Scoopit Rocks III: Gamification and Community

Why Scoop.it Rocks III: Gamification And Community

Sometimes you fall in love by accident. When Marc Rougier read and commented on Curation The Next Web Revolution I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I didn’t know I’d just found my long lost French bother (brothers really since Guilluame Decugis would follow not long after).

Sometimes you fight with your brothers. Recently I had a little online spat with Guilluame after Scoop.it took my candy away. The new Scoop.it UI, something I now LOVE, took away my daily visitor counts and the best gamification leaderboard ever developed.

Scoop.it’s Blog Post About Giving Candy Back

How Content Goes Viral

This week I wrote one of those rare viral posts. Top 5 Magical Do More WithLess Curation Tools has now been Retweeted to more than 400,000 people. I owe BIG Thank Yous to @Small Rivers, @Videoturf, @Henrikboyander and 78 others for their support. I’m writing a more detailed analysis about how and why content goes viral to do precisely that (to say thanks), but the biggest thank you goes to Scoop.it. More than 90% of the Power Retweeters that picked up Top 5 Magical Curation Tools I know from the Scoop.it Community including writing a recent guest post for @SmallRivers. 

I just wrote a two part series for the great @SmallRivers team (the people who created one of my magical tools Paper.li):

5 Social Media Marketing Safety Tips To Quiet Your Lizard Brain

How To Avoid A PR Crisis In The First Place

Over 100,000 of the people who had a chance to read 5 Magical Curation Tools via ReTweets came from @SmallRiver’s almost 60,000 followers (the posted twice). Scoop.it is a community for power curators such as Robin Good and Michele Smorgon (@Maxoz). When you learn from these generous mentors they also keep their eyes peeled for you. They protect you. They share with you.

I wrote about the importance of Scoop.it’s great community in Scoop.it RocksII. Scoop.it Rocks III is about how Scoop.it uses gamification, its new UX (user experience) and the power of its community to make a strong argument to become the hub of your personal or company social media creation and curation efforts.

Scoop.it’s Gamification

The new Scoop.it User Interface (UI) is the best near real time content testing tool I’ve found. The tool has four dimensions:

•  Daily and Long Term Visitors By Topic on your profile. 
• Feed Quality Score (Curation Revolution my first scoop has an 82). 
•  My Community “Follower” count (on profile under my picture).
•  Analytics showing most popular Scoops over time.

If you study gamification you know there is typically a game and a game within the game. You play the frequently flyer game comparing miles to the aggregate and you want the upgrade on the flight you are about to take. Scoop.it’s game is generating visitors (daily and aggregate) by Scoop feed. Scoop.it’s game within the game is comparing progress to my immediate competitive set.

Download my free Gamification White Paper from Atlantic BT

Scoop.it’s Main Game - Visitors Daily and Aggregate

One of the things I LOVE about Scoop.it is how tuned it is to how Internet marketers THINK. Every night at midnight all visitor numbers reset to zero for every scoop. The totals aren't lost, but the first thing I watch goes to zero. Game on!

The value of wiping the board clean reinforces several important Internet marketing ideas:  

•  Internet marketing happens NOW (real time or near real time).
• Yesterday is helpful and instructive but quickly a distant memory, earn money (expressed as cash, attention, Retweets, subscriptions or traffic) today. 
• History is valuable IF you can pull the gold forward to TODAY (why I blog about top 5 Best ScentTrial or why a post went viral to get a second act extracted from the first).
• History is valuable when the mob valued something yesterday because they may value it again today if you remind them of their past love. 
• Mistakes hurt, but the only long lasting non-recoverable mistake in Internet marketing is sloth. Do nothing and you get nothing.

The Best Near Real Time Content Monitor?

Is Scoop.it the most immediate near real time monitoring tool? Yes. I say “near real time” because there is a lag between when I publish something and Scoop.it’s community votes. Once my Revolutions got above several hundred followers, and inside of that list are some of the most powerful (and kind) curators in Scoop.it like Robin Good, Brian Yanish (@MarketingHits), Gerrit Bes, and John van den Brink.

Aggregate feedback loops are great and valuable. Having Robin send a message about how you missed or hit the mark is infinitely more valuable. Here is how I use The tool:

1. Post new content to slow feeds between 10:00 and 12:20 EST. 
2. If I’m still up I check the early returns watching the daily visits and the Notifications area. If daily visits are UP I go to notifications to see who picked something up. Up above 5% means someone picked up my content as I don’t have enough followers up at midnight to make something get picked up fast. The early returns are coming from friends in Australia, the far east and other places that may be just starting their day as I’m ending mine. 
3. If something gets picked up I thank whoever picked it up. If the curator is new to me I follow them even if I don’t speak their language. Speaking the same language isn’t as critical as you might think. Good ideas jump off the page no matter what the language. 
4. I go to bed and get up usually around 6:00 to check early returns. What is trending the way I thought? What is a surprise? If a significant feed such as Curation Revolution is behind schedule, it should have about 25 views by that time, I make my first curation move changing the headline. I arrive at work by 9:00. 
5. At 9:00 I check to see how the changes I made at 6:00 are going. If the headline change flopped I toss the content and curate new content in its place. 
6. I check again at noon. Each check gets a new round of social support using Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook and StumbleUpon. I may support with a quick blog post too OR I may move a Scoop out to our AtlanticbtBlog. NOTE when I move content out of Scoop.it to a blog I rewrite 30% of the content so there is no straight duplication. Even with this rewrite using Scoop.it is the fastest way to post a blog post (bar none). 

If my content day is on trend I may not touch any of my Scoop.it content until it is time to start the cycle again. If it is NOT trending I take one of these actions:

• Look for and curate viral content on a trusted source that hasn’t been beaten to death by other curators (this is easier at midnight than during the day). 
• Find and curate content that may have been beaten to death and put a new spin on it by writing a few hundred words IN SCOOP.IT (key idea). 
• Aggregate or mashup content in some unique way from trusted sources. 
• Create unique content. If I want the content to live for longer (say a week) then I publish to one of our blogs. If the content is a test of an idea or a topic or an approach it goes to Scoop.it.
• Rinse and repeat.

My boss asked me to show him in Google Analytics where an article had just popped. I don’t use GA for social monitoring because it is terrible at it. GA loses friends of friends posting. GA may or may not capture your first generation of link support, it doesn’t capture the next tier at all so the picture is incomplete.

I use Scoop.it as the testing ground for content that may or may not earn its way into our blogs. I use Scoop.it for the immediate feedback loops I need to tell us if we are onto something TODAY and should invest more in that content TOMORROW.

Finally I check my immediate competitive set to see if I am having a bad day or WE are (lol). When my counts are off I check to see if Antonino is slow too. If he is then the pattern is impacting all curators. If he is blowing up I check Gladys Pntado and K3Hamilton. I’ve trust all of these curators.

If we are all off in somewhat the same way I do nothing. If I want to know how the amazingly viral are doing today I check Gerrit Bes, Thomas Faltin, Heiko Idensen and Vita Yours. If Vita Yours is off we are all going to be slow since their core feed is about celebrities and there isn’t anything sticker than content about celebrities (period full stop).

There are several admired content leaders I check such as Howard Rheingold (read his books), Karen Dietz (storytelling expert), Beth Kanter (smart), Anise Smith (QR Codes), Michael Verstrepen (picks up my stuff and is excellent in education and online learning), and about 10 other people I have on a “watch and check list”.

Many of these curators and I started curating together, but they’ve long since moved away from me (above me LOL). Here is an important point and the genius of Scoop.it's gamification. At first they showed my little feeds in relation to the top of the stack. That was depressing and made me want to stop curating. Now they show me those curators around me and I watch the others (those far above me now) based on having watched and learned what they excel at curating. I’m using the Scoop.it game within the game as a way to fuel my competitive fire, but mostly as a way to keep track of GREATNESS and how far I’ve got to go (lol).

Scoop.it taps into an important second leaderboard idea – measuring yourself against your progress (feeling good) and against greatness (work to do). This is why Scoop.it has the most advanced gamification online. I was so surprised when they changed their UI removing the genius of their gamification I stomped my feed and cried. I got others to stomp their feet to and, to Marc’s and Guilluame’s credit, they immediately pivoted giving us our favorite tools back. Actually they pivoted forward since the old data in the new UI makes Scoop.it the most powerful content creation tool online (period full stop).

Great weekend to all my Scoopers, to the amazing, brilliant and cool Scoop.it team and to my friends, family and followers.

Marty