As consumers of web content, we have all experienced the frustrating click-scan-repeat drill one has to go through to find timely, relevant and credible information on our search terms.
The explosive growth of online publishing channels on the web has resulted in an information glut that makes it challenging to find relevant, contextual information easily. Search engines continue to improve but seem to be losing the battle. Spammers and content farms further compound the problem.
While the amount of information on the web continues to grow, our ability to process it continues to diminish.
A fast-paced world makes continual demands on our attention and our time, making it all the more important for us to find, process and grasp content we seek quickly and easily.
This is a tall order, and a huge challenge, especially for content marketers who need audience engagement – our attention — to grow their brand, establish thought leadership or nurture sales leads.
This morning the MPI released its first piece of research on cultural products and curation. The advent of e-commerce means that consumer choice in films, music and books is no longer limited by what can physically fit on shelves.
Consumers can now access specialized products online that would never be able to pay rent in the retail environment.
In a highly influential 2004 essay Chris Anderson argues that these new niche products, and not megahits, will be the primary source of revenue for cultural producers. Harvard’s Anita Elberse responds that hits do and will continue to generate most profits.
The curation project does not seek to settle this important ongoing debate. Instead, it seeks to understand how makers of niche products can be successful in the Long Tail era.
“There’s are a lot of people in the news industry who are very skeptical of anything that isn’t news,” says The New York Times’ John O’Neil.
As the editor of the Times’ Topic Pages, which he calls a “current events encyclopedia,” O’Neil oversees 25,000 topic pages, half of which — about 12,000 or so — include some human curation.
While the rest of the newsroom is caught up in the 24-hour news cycle, constantly churning out articles, O’Neil and his team are on a parallel cycle, “harvesting the reference material every day out of what the news cycle produces.”
This means updating existing topic pages, and creating new ones, based on each morning’s news. (The most pressing criterion for what gets updated first, O’Neil said, is whether “we would feel stupid not having it there.”)
A few of the Times’ most highly curated topics include coffee (curated by coffee reporter Oliver Strand with additional updates by Mike White) and and Wikipedia (curated by media reporter Noam Cohen), as well as more predictably prominent topics like Wikileaks and Egypt.
Who here with a Tumblr blog tags their posts? Hands? Well, you might want to start sweetening up your SEO, as Tumblr has just added a page that organizes posts by tag.
The new Explore page was born due to the rather eclectic nature of many a Tumblr — unless you’re a fashion blogger or something of the like, chances are your content is all over the map, which can make it hard to be seen in the Tumblr Directory.
Real estate professionals are being mis-advised. Broadcasting what you THINK may be relevant information again and again, without pre-screening the source and considering the context is a waste of your time.
Sure you might get “a hit” or heck, even a lead. But it won’t work consistently and it won’t be successful over the long haul.
So, while some “experts” may be leading you down their automated paths or filling you up with hope of launching a comprehensive social media marketing plan in 5, 10 or 12 days….my advice is “think for yourself”.
There are no quick fixes with social media, it takes work and it takes drive….just like with any successful marketing or business plan.
Most importantly, it begins with content. The tools and strategies for sharing good content with your sphere can be learned. But, creating and sharing good content takes skill.
Jay Rosen points us to an article out of France that takes a stab at presenting what a modern internet-era newsroom should look like.
The point that I find most interesting, that helped clarify a few different ideas for me, is that it splits "journalism" into three distinct categories, all of which have a role in the newsroom: Reporters -- who go out and do first person reporting -- creating original stories, not just reposting rewritten wire copy.
Columnists -- who "start conversations and give stories another perspective."
Curators -- who "'cover' the news by sorting, verifying and editing live everything good existing on the web and in the media. They make link journalism, they make the news more accessible."
People used to come into my sandwich shop craving pizza. I could see it in their eyes. They wanted melted mozzarella on a bed of tomato sauce with black olives, pepperoni and maybe just a touch of roasted red pepper.
They wouldn’t be satisfied with a sandwich – not this time anyway. Their craving knew one master, and it came in the shape of a circle.
I had two options: I could point them to the best pizza joint in town or I could try to force a sandwich down their throat, literally (we didn’t have pizza, hell we didn’t even have mozzarella cheese).
Standing at this fork in the road I had a decision to make, just like brands today have a decision to make when they’re considering the idea of curating content as part of their content development strategy.
“But, we’ll be sending them to someone else’s stuff!”
**Step 1: Identify a Topic** On what topic do your prospects want to hear from you every single day? On what topic does your company have a unique position? On what topic do you want to be a thought leader? I would add that you need a find a topic that will help you ultimately drive your marketing objectives as well.
**Step 2: Follow the Influencers** Bloggers Analysts Trade publications Online news sites Journals Once you identify these, follow them with Twitter, RSS, email newsletter feeds, etc. For more, here’s 10 steps to finding the influencers in your market.
**Step 3: Share** Select only the most relevant content Be comprehensive and open minded Share across channels Remember, your job is the curator…to select the very best content from around the industry. More is not necessarily better. Share the information that will be valuable and relevant to your target persona.
Tools to share your content include: - Newsletters - a Microsite - Social Media - Feeds - Widgets
**Step 4: Organize Content** Key points include: Build an online library for your content by categories that make sense for you and your readers (think like a publisher). Make it easy for your prospects to navigate (see the samples below). This will also increase your search engine prominence.
**Step5: Create your own content** You need to share your own perspective…your own point of view (check this article for more on that). Pawan suggests 40 curated pieces to one original piece.
The act of curating keeps you relevant.
Curation places your content in the context of a broader issue and builds credibility
Two years ago, Google acquired Gapminder, the Swedish graphics-display company whose Trendalyzer software specializes in representing data over time. (You may recall the company from this awesome and much-circulated TED talk from 2006.)
Since the acquisition, Google has built out the Trendalyzer software to create its Public Data Explorer, a tool that makes large datasets easy to visualize — and, for consumers, to play with.
The Explorer has created interactive and dynamic data visualizations of information about traditionally hard-to-grasp concepts like unemployment figures, income statistics, world development indicators, and more.
I recently returned from spending a couple of hours with IABC’s staff talking about content curation as a new skill and responsibility of communications professionals.
I tweeted that I was headed to San Francisco for the lunchtime meeting, prompting a reply from Web consultant Ramsey Mosen asking my view of the ideal balance between curated and original content.
It’ll come as no surprise to regular readers that I replied, “It depends,” which is both accurate and a cop-out.
On what does it depend? And based on those factors, what is the appropriate mix?
One of the best laughs I’ve had recently (at someone else’s expense) came from a blog post that advised Twitter users to apply an exact division of categories of tweets: x percent for links to your own content, x percent for links to other content, x percent for personal observations, x for retweets, x for participation in conversation, and so on.
I can think of few activities less worthwhile than calculating the percentage of tweets that fall into each category in an effort to make sure you’re getting it just right.
The very idea that you can apply a formulaic approach—for tweets or a curated-to-original content ratio—is ridiculous.
You need to consider the various factors at play in your communication efforts—audience, niche, objectives, and so on—to figure out what’s right for you or your organization, then strive to come reasonably close.
While, for many, LinkedIn is merely an enhanced electronic rolodex for job search, the reality is that LinkedIn is a business-oriented treasure trove of social media content that’s user-generated and user-curated. From a content marketing perspective, LinkedIn enables bite size chunks of content creation across your enterprise.
As a result, area experts can develop and post content when and where it’s needed without additional editorial or creative support.
Before integrating LinkedIn into your marketing strategy, whether you’re looking to source new sales leads or position your firm (or find your next job,) it’s important to assess the different types of content that can be published on LinkedIn and determine which will be best for achieving your goal(s).
(See why LinkedIn is social media’s matchmaker.) Here are eight types of LinkedIn information:
An interesting aspect of the culture of sharing on social networks is that of content curation. This is the act of pointing your followers to content from other people.
Anyone who sometimes uses Twitter to send people to an interesting blog post or news article or video that they did not create is curating content. A retweet is a form of content curation too.
Essentially the idea is that you find things that interest you and share them.
If you become known as "always finding the good stuff" people will eagerly follow you even if you don't do much in the way of original content.
As he sifts through mountains of cultural data, this new type of tastemaker is gilding his personal brand (and making some serious dough) in the process.
The Insights WordPress plugin allows anyone to easily publish any image, video, text or Google map, by simply searching for specific keywords and selecting the relevant results. Worth checking out.
Content Curation is rapidly becoming one of the buzzwords du jour, as we all drown in a sea of content coming at us from every direction, through multiple devices and on a 24/7/365 always on timeline.
What is content curation? My definition may be somewhat abridged from industry pundits – here goes: “organizing and sharing the most relevant content on a finite subject.”
Why is content curation important to your brand or business? Simple answer – if you want to connect with your potential customers and market segment your content has to be relevant, concise and “speak to your market” in a meaningful way.
It's widely accepted that creating compelling and relevant content and publishing it on a consistent basis can lead to a bevy of benefits for the digital marketer.
Namely, increased traffic, links, SEO authority, leads, thought leadership status and sales growth.
"Content is King," we hear. And creating content is at the center of any inbound marketing plan. SEO you might say begins and ends with content; without it we'd have no reason to search. Blogs and podcasts tell us 2011 is the year of content marketing.
How do marketers deal with the mantra of creating more and more content? ContentWise reports over $47 billion was spent on content curation and publishing in 2009.
A new study (published Sept. 2010) by MarketingProfs and Junta42 named, B2B Content Marketing 2010 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends found, among other things:
9 in 10 B2B organizations market with content 51% report they plan to increase spending on content marketing.
More than a quarter of their marketing budget, on average is spent on content marketing...
Authoring and curation are even more fundamental skills. Curation has traditionally meant just making sure assets are safe, uncorrupted, and ready for use, but it has broadened (particularly in the keynote by Steve Rosenbaum) to include gathering information, filtering and tagging it, and generally understanding what's useful to different audiences. This has always been a publisher's role. In the age of abundant digital content, the gathering and filtering functions can dwarf the editorial side of publishing. Thus, although Thomson Reuters has enormous resources of their own, they also generate value by tracking the assets of many other organizations.
When working with other people's material, curation, authoring, and editing all start to merge. Perhaps organizing other people's work into a meaningful sequence is as valuable as authoring one's own. In short, curation adds value in ways that are different from authoring but increasingly valid.
It’s a rare morning that I don’t start out by looking at the news.
No, I no longer get the newswpaper delivered (it’s been years, actually), and I don’t usually flip to the front page of nytimes.com either.
These days I’m most likely to grab my iPhone (often while still in bed, if truth be told) and log on to smartr.
This cool app brings me my Twitter stream, but curated to only include links and to strip out Foursquare checkins and other non-news stuff. Smartr then presents those links to me as a news feed.
They say they’re bringing you “only the stuff you care about” – and for me, that’s exactly what it does. [No disclosure necessary - I just love the app.]
Smartr is just one of many tools helping end users manage their ever-growing content streams.
Online tools like paper.li, hybrid Twitter/facebook apps Flipboard and NewsMix and timeline-bender Cadmus all help to tame the beast of too much information 24/7.
Take a look at Thoora, which helps users “Discover What the World is Talking About.”
Thoora, which calls itself a news discovery service, finds what is hot in blogs, twitter and traditional news media and displays the stories in real time ordered from mosts buzz to least.
Tweets per hour and the “sparkline” of tweet history is shown for each story.
When I searched for curation, it came up with six tweets per hour and I found a story I’d missed despite diligent following of the topic. So if you are looking to leverage the wisdom of the crowd in your research or uncover new voices, take a look at this site. It’s free.
Thoora’s crowdsourcing of the news isn’t unique, although it had a lot less company when it was launched in October 2009.
It does raise the fundamental question of whether you want to focus your time on what is popular to all versus what is important to you.
I lean toward the “what’s important” but like to mix that up a bit so I can periodically reassess whether my priorities still make sense and my sources remain close to comprehensive.
Many of the content curation systems for business (Eqentia, Hivefire, Loud3r, ConnectedN, Aggregare, CIThread, CurationStation, DayLife, OneSpot, PublishThis, StoryCrawler and more) find relevant content and then give you an option to display it according to frequency of social mention. So you don’t need to forego popularity measures in your search for what is important to you.
What different uses do you see for crowdsourced news vs topically curated news?
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You can enter several keywords and you can refine them whenever you want. Our suggestion engine uses more signals but entering a few keywords here will rapidly give you great content to curate.
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