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3 New Tech Apps for Better Content Marketing

Quality content at its best offers opportunity for people to discover and engage with communities they feel a part of, brands they are interested in, and ideas they are curious about.

The tools for creating and distributing this content have become increasingly robust as demand rises. Some of the latest content marketing ideas were on display this week at the May 9  New York Tech Meetup.

The presentations emphasized that content is a driver in tech innovation. For those who missed it, watch the Livestream here or check out our Storify review.

Three of start-up demos — Folio, Launch.it and Disqus — stood out at the meetup

Folio

Folio is a lightweight marketplace for digital content. Think of all those false starts or great ideas that didn’t work as nuggets of potential that can be reused by other creative professionals.

Folio seeks to streamline graphic designers’ workflow and save time by using existing assets from other pros. The site promises to have community rating system by approved specialists to ensure all content on the site is high quality.

Folio now offers all image formats but plans to add audio this week and text documents are coming soon — so the marketplace will soon be useful for engineers as well as designers.

Social actions are built in: when a file is uploaded, it can be sent out to social profiles to notify your network. When assets are purchased on Folio, users gain the right to use it in their products but not for commercial resale.

This has the potential of being a great tool for creative professionals to profit off their work and engage in a collaborative community.

Launch.it 

Launch.it is a platform for launches — “anything new,” the founders explained. Credibility and visibility are the focus, along with enabling PR pros or founders to reach their audience directly.

The team noted that visibility is sort of the holy grail of a launch, but in the current landscape, where there are fewer journalists, it had become more difficult for PR pros to get their message out. It was just a matter of time before a solid platform came along to skip the middleman and appeal directly to the user.

Users can comment and vote, and view product announcements by most popular, most commented or most recent. This is not a place for the traditional press release. Marketers must treat this platform like any other inbound marketing — engage and meet a need for the audience.

Disqus

Disqus introduced its next-generation commenting platform, called Disqus 2012, which is being rolled out to publishers (request an invite here).

Comments are a source of great user-generated content for publishers and continue to attract developer attention. Gawker recently built its own system, and Facebook came under fire for suggesting it would block comments on publisher sites. With many commenting platforms in the market, Disqus leads in functionality and continues to be a popular choice.

The new features in Disqus 2012 promise to bring more traffic and participation. The real-time is frictionless and SEO capabilities are built in. New voting actions allow users to surface the best comments. For a preview of the new Disqus, look no further than the comments on Disqus’ own blog.

According to a new study, the technology industry in NYC is growing faster than tech in any other city in the U.S. The applications for marketing make the region one to watch closely. NYTM itself is using video content to document happenings in NY tech and to build a community around it with its just-launched Startup Stories.

The next New York Tech Meetup will host a new set of entrepreneurs with ideas next month, stay tuned for details and remember, tickets sell out quickly.

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