I caught Paul Gillin’s column in B2B magazine yesterday on how curation is the new creation. This quote hit home:
“…humans face a problem our species has never confronted before: We have too much information. Our challenge has shifted from finding what we need to filtering out what we don’t. Today, curation is nearly as important as creation.”
Paul also points out that curation is as old as collecting itself. It’s NOT new (although it’s the flavor of the month right now). Media companies have been curating content for centuries, but the idea of online content curation is something all content marketers need to consider as part of the content marketing plan.
Why? Brands must position themselves as the trusted industry experts. To do that, curation must be part of the mix.
Are you stuck on how exactly to do this? If so, here are some ideas to chew on.
1. Lists
Generating the defacto list on something relevant to your customers is a good first step. For example, Junta42 has been curating the top content marketing blogs for over three years now. This list is one of our top 5 most popular pages, generates a number of enewsletter and blog signups, and has led to significant new business and lasting relationships. Since there are hundreds of excellent content sources out there on content marketing, the list helps marketers quickly find the best in just one click.
Your list could revolve around online resources, companies, buyer’s guides, best practices and more. Find out what your customers really need to know and construct this helpful tool.
2. Curated Microsites
A curated microsite is a stand-alone website that brings in content from multiple sources around one niche topic. American Express has done this tremendously well with Open Forum (a mixture of new and curated content). Adobe (Omniture) has transformed CMO.com into the best digital marketing material for C-level marketers. Content Marketing Institute partner OpenView Venture Partners (a venture capital firm) has recently launched OpenView Labs, which seeks to become the ultimate resource for expansion-stage technology companies.
3. SmartBrief-Style eNewsletter
SmartBrief has created a business from developing curated enewsletters around dozens of business-related topics. You can too. Instead of creating and editing all original content, consider packaging the best of the industry each week in a tidy enewsletter. OpenView has done this with their enewsletter. So has Junta42, using a mix of original blog content and the best of the net (sign up here).
4. Curated Twitter Feed
The original concept for the Junta42 Twitter feed was exactly that – curating the best content marketing articles each day (now with over 350 listings). We get dozens, sometimes hundreds of people sharing this content each day, helping to position Junta42 as a leader in content marketing. The World Economic Forum does this perhaps better than anyone (with over 1.5 million followers).
Great content comes from almost anywhere these days. If your job is to position your brand as the leading expert in the industry, curation needs to be part of the equation.
What’s your content curation idea? Would love to hear it.
10 Comments
Another way to do this is to reduce the curation effort by using Automated Filtering. That’s the core concept behind Paper.li and Browse My Stuff.
More ideas on this here:
http://www.browsemystuff.com/wpblog/automated-filtering-human-powered-curation/
Each Monday on our blog, THINKing, we produce “Creativity 2010″, a weekly curated round-up of creativity links. I’m considering starting “Thursday THINKing”. In this post, I’d curate top content from my favorite blogs on PR, branding and social media. Not only is it helpful to our readers, it also provides some structure for the blog in that we have two days a week in which something new appears.
Great post Joe!
You’re quite correct that marketers must consider themselves as curators. However, most marketers aren’t aware of the many critical business risks they face when they fail to leverage quality content curation. Here are 3 big ideas that I think marketers should consider if they don’t curate:
1. Longer Sales cycles: The deluge of information for buyers means that sales people have to fight to nurture their prospects or risk losing to a smart content-marketing competitor. If marketers don’t curate, they risk losing an opportunity to SHORTEN the sales cycle for their sales team and help keep the attention of their prospects in a noisy marketplace. Here’s a blog post I wrote on that problem: http://www.contentcurationmarketing.com/articles/7552/three-ways-in-which-content-curation-helps-markete/
2. Low Content Marketing ROI: Content Marketing ROI increases when marketers can take advantage of curated content to increase the impact of their marketing communication and marketing assets. Don’t curate? Well risk losing out on increasing the value of your marketing activity and lose out on fresh content, fast. I wrote a blog post on that, here: http://www.contentcurationmarketing.com/articles/14565/content-marketing-roi-3-ways-content-curation-opti/
3. Lost Vendor Preference: How do you know that your customers consider you the VENDOR of AUTHORITY? That’s a competitive space and marketers that fail to establish comprehensive topic and issue authority will lose out to smart marketers who will move first and move quickly. If you’re not the vendor and absolute authority on your critical customer issues online, then your competitor is eating your lunch! I also wrote a post on that here: http://www.contentcurationmarketing.com/articles/4382/b2b-content-curation-adds-a-new-competitive-channe/
With http://www.getcurata.com, we remove these big online marketing pains because marketers are already overwhelmed and busy with new content solutions and new content channels. The risk to marketers for ignoring content curation is dramatic, but not everyone will get it, which is why not everyone will win.
Great point and well made. In addition to the ones you mentioned, Techmeme has done an expert job here.
The only addition to your list that I would make is curating offline sources.
It may sound counter intuitive to be an online curator of offline information, but books, magazines, events, venue information, etc., offer a (sometimes overwhelming) wealth of information, and you can add real value by curating the best for your audience.
@Tony – really like the paper.li stuff.
@Taariq – I’ve heard great things about your product and thanks for commenting. I agree with you, but I do believe introducing original content into curated content is necessary to truly positioning the brand as THE industry expert.
@Harry – Excellent stuff. You’ve been a content marketing leader since I’ve been in the space.
@Matt…love the offline curation concept. Would love to hear more best practices on that.
Joe,
Excellent post with great examples of content curation in action. Curation has become such an important part of the content marketing mix, and we’re seeing more and more companies taking advantage of the opportunities.
I tend to agree with you that content curation must supplement creation. It is with truly original, compelling content that your company can establish thought leadership; curation helps to further this mission. By leveraging the two, your organization can become a hub of vital industry information, and, most importantly, develop those solid customer connections.
Thanks again!
This is a great post! Online documentation and content curation are making and breaking the success of several companies right now. And frankly, people are going to have to come to terms with the emergence of this new frontier and either decide to “move west” or simply choose to get left behind.
Last month Forbes came out with an article by MindTouch CEO Aaron Fulkerson that has some astounding statistics as to what kind of ROI online content can bring in. Well-curated content *is* a “sales tool”– I definitely recommend giving the article a read: http://www.forbes.com/2010/08/07/customer-service-fulkerson-technology-documentation.html
Cheers,
Liz
Joe,
The automation of content curation makes it possible to do something no human can do: cull all online sources in real time. However, the lack of semantic sophistication in software (and tagged content) means that curation software often fails to approach the quality of even a novice librarian.
As you, Harry Hoover and others so well demonstrate, the best practice in content curation is adding a human eye (and brain) to filtering (and annotating) automated feeds.
Thad…you are right…the best curation is a combination of technology and human beings. I think that will be the case for some time to come.
One problem associated with automatic curation is replaceability. If the audience has access directly to the algorithm output, it will ignore the intermediaries and consume directly from the source.
Value must be added by the publisher, or it will eventually be left out of the chain.