"Working so hard to make your blog great can be depressing without feedback. And that's difficult to come by!"
Mark Schaeffer touches a very interesting point of social media in general and blogging in particular.
Why the heck am I doing that?
This is the question you will sooner or later ask yourself if you started a blog or a social media publishing activity. If you've followed us for a while, you know this is one of the frustration we had that pushed us to create Scoop.it. And also the more important question of how do you make an impact?
One of the answers we found is in developing the interest graph. Some people have the ability to impact many. That's rare. And most of us don't. But all of us have the ability to impact other people that share their interest. By looking at the complexity of the social web through the prism of interests, we come out with a totally different possible way to organize the web, define influence and being impactful.
Think about it this way: in what you do everyday, is it more important to influence a million random strangers or the tens or hundreds of people who care deeply about the same topic that you do?
Marty Note
This is an insightful note from Guillaume. I blogged for years when a big day was ten people reading what I posted. I started ScentTrail Marketing in 2007. There are almost 600 posts on it now, more than 500,000 words, almost 116,000 views and solid heuristics (time on site, pages viewed and return visitors).
Scoop.it helped considerably get to where the blog is now. Now I can post something on a Saturday such as SEO and Data Got A THING Going On (http://scenttrail.blogspot.com/2012/11/seo-and-data-got-thing-going-on.html ) from yesterday and have 400 views in 24 hours because one of Scoop.it's promises is coming true - I work about as hard as always but that work generates more return due to a growing network effect.
My next goal for ScentTrail is to open the platform up. Writing yesterday I realized that most of what I write for ScentTrail Marketing is 90% ME and 10% OTHERS (comments, Retweets, Scoops, G+). Strikes me that ratio needs to change. My strategies to change it are:
* New platform to encourage more User Generated Content (UGC).
* Find new ways to use Scoop.it from an API level.
* Work on SpinSnip, a social content manageent system we are creating.
* Greater focus on leaders in Internet marketing (interviews, guest posts).
* Reviews and social signals on everything.
* More visual connection (videos and pictures).
* Add a gamification layer to promote engagement and social shares.
* More contests and games to promote FUN.
Scoop.it will play a large role. I hope anyone reading this will join, become involved and help. ScentTrail is a nonprofit blog. I have adwords on it, but any money, and believe me it isn't much yet, it ever earns will go to help fund cancer research.
ScentTrail started as an experiment. Scoop.it helped that experiment become successful and now I hope to marshal the wisdom of crowds to take ScentTrail Marketing to the next level.
Thanks to Guillaume and the team at Scoop.it for creating such a great tool. Couldn't have gotten here without it and excited to see where we end up.
Marty
