This is a great piece by Heidi Cohen on why your marketing needs content curation and 12 attributes of a successful curation strategy. This is one of the best articles I've seen on this topic in a very long time.
As I said, I've seen many pieces on curation but if you're like me, everytime I read about this, I always find something new or am reminded of ways I can polish what I'm doing.
Here are some of the highlights.........
Intro:
Why Your Marketing Needs Content Curation
At its core, content curation is like a great editor or blogger who brings his unique taste and understanding of his target audience to his selection of the best content for his readers.
**He provides context for the content so that it's more than a collection of information
3 Reasons your content marketing strategy needs content curation:
1. Offering your audience a combination of original and third party content provides a branded context for your work
2. Curating other people's content positions you and/or your organization as a tastemaker in your field
3. Creating sufficient content is a marketing and business challenge
12 Attributes of a successful content curation strategy:
Here are a few things that caught my attention:
*Has defined measurable goals
As part of your content marketing strategy and by extension
your marketing plan, content curation needs objectives that
are associated with your business.
**Targets a specific audience
. *Content curation like other forms of content marketing requires
understanding your readers' marketing persona
** Involves a community
*As with any social media or content marketing, your
audience should be at the heart of your content efforts.
**Clay Shirky says it best:
"Curation comes up when people
realize that it isn't just about information seeking, it's also
about synchronizing a community"
Selected and reviewed by Jan Gordon covering "Curation, Social Business and Beyond"
This is a really good article about content curation. There is nothing wrong with doing content curation, as it provides insight from multiple sources. As this article points out, the trick is curating content that adds value to whatever it is that you are adding the content to. In my case, it's my blog. I've followed most of these guidelines instinctively, because I want to provide quality information to share with fellow technical communicators and e-learning specialists.
Read this one carefully, as it's chock full of good advice.
My friend Robert Caruso has created Bundlepost, an amazing tool to help you find relevant, interesting, and valuable content.
This video tells you how Bundlepost works. It helps you to manage and post content effeciently so you can spend the rest of the time engaging and doing business.
He explains how it works, how to set it up, what is what is isn't and the many benefits it provides.
This tool is definitely something you should take a look at.
Selected by Jan Gordon covering "Content Curation, Social Media and Beyond"
This a great blog post from Rian van der Merwe , describing the noise you can find on the web now, and especially content just created for SEO purposes or advertisers. As many, Rian is tired of it.
Rian speaks for many of us who are overwhelmed, overloaded with content that gives us no value at all. This is the problem
"I used to believe that if you write with passion and clarity about a topic you know well (or want to know more about), you will find and build an audience. I believed that maybe, if you’re smart about it, you could find a way for some part of that audience to pay you money to sustain whatever obsession drove you to self-publishing"'
Here's what caught my attention:
****The wells of attention are being drilled to depletion by linkbait headlines, ad-infested pages, “jumps” and random pagination, and content that is engineered to be “consumed” in 1 minute or less of quick scanning – just enough time to capture those almighty eyeballs[2]. And the reality is that “Alternative Attention sources” simply don’t exist.
The Scoopit team agrees!
My input:
****The Opportunity: This is the time for all good curators to come forward - 2012 will be the year of the content curator -
**Know your audience
**Know their pain points
**Find and select the best content, add your own opinions, information or anything that will provide more value for your audience
**Select only the best content, don't just aggregate links that add to the noise
**Become a trusted resource - many opportunities will come to you, it's your time to shine
Curated by Jan Gordon covering "Content Curation, Social Media and Beyond"
I really liked this article by Romain Goday from Darwin Ecosystem about content discovery tools and particularly the way he described the element of the "human touch" and why they go hand and hand.
His description of the human part of the equation eloquently describes the process of a content curation.
Intro:
Content discovery tools have been trending towards taking over an increasing part of the selection process by filtering out information.
Content Selection Should Remain a Vital Part of the User Experience
Excerpt:
While tools carry the advantage of computing and aggregating information quickly on the user’s behalf, the user possesses a number of natural skills that tools cannot adequately take the place of.
Here are a few of the most important ones, as they relate to selecting and identifying relevant content:
Users are contextual thinkers:
The relevance of a piece of information depends highly on the context of the informational need.
The motivation and goal of the user determines what information is important and what information is not.
Users possess relevant expertise: The user’s expertise helps them to predict the implications of a particular event.
It also allows the user to identify anomalies that take place in the usual development of an event based on their experience with the topic.
Users make sense of patterns: The human brain can easily understand the relationships between multiple events.
This ability to interpret patterns is critical to understand and identify what is going on and how it’s developing.
Curated by JanLGordon covering "Content Curation, Social Media & Beyond"
From the article intro: The success of social networks and the move to socialise many others aspects of the web – from content and search to deals and commerce – has captured the imagination of analysts, content creators and brands. Those best positioned to monetise these changes, however, are developing strategies that extend beyond social networks built on who-knows-who to those built on shared interests: so-called "communities of interest".
"It's no longer just social media that's social any more – all media is becoming social thanks to the maturation of creative tools and digital distribution," says Troy Young, president of SAY Media.
Technology has democratised publishing. This, in turn, has resulted in a new breed of media businesses that see themselves more as curators of content rather than owners.
New technology is creating new opportunities to socially interact and is also enabling end users to become their own content curator...
This piece was written by Oscar Berg (@oscarberg) for CMS Wire and curated by JanLGordon covering her topic "Content Curation, Social Media and Beyond" on Scoopit.
I was especially drawn to this article in relation to Scoopit, as I know from discussions I've had with Guillaume Decugis, this very much speaks to his vision of what this platform could and should become.
**By sharing content and helping each other source, review and curate topics of interest, we stay informed, expand the conversation and contribute to others. It's like a collective intelligence of sorts.
**An essential part of community building is giving others credit if you repost their content and thanking them for posting it.
Intro:
"Since the dawn of time, primates have relied on social networks to help the whole group with their environments.
This of course applies to humans and our enterprises as well."
Here's what caught my attention:
Understanding the Dynamic of Your Networks
Today we also have information technologies such as social software that anyone can use to build, nurture and make use of their informal networks.
**And as the informal networks become visible, they become more usable to both individuals and organizations
**as we can better understand their dynamics and how to make proper use of them.
**In an environment where change is business as usual and being
**more responsive, agile and innovative is the only way to adapt to the environment, who can afford not to understand the dynamics of networks and harness their power with the use of social technologies?
This post was written by Tony Karrer from Aggregage
He has some interesting things to say about an article he read by Ville Kilkku, which was all about the future of content curation, the title of the piece he's referring to in this post is "Klout, Triberr, paper.li, and the future of content curation".
Intro
He says,
"Reading this article made me realize that people curation should be a lot of what we are really talking about here. But before I get to that, let me step through what he talks about. He takes us through a few different models of content curation. I’m going to need to compare these to my post on Marketing via Aggregation, Filtering and Curation – Tools and Resources to see if this classification changes things."
He then talks about three major trends in content curation:
From individual content curators to crowdsourced content curation: Individuals cannot keep up with the pace of new content, even though they have better discovery tools than before. Crowdsourcing can, although it is not suitable for promoting radical new ideas: the dictatorship of the masses is unavoidably conservative.
From manual to semi-automated content curation: Individual content curators are forced to automate as much of the process as possible in order to stay relevant. From content curation to people curation: When there is too much content, you vet the content creators, manually or automatically. Those who pass get exposure for all of their content.
What caught my attention:
How do these trends interact? Social networking of the content creator is vitally important in order to create an audience as isolated content becomes increasingly difficult to discover and curation focuses on people instead of individual content. Build it, and they will come, is dead.
Great article on how to find hidden treasures using answer sites, a great resource for finding content.
Written August 25th, 2011 • By: Arnie Kuenn • Content Marketing
"Answer sites might just be the perfect marriage of social media and search."
The basic concept behind an answer site is that people can post a question hoping to get it answered by someone knowledgeable in the subject matter. The answers can be powered by public knowledge with consensus determining the “best” answer. Answer sites offer users the ability to be both the inquisitor and the expert.
Generally, in human — shall we say, analog — interaction, we can answer each others questions based on our personal experiences. Answer sites make it possible to do this on a massive scale. This often means that the turnaround for a question is relatively fast; many questions get answers in less than a day. In fact, most questions have already been asked and answered, so getting an answer to common questions can be almost instant.
Urbanspoon has signed a deal with Zagat that will see over 25,000 Zagat reviews featured prominently on Urbanspoon.
Urbanspoon has signed a deal with Zagat that will see over 25,000 Zagat reviews featured prominently on Urbanspoon.
Urbanspoon tells WebProNews, “”We’re excited to be working with Zagat – the pinnacle of high end restaurant reviews. Providing diners with easy access to Zagat reviews directly on their smartphones will make it even easier to select the best dining options.”
“Our goal at Urbanspoon is to give users the most accurate, in-depth look at local restaurants to help inform their decision about what new spots to try and which favorites to keep on their go-to list,” said Urbanspoon GM Kara Nortman. “Bringing in content from Zagat, arguably the most famous name in restaurant reviews, adds another layer of trusted insight to help people find the best restaurants in their cities.”
Zagat’s ratings and recommendations for restaurants will appear alongside Urbanspoon’s aggregated content. Users will be able to access the reviews along with general business info, photos and related blog posts.
This is the whole piece, there's a visual to show you how it'll look when you click here and scroll to the bottom.
This piece was written by Eric Brown for social media explorer.
I selected this article because it reaffirms what many of us already know but it's still good to see this in writing: Content curation and Media Curation (a mix of machine aggregation and Human Curation) are starting to pick up steam.
Here are some highlights:
Curation comes up when search stops working,” says author and NYU Professor Clay Shirky. But it’s more than a human-powered filter.
**“Curation comes up when people realize that it isn’t just about information seeking, it’s also about synchronizing a community.”
The author says and I agree with him:
**"The value will be in the expertise of the curator, people will not read junk, and the best of the best curators will create digital domination with vibrant communities".
There is also a great quote from Fred Wilson's AVB blog in which he details what he would do if he were starting the Village Voice now:
**I would not print anything. I would not hire a ton of writers. I would build a website and a mobile app (or two or three). I would hire a Publisher and a few salespeople.
**I would hire an editor and a few journalists. And then I’d go out and find every blog, twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube, and other social media feed out there that is related to downtown NYC
**and I would pull it all into an aggregation system where my editor and journalists could cull through the posts coming in, curate them, and then publish them
Curated by Jan Gordon covering "Content Curation, Social Business and Beyond"
This is another compelling story about Pinterest - the video says it all. It's a deaf woman's story about how she's using visuals to communicate her story. There's something for everyone on this network and this is just the beginning.
Please feel free to follow "Pinterest Watch" for continuous news coverage on this hot new network. You can also follow me on Pinterest http://pinterest.com/jangordon/
Intro:
I'm discovering new ways to use social media to show I can integrate and make noise in the masses. I love how versatile Pinterest is. It serves many purposes..
This very informative article was written by Shobha-Atre for Fulltraffic blog
"Content curation can and WILL play a vital role in advertising your business and providing greater exposure to your products in the market."
Here's what caught my attention - a few takeaways:
Content curation helps in defining a niche target audience and providing content relevant to their needs.
It is a smart and an inexpensive marketing tool that can help in achieving amazing results for your online business.
In addition, it can assist in refining your content and sharing valuable information to provide greater online visibility to your company.
Brand building can be a huge exercise and also challenging for many companies at the same time.
However, with the use of content curation tools, it has become a lot easier to achieve successful branding results.
It saves valuable time and effort of the online users in searching for enormous amount of information on the web.
Content curation is the best method of providing purposeful information that may be extremely useful to the readers in addressing different issues.
Rather than looking at a variety of sources, they can get all the valuable information under one roof that can be immense value for companies.
Besides, it helps them to discover and find all the latest information about your products and services and encourages them to make a final purchase easily.
Curated by Jan Gordon covering "Content Curation, Social Media and Beyond"
Please note that the author of this original post, Shobha Atre, uses images stolen from other web sites, (the one appearing here is an image I have bought and personalized myself with those titles) without providing any credit or attribution. How can this person be a reliable curator if sHe behaves in this way?
Hi robin,
Thank you for pointing this out, I had no idea she used a stolen image in this piece. Will leave this up so you see my response. Taking it down tomorrow, not tweeting it. I don't support anyone who does this.
Food for thought from Toddi Gutner for Business2Community:
I found this piece particularly interesting and wanted to call your attention to it. It's one of those things we all experience everyday, but do we really stop to ask ourselves this question:
****Are You Mobilizing Communities or Just a Voice in the Crowd?
I've personally covered events online, tweeting the main points live and although I was able to filter and capture the essence of what was going on, I had to go back and really absorb the information and then try to apply it to my business effectively. (not always an easy task) :-)
It's a juggling act but one I think we're all experiencing on one level or another.
Excerpt:
Continuous Partial Attention (CPA) is the process of paying simultaneous but superficial attention to a number of sources of incoming information.
This term, coined by writer and consultant Linda Stone in 1998, aptly describes the scene at the recent Council of Public Relations Firms Critical Issues Forum on Social Revolution:
This is what particularly caught my attention:
**What was the unintended consequence (UC) - these being outcomes that are not intended by a purposeful action?
**They can be positive, negative or have a perverse effect contrary to what was originally intended.
****So are there any unintended consequences to compulsively tweeting from an event or otherwise?
This is a question I have yet to answer. It is sort of like waiting to see what the side effects of a drug will be years after it has been approved.
One UC of CPA may be that peoples’ attention spans (already truncated by USA Today and sound bite television) and
**related ability for analytic thought will be reduced to nanoseconds.
I'd love to hear your Thoughts?
Curated by Jan Gordon covering "Content Curation, Social Media and Beyond"
I just rescooped this article because I found it in another source, but here I look further into your collection and find it. I'm curating on the topic information overload and coping skills. I believe that curation can help you pay attention. I experienced this myself .. I was a conference. Many people were tweeting. I was tracking it with storify - doing content curation in real time with twitter versus tweeting helped me pay attention, quickly put together a coherrent record of what happened and make it unstandable to people not in the room.
@BethKanter
I have covered a few conferences in real-time and it definitely makes you pay attention on more than one level. Being able to put it in a cohesive manner helping people understand what's happening is an art in itself and something you do very well.
In this video, natural language processing expert Russell Wright from Theme Zoom explains the difference between premium curation for corporations and curation for small businesses.
There is some very good information for small businesses.
Here are a few things Russell talks about:
He suggests tools for aggregating information, (he mentions Curata a lot for corporations and he has a relationship with them and it almost seems like he's plugging them a lot, but stick with it, you might find one or two things that will help you along the way).
Here are a few things he talks about:
**how to have the right site architecture for good SEO
**adding context, how to use curation to show your expertise using the monitization model, he explains this in more detail.
**Provide a better valued insight or create a new conversation, give your opinion on the content you're curating, find a creative way to add meaning without going overboard.
**You have to be clear about what service you're providing, reduce your topics and themes by only having 4 or 5 keywords so you are continually providing valuable information to your audience.
**Don't be too broad, match your topic with your brand message.
This is a great article on curation from Finger Tips Music. There is much confusion out there, some people say content curation is just a buzz word, it is so much more and what I've highlighted below is just the tip of the iceberg.
Curated by JanLGordon covering Content Curation, Social Media & Beyond
Here's what caught my attention:
Curating is not just filtering
****Curators must keep selections to a rigorous minimum.
**One long-running model is the site Very Short List, which selects but one thing a day to inform you about.
****The difference between filtering and curating is, however, more than quantitative.
******A curator aims to present web content in a manner that removes it from the medium’s inherent endlessness as well as its relentless robotic-ness.
****** This can be done only with the care and attention of an individual intelligence.
*******A curator, alive to context and nuance, has a voice, a sensibility, a vibe; there is something inherently idiosyncratic about curating.
I posted this a few weeks ago, I'm sure not everyone saw it and it is definitely worth posting again. Lots of information and strategy.
Nine ways to make curation work for your brand.
Become a Content Curation King
Sean Carton | August 29, 2011
"Curation" is a buzzword (even if it isn't technically a word…unless you count the 14th century French definition meaning "to cure") that's smokin' up the interwebs these days. Launching into the blogosphere virtually from nowhere in 2009, it's now one of those terms that's essential to any digital marketer on the cutting edge (or for anyone who wants to sound like one).
Curation has now come to mean the act of sorting through the vast amounts of content on the web and presenting it in a coherent way, organized around a specific topic(s). However, unlike automated services (such as Google News), the essential difference of curation is that there's a human being doing the sifting, sorting, arranging, and publishing. Just as a museum curator must decide which artifacts to display during an exhibition, an online curator decides what information available online is appropriate and relevant to her audience.
Making curation work for your brand is a lot easier said than done. As countless would-be content curation kings (and queens) have found out, just gathering a lot of links together doesn't guarantee anything except that you'll spend a lot of time curating links. You need to commit resources to both curation and promotion if you're going to be successful. And that's just the first step. To truly succeed as a curator, you need to think like a curator (not just an aggregator) and keep the following in mind:
In 2008 the number of devices connected to the Internet surpassed the number of people connected, and in 2020 there will be 50 billion things connected, 7 times the world’s population, according to Dave Evans of Cisco.
The infographic below highlights some of the key features of the Internet of things, including the pace of growth, how external data can be aggregated so that your alarm clocks, cars, and coffee makers make decisions to fit with your schedule, and that some cameras and computers are now just a cubic millimeter.
An amazing statistic is that by end of 2011, 20 typical households will generate more Internet traffic than the entire Internet in 2008. That is slightly unbelievable, and I would like to know how they define ‘typical’ and what data is generated for Internet communication.
However it is important to recognize that the Internet of things is one of the most important ways to understand our connected future. Pervasive connectivity, and the amazing things we will be able to do with that, will shape our lives.
I hope you had a great Labor Day weekend. Hope to see you share some content soon? That is on Internet Billboards! LOL Nice curation as usual. Thanks Tom
Great article on how to find hidden treasures using answer sites, a great resource for finding content.
Written August 25th, 2011 • By: Arnie Kuenn • Content Marketing
"Answer sites might just be the perfect marriage of social media and search."
The basic concept behind an answer site is that people can post a question hoping to get it answered by someone knowledgeable in the subject matter. The answers can be powered by public knowledge with consensus determining the “best” answer. Answer sites offer users the ability to be both the inquisitor and the expert.
Generally, in human — shall we say, analog — interaction, we can answer each others questions based on our personal experiences. Answer sites make it possible to do this on a massive scale. This often means that the turnaround for a question is relatively fast; many questions get answers in less than a day. In fact, most questions have already been asked and answered, so getting an answer to common questions can be almost instant.
Great post written by Eric Brown for Social Media Explorer - This is what caught my attention:
Curation — the act of human editors adding their work to the machines that gather, organize and filter content.
“Curation comes up when search stops working,” says author and NYU Professor Clay Shirky. But it’s more than a human-powered filter.
“Curation comes up when people realize that it isn’t just about information seeking, it’s also about synchronizing a community.”
Part of the reason that human curation is so critical is simply the vast number of people who are now making and sharing media.
“Everyone is a media outlet”, says Shirky. “The point of everyone being a media outlet is really not at all complicated. It just means that we can all put things out in the public view.
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This is a really good article about content curation. There is nothing wrong with doing content curation, as it provides insight from multiple sources. As this article points out, the trick is curating content that adds value to whatever it is that you are adding the content to. In my case, it's my blog. I've followed most of these guidelines instinctively, because I want to provide quality information to share with fellow technical communicators and e-learning specialists.
Read this one carefully, as it's chock full of good advice.
--techcommgeekmom