside the stack to break it out.

Your new UI has started this thinking or made it more immediate because: http://www.scoop.it/u/martin-marty-smith is one heck of a beautiful page now thanks to your changes. But your organization of the information (alpha) makes it tough to drive link juice in there. Curation Revolution is more than half my traffic yet it is next to BI Revolution.

***** This is where I stopped to dig deeper into what I've been thinking ever since seeing the new Scoop.it visual UI recounted above.

Late and Guillaume is probably the only one still reading, so hope some of this makes sense. Don't have tie to sleep and edit so opting for sleep (lol).

Marty