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Some evenings, as 9 p.m. draws near, I feel like relaxing with a little TV. What to watch? Scrolling through my cable provider’s crammed program listings only frustrates me, so I rely on my partner Dave—an avid TV fan. He knows I eschew reality TV, weight-loss contests and the like. In a sense, he functions as my TV curator, informing me of a History Channel special about Atlantis or the debut of a sci-fi drama.
If curation isn’t yet on your radar screen, it soon will be. Why? We are constantly bombarded by an ever-growing array of information, and it’s becoming more and more difficult to make sense of it. As New York University professor Clay Shirky has famously stated: “It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.”
Stated simply, content curation is the organization and sharing of relevant content on a particular subject. In a world where high-quality information is harder to find, learning to meaningfully filter through content is an increasingly valuable skill.
Rohit Bhargava, senior vice president of strategy and marketing at Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence, says in his Manifesto for the Content Curator: “In the near future, experts predict that content on the Web will double every 72 hours. The detached analysis of an algorithm will no longer be enough to find what we are looking for. The future of the social web will be driven by content curators, who take it upon themselves to collect and share the best content online for others to consume.”
Curation flow
To gain a clearer understanding of how it works, let’s walk through the typical flow of curation: Find, organize and share.
Get started by first developing a strategy, as you would with any communication program. Which niche do you want to focus on? Who is your audience, and what do they care about? What are you trying to achieve by curating content?
Then, find content relevant to your niche, whether that’s vegetarian cooking, pharmaceutical trends or aerospace engineering. You may already be watching; reading; and listening to videos, blog posts, tweets, news articles and podcasts within your area of expertise. You can also use saved Google and Twitter searches and RSS feeds to help you uncover important nuggets of information.
The next step is to organize and make these tidbits easy to find in the future. You can bookmark them using such free online services as Delicious or Diigo (or both, since the future of Delicious is up in the air). Adding multiple tags to your curated information increases the odds of your finding it again later.
The final step in the curation process is to share or publish your content, not through automated aggregation, but in a human way—perhaps with your own comments added to help your audience understand the meaning of what you’re sharing. Several tools are available to help you accomplish this. (See “Curation Tools,” below.)
Yes, I said “final step,” but it helps to think of curation as a loop, where you are continually adding to your knowledge, organizing it and sharing. You might also want to measure the feedback you’re receiving from your audience. Are they in turn sharing your content? Are they commenting on it positively or negatively?
A marketing trend
As they seek new ways to reach customers online, smart marketers can integrate curation into their toolkits as a relatively easy, inexpensive, and powerful way to engage audiences online by providing relevant and timely information. This may be especially true in the business-to-business sector, with its often narrow fields of interest. For example, Adobe runs CMO.com, aimed at chief marketing officers. The site serves up both original and curated content in a vendor-neutral environment.
Organizations that curate do so to establish thought leadership, boost their search engine optimization and ultimately generate leads from those who follow their content. After all, if you filter information to make it more manageable and accessible, you become a trusted resource.
Curation tools
When you’re ready, you can test-drive some tools, many of which are free. The simplest way to begin is by sharing your own Delicious or Diigo bookmarks with colleagues and clients.
Then try Paper.li, which allows you to curate Twitter content based on keywords, people you follow or other criteria. Some IABC members have generated Paper.li “dailies,” which anyone can subscribe to. Check out the IABC Leaders Daily, curated by Tanya Reynolds, or the IABC Daily, curated by Allan Jenkins. Paper.li uses a newspaper-like interface, as does Flipboard—an iPad app that pulls online content into a template that looks very much like an elegant print publication.
Another cool product is Storify, which allows you to tell a story using various media, including photos, videos, tweets and more. A new kid on the block is Shortform, which transforms you into a video DJ, allowing you to curate content on your own personalized channel, with clips pulled in from YouTube and other video sites. Curata, a paid service, is a content production and distribution tool designed to deliver leads and elevate market visibility.
The nice thing about curation is that you can start small—to meet your own needs or those of your organization—and spread the word to a more public audience when you feel ready to shine a light on your curated content.
Someday, a member of your communication team might have the title of “content curator.” Today, curation is a function that can be integrated into existing communication activities within your organization, helping employees and customers to filter the Web—just as Dave’s picks allow me to unearth my evening hour of TV entertainment.