You’ve heard the buzz word — curation — being thrown around like it’s a gadget we all know how to work. In reality, good content curation isn’t as simple as pushing a share button. It’s actually a combination of finding great content and following some simple best practices on how to successfully share that content.

via 5 Tips for Great Content Curation.

Reports on the media habits of Millennials, those “digital natives”, have given some the impression that young people never read newspapers. However, survey evidence stubbornly insists that they do.

For instance, the recent Pew State of the News Media study notes that 23% of people aged 18-24 reported reading a newspaper yesterday. As a Millennial myself, I was slightly skeptical. Were these 18-24 year olds just confused about what a newspaper is? Further evidence confirms the existence of young people looking to print: The New York Times reports that 10% of its hard copy subscribers are aged 18-24, which is on par with the 9% of this age cohort who subscribe digitally.

via Millennials and Print Newspapers: A Surprising Story : Go Figure : NPR.

If the Internet has taught us anything, it’s that people are really into anthropomorphized cats. They’re good for a chuckle, sure, but their popularity gets at the more interesting question of why and how we share online, and what that means for the changing ways in which we engage with all kinds of information, from lolcats to hard news.

Self-described Internet culture connoisseur Ben Huh is probably best known as CEO of Cheezburger, the hub for sites like I Can Has Cheezburger, FAIL blog, and Know Your Meme. He’s also a co-founder and board member of the hyped startup Circa, which bills itself as “news, re-imagined,” but has so far kept quiet about how it’s doing the re-imagining. (The site’s expected to formally launch this summer.) For now, there’s this, from its landing page: “Our vision is to create the best possible news experience by optimizing for truths, encouraging diversity, and empowering readers.”

I caught up with Huh at ROFLCon, an Internet culture conference at MIT, to ask him about his observations on journalism, and where he thinks the industry is headed.

via Cheezburger’s Ben Huh says news organizations should think like teenagers if they want to survive » Nieman Journalism Lab.

The hype around gamification is fairly new, but the idea has been around for some time. In fact, badges and leader boards could be considered the new sweepstakes and loyalty rewards. And gamification is not just for major consumer brands and their tech-savvy 18-to-34-year-old demographic. There are examples where gamification in marketing has worked spectacularly for 50-year-old rural ranchers. In other words, any audience is up for grabs.

via 4 Tips For Gamifying Your Tired Marketing Plan.

US consumers have embraced tablets at a staggering pace. And one of the major selling points has been their portability. But, interestingly, a Q1 2012 study by Viacom of US tablet owners found that they used their devices at home 74% of the time. That makes sense considering that consumers appeared to be using tablets largely for entertainment purposes, such as playing games, or watching television and movies.

Of those using tablets at home, more than nine in 10 employed the devices in either the living room or bedroom, bolstering the idea that consumers used tablets primarily for fun or relaxation. But three-quarters of respondents were at least somewhat likely to use their tablets in a home office, suggesting that the devices were used for work at least some of the time.

via Home Is Where the Tablet Is – eMarketer.

Tencent’s social site may not enjoy the hype of Sina Weibo, but it still accounts for significant usage and user share

Chinese online media giant Tencent has a genuine hit with instant messaging in QQ, reporting over 700 million (unaudited) users at the end of 2011. But what about the firm’s other services?

Tencent Weibo, probably the second most well-known internet service developed by the firm, is popular, but often plays second-fiddle in the marketing press to competitor Sina Weibo.

Perhaps the success of QQ can help the firm in other endeavors, then. According to an April 2012 report from McKinsey & Company, a global consultancy, Tencent’s Qzone, the social site linked to the IM app, was the most popular social media site among internet users surveyed in the country.

via Tencent’s Qzone Still Reigns in China Despite Sina Weibo’s Buzz – eMarketer.

The Washington Post was the first publication to experiment with a “frictionless” social reader app, which launched last year. If you use Facebook you’ve probably come across it: it manifests as a clustered list of stories that are almost completely unrelated except for the fact that they all come from the same publication.

If you decide to click on a link it doesn’t take you to the story. Instead, it shunts you over to a signup screen for Social Reader, which you have to accept if you want to make it through to the site. This forceful behavior is how the Post’s reader app gained tens of millions of users in a few short months; it’s also how, as Jeff Bercovici at Forbes pointed out this morning, the Washington Post seems to have worn its readers — or Facebook — out. They’re annoyed, and they’re quitting in droves:

via Facebook Social Readers Are All Collapsing.

As the worldwide social network audience soars well past 1 billion people, marketers are tackling the difficult task of coordinating their social media marketing efforts on a global scale.

A grassroots, organic approach may have worked in the early days, but many marketers now have dozens or even hundreds of social media profiles to manage worldwide. This requires a delicate combination of corporate oversight, to keep brand messaging consistent, and flexibility, to empower local managers who know their markets best.

via Is Your Social Media Strategy Global? – eMarketer.

Scope creep is the kind of thing that accumulates so slowly and subtly that you don’t realize it’s happening until it’s too late, like when you’ve already promised it or, worse, when you’re already building it. Scope creep is like slowly loading up your plate with little portions of everything on the buffet until you realize man, this plate is getting heavy and omigod I can’t eat all of this, what was I thinking! Except, for the metaphor to work in our case, we have to imagine escorting our clients to the buffet and willingly loading up their plate with every single thing they want knowing full well that they have no hope of eating it all (and that price-per-pound buffets always win by betting on big appetites).

via How to Prevent Scope Creep.

What if there was a way to determine the best time to share your tweets, Facebook updates, and response-worthy content? And what if you could automate the entire process?That’s the thinking behind a new wave of companies that claim to have social media communication down to a science. Recently, I analyzed nearly a dozen vendors in this burgeoning field, which I call the “social performance” category. These firms offer software tools and methods that analyze, plan, deliver, and measure media such as ads, content, and conversations published in social channels. For a price, of course.Although the business is young, there are a lot of players out there already. New entrants include Adobe Social, which employs Adobe acquisitions Context Optional and Omniture; BuddyMedia, which is optimizing earned content to be ads with its Brighter Option acquisition; Bazaarvoice, which has introduced a solution to launch social ads outside of traditional social networks; and Webtrends Social, which tracks social content off domain, ads and their performance back to the corporate website; and finally, Wildfire which has partnered with Adaptly to measure the paid-to-owned transition.

via Why Automating Social Media Marketing Could Hurt Facebook.