Affichage des articles dont le libellé est shares. Afficher tous les articles
Affichage des articles dont le libellé est shares. Afficher tous les articles
samedi 28 avril 2012
5 Tips for Great Content Curation
If you’re a curator looking for some boundaries in what feels like the Wild West, here are five best practices to consider.
1. Be Part of the Content Ecosystem
Be part of the content ecosystem, not just a re-packager of it. Often, people think of themselves as either creators or curators as if these two things are mutually exclusive. What a curator really should do is embrace content as both a maker and an organizer. The most successful curators include sites like The Huffington Post, that embrace the three-legged-stool philosophy of creating some content, inviting visitors to contribute some content, and gathering links and articles from the web. Created, contributed, and collected — the three ‘c’s is a strong content mix that has a measurable impact. Why? Because your visitors don’t want to hunt around the web for related material. Once they find a quality, curated collection, they’ll stay for related offerings.
2. Follow a Schedule
Audiences expect some regularity, and they’ll reward you for it. It doesn’t need to be a schedule that you can’t keep up with. If you want to curate three new links a day, and write one big post a week, that’s a schedule. Make sure to post at the same time each week. This is so readers know when to expect new material from you. Consistency and regularity will also bring you new users, and help you grow a loyal base of members who appreciate your work. A good example of someone who gets why a schedule makes a difference is Jason Hirschhorn via his MediaReDEF newsletter. He never misses a publish date.
3. Embrace Multiple Platforms
It used to be that your audience came to you. Not anymore. Today content consumers get their information on the platform of their choosing. That means you should consider posting short bursts on Tumblr, images on Pinterest, video on YouTube, and community conversations on Facebook. And don’t leave out established sites and publishers. If your audience hangs out on a blog, you may want to offer that publication some guest posts or even a regular column. Essentially, you have to bring your content contributions to wherever your readers may be.
4. Engage and Participate
Having a voice as a curator means more than creating and curating your own work. Make sure you’re giving back by reading others and commenting on their posts. A re-tweet is one of the easiest ways to help build relationships with fellow bloggers and curators. And your followers will appreciate that you’ve pointed them to good content. One word here, I never hit an RT without clicking through to read what I’m recommending. You can also lose followers if you don’t put in the effort to recommend material that you really think merits their attention.
5. Share. Don’t Steal.
Take the time to give attribution, link backs, and credit. The sharing economy works because we’re each sharing our audiences, and providing the value of our endorsements. If you pick up someone’s work and put it on your blog, or mention a fact without crediting the source, you’re not building shared credibility. You’re just abusing someone else’s effort. The important thing to realize is that we’re increasingly living in a world of information overload. So when people choose to listen to you it’s because you’re able to separate signal from noise. You provide a clear, contextually relevant voice within the topic or topics that you create and curate.
10:16 0
mardi 14 février 2012
Twitter Investors, Including Employees, Can Only Sell 20% of Their Stock [REPORT]
In a move designed to forestall an IPO for as long as possible,Twitter has a rule barring any investor, including employees, from selling more than 20% of their stock, according to a report.
Twitter initiated the rule about a year ago, but it hadn’t been made public, according to CNNMoney. The guideline is somewhat controversial within the company and allegedly prompted Senior Technical Engineer Evan Weaver to resign last August.
According to the article, Weaver’s departure prompted an explanatory email to staffers from CEO Dick Costolo. The email outlined Twitter’s reason behind the policy: To keep to the SEC-dictated limit of under 500 investors. Beyond that number, Twitter would have to go public. “We don’t want to be public until we have very predictable quarterly earnings growth,” Costolo wrote in his August email, according to the article. “We’re not ready to be a public company for a couple years… There is one reasonable way to do this: Let everybody with vested common stock sell only some fraction of their shares,” Costolo added.
Twitter reps could not be reached for comment on the report.
Costolo’s stance on going public mirrors his other recent public statements. Like other social media firms, including, for a time, Facebook, Twitter appears to be holding off an IPO as a way of limiting outsider investors’ influence. That approach has hardly dimmed enthusiasm for the stock, though. Last March, Twitter’s valuationhit $7.7 billion on Sharespost, which trades shares on the secondary market.
Limiting shareholders means catering to deep-pocketed investors, including Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who sank $300 million into the company in December. Like Facebook, Twitter has also stopped giving out stock to employees instead offering them restricted stock units (RSUs), which can only be converted to actual shares after an IPO or a corporate buyout, according to the report.
Image courtesy of Flickr, eldh
15:52 0
vendredi 27 janvier 2012
Can Regular Investors Buy a Piece of Facebook ?
Mashable is not a financial publication, and we’re not in the business of giving stock market tips. But we can break down the IPO process — and gauge the likelihood of a regular investor getting in on the ground floor.
Don’t Get Your Hopes Up
We’ll cut to the chase — unless you’re a close personal friend or relative of a Facebook executive, or you manage an enormous amount of capital, you have almost no chance of getting IPO pricing on a stock like Facebook.
Why? Well, as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) points out, “the underwriters and the company that issues the shares control the IPO process.” The SEC doesn’t regulate how these primary shares are allocated.
In Facebook’s case, the Wall Street Journal reports that Morgan Stanley will likely be the lead underwriter for the IPO, with Goldman Sachs also expected to play a large role.
These investment banks are going to target large customers and institutional investors. The goal is to move shares by the millions, not the hundreds or thousands.
Even if you have an account with Morgan Stanley or Goldman, you’re probably not going to get to make any purchases as an individual — not unless you are a big-time celebrity or business mogul. (Ashton Kutcher, it’s your lucky day.) In most cases, the underwriter will call you and let you know if you can get in on the action.
What Can Average Investors Do?
Aside from buying pre-IPO shares on something like SecondMarket — which, again, has some basic financial requirements that will exclude most individual investors — investors interested in a Facebook IPO have a few options:
- Buy into a mutual fund that invests in IPOs. There are a few of these funds in the market, such as the Global IPO Plus Aftermarket fund from Renaissance Capital. The returns on these funds tends to be flat, however — and with a stock like Facebook, it’s unlikely that this fund will get much of the action.
- Buy on the aftermarket. This is where it can get tricky. Putting in a market order the day a stock opens can be risky. In fact, many retail investors were burned during the dotcom era for moving too fast on IPO stocks that never again exceeded their order price. Placing a limit order or stop market order can help alleviate some of the risk, but it won’t guarantee a buyer a piece of the action.
- Watch from the sidelines. Sometimes it pays to take a step back and watch the market from afar before jumping in. An IPO Facebook could be the next Google — but there’s also a chance it could also be the next Yahoo. Wait and see.
14:29 0
Inscription à :
Articles (Atom)
