"Content marketing is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s a must-have. It’s imperative that businesses create content on an ongoing basis. They can’t create just any old content, of course. It must be relevant and high quality. It also must be valuable and drive profitable customer interactions. And it must be about customer needs and customer interests, not ad-speak, which is all about the “me"."
Rebecca Lieb

For you content marketers, as you drown in the massive content creation craze here are some tools that you might want to explore for creation, curation and ideation!
       
Quora is good at getting people to open up. It discerns your interests before deciding which questions, topics and people to show you. Without overt prodding, Quora teaches users to put their experience into their answers in the form of short biographies related to the question.

Topsy "specializes in analyzing the global conversation on Its tools can decipher how often a term is tweeted, find an influential person on a specific subject, or measure the exposure of an event or campaign."

SocialMention seeks out content according to your search parameters across the social web and analyzes sentiment.

Zemanta is a semantic content discovery personal assistant, listening to your needs and bringing back the information you need in real time. It’s a great tool for inspiration and research as well as engaging your audience with more relevant content, especially if you aren’t a high-volume publisher.

Evernote is my brain dump. It lets you save voice recordings, text, pictures, and entire web pages to a cloud account you can access from any computer or mobile device.

Ubersuggest takes your word or phrase and instantly generates thousands of keyword ideas from real user queries! Use the keywords to get inspiration for your next blog post, or to optimize your PPC campaigns.

SocialMention  helps you keep track of your brand and keeps you on the cutting edge of your industry. Drop a keyword in their search tool and you’ll pull up results like the latest mentions across the search world.

Twitter List helps you keep track of industry influencers, customers, journalists… any group of people whose real-time conversations might inform your content creation decisions.

“With Bottlenose Nerve Center, it is now possible to know what the world thinks and feels at precisely this moment. Nerve Center helps brands, agencies, and enterprises understand the trends that are impacting them in real-time, so they can amplify the positives and tamp the negatives.”

Jing records everything you see and do. From simple mouse movements to a fully narrated tutorial. Jing videos are limited to five minutes for instant, focused communication.

Here are two articles that I found very helpful!
http://www.toprankblog.com/2013/04/11-content-creation-tools/#ptlink.fid=8947&isc=1&did=bookmark.3a64e6e1aed2e1ab0fb5f3b6d89a593b90065257&ctp=article

http://blog.kissmetrics.com/17-social-media-tools/

Image credit: http://adsoftheworld.com/

Apple’s announcement of the iBeacon functionality as part of its iOS7 technology is a game-changer for how businesses will conduct location-based marketing in the future. Think of iBeacon as a form of micro-location geofencing that makes it much easier for retailers to use a person’s exact location within a store to deliver targeted, relevant content, says Dave Walters, Product Strategist, Silverpop.

Here’s how it works: A customer with an iPhone 4S or later model who’s downloaded your app walks into your store. The iBeacon in the customer’s phone exchanges data with beacons in your store. Your system has been configured to send push notifications to customers who meet certain criteria, so at the moment the customer strolls into Aisle 12, they receive a push notification on their phone with offers or content related to where they’re standing.

The possibilities are endless. You could use iBeacon to serve up customized coupons, says Dave, send sales alerts based on real-time external data (such as weather changes), display personalized product information and videos, curate shopping lists based on past purchases, and drive email opt-ins. Moving beyond mobile, you could use iBeacon activity to trigger communications in other channels.  Learn More on iBeacon and the next generation of location based marketing.

With more than 46% of the web searchers using mobile extensively, the release of Google Hummingbird demands mobile responsive website design. Without it, your website ranking will be seriously compromised.

Find Ways to Create Mobile-First Content
Mobile-first also impacts your content creation process and cycle. Here are some key things to consider when you’re developing topics, writing content, and thinking about dissemination:

Short content tends to play better on mobile. Yet long posts are necessary for great SEO. The work around: use introductions to your blog posts as the hook to target your mobile readers.
Visual and Audio Content: Are you using visual content such as images, infographics, video, and micro-video to support your content efforts? Mobile users devours visual content much easier and faster than text-based content
Socially Friendly: Are you crafting socially sharable content? Mobile users tend to have a high degree of social shares and this can be a great way to build your shares with minimal effort.
Target Specific: Why not use Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools to determine what people are doing on your site. Are they shopping? If so, product guides would be a great way to focus your content development. Are they looking for industry trends, then you need to furnish them with materials that talks about your industry. When you have a better understanding of how your mobile audience is spending their time, you’ll be in an excellent position to develop topics of interest. Read more.

Make Google Hummingbird work for you. Come up with a list of the 5-10 most frequently asked questions—either about your products or how to use them and create one or more blog posts that answer each of those questions. Now your website transforms from being all about you to how it can benefit your prospects and clients.

I for one, talk a lot about the perils of digital distraction. For, we live in an awkward age where 90% of people move between devices to accomplish one single goal. Yet, never before in the written history of mankind have we enjoyed such immense privileges.  Here is a snap shot of the 6 apps that will stramline your digital life.

Your Password in the Technology Safe Deposit Box
Forget remembering dozens of passwords.  The word is that LastPass stores your data online in an encryption so complicated that even the company (and the NSA, for that matter) can’t read. The two-factor authentication ensure you’re actually who you say you are. Personally, I will be hesitant to use it. Read more...

The Comprehensive Calendar for Your ILife
Tiny details sets Sunrise apart from other free competitors. Send Artwork: @elineart                                                          and respond to event invites from within the app itself. A tap brings up a handy map to help you get to your next appointment. It pulls in weather for your location and shows a little icon next to events throughout the day, so you always know when to bring the umbrella. And ofcourse, Facebook events, friends’ birthdays, Foursquare check-ins, and more on one supremely synchronized calendar.
The ultimate enabler Hootlet.  Read more...

Jazz Up Your Digital Self On One Website
Stand apart from existing personal site builders with its eye-catching, customized infographics. To set up the site, you just need to connect existing social profiles, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. Relevant data is then pulled in and automagically arranged into not just a homepage but an entire website. This is the wonder of Vizify.
Read more...

You Control Your Personal Brand
Over 1 billion names are Googled every day - more than the entire population of the U.S. and Europe combined. You get to choose how you showcase yourself in the eyes of Google and that is pretty nifty. Brandyourself simplifies the complicated online reputation management process so you can do it yourself.

Organize Your Online Research
Evernote’s Web Clipper, a browser extension that lets you “snip” out those little gems you encounter online and store them all in the cloud--neatly catalogued and accessible on any device. For web serfers living life on the edge, this is for you. You can select a piece of text or an image or choose to save the entire article or page. Read more...

Armed with these amazing apps, now you are left with some quiet time to ponder on the wonder of the glory that is you!
Have fun and let me know of other wonders that I have missed!