Content Curation is the act of discovering, gathering, and presenting digital content that surrounds specific subject matter.
Presently, we are seeing shifts in the marketplace as brands realizing that they can move from just pushing adverts to actually pulling interested consumers towards themselves by publishing quality, engaging, and informative content. Instead of broadcasting at the target market, you can engage with them. Instead of just talking about yourselves and your sales proposition, you can talk to the consumer and talk about their needs. Instead of just talking and then listening for a response, you’re able to listen and then talk across any of the social media platforms. Instead of buying media, you can actually become the media which consumers are drawn towards.
As Danielle Sacks wrote, “the Internet has turned what used to be a controlled, one-way message into a real-time dialogue with millions.” And you need to have enough breadth and depth of content to talk with them. So content curation helps you build that depth of content.
“Content curation is editing on steroids. – Joe Pulizzi” It is the ongoing classification and grouping of disaggregated pieces of information such that each piece increases in context, meaning, and importance. It is the art of combining and filtering information from different online resources to form your own ideas and maintain your thought leadership.
Types of Content Curation
We see content curation is the addition of 3 things: Context, Trust, and Meaning for the benefit of the reader. It is through grouping certain articles together based on the topics within them and the themes that are evolving.
You can add context to any given story which provides real value to the user. Another example of this is related article links. Secondly, by re-publishing anyone’s content or links to that content, you add trust to it because you badge your name as behind that content. If someone I trust retweets something, I click on it because of that trust they have added to that link. Thirdly you can add meaning. For example, Wikipedia abstracts and detailed classification information is added to the original article so that it has a deeper meaning than it would have previously.
What can Content Curation bring you?
Thoughts, words, and ideas of others can be helpful to establish yourself as a value added resource and as a place or destination for information.
If you aggregate and analyze external content in order to curate it, firstly you can generate insight, amplify community voices, and expand coverage of a topic. These are the major purposes of content curation.
You can generate insight for internal use only by gathering all the most relevant sources in one place, threading and analysis of topics reveals trends, clusters, and the ebb and flow of attention of your users. Secondly, you are amplifying community voices by adding weight and reach behind those customers, advocates and independent experts that are already speaking your language. This demonstrates an openness to an independent and third party voices. Thirdly, you can expand your coverage by including independent perspectives and disparate viewpoints you increase the volume, breadth and depth of coverage as well as therefore reducing the per article costs.
Some people seem to think that social media is worthless as the qoute says: “Never before have so many people with so little to say said so much to so few.” But even if 80% of the content in your subject area is poor, or off-message, the other 20% is a goldmine. And filtering tools to find that 20% are vitally important.
Curation isn’t just aggregation. Aggregation is not as valuable to [the reader] unless you can provide curation on top of it. It is the addition of meaning and trust that we mentioned earlier.
The Content Blend
It’s not about having all externally-created content, but about blending authored content, community viewpoints, your own thought leadership, and external sources together. This ensures a breadth and depth of coverage, whilst maintaining the “house voice” and the desired quality level.
User-generated content across multiple channels and shared links provides insight that bubbles up to inform your thought leadership content and the influence of your thought leadership trickles down in order to give weight to all the content blend.
Finding Ideas for Curated Content
It could be internal sources such as web CMS, staff blogs, sales and marketing material, and perhaps customer support archive/FAQs. It could also come from external sources such as blogs of customers and advocates, subject matter experts, news and reviews sites, and wider index of social media sources.
Immediacy
Instead of one-way interruption, web marketing is about delivering useful content at just the precise moment that a buyer needs it. That is why, it is important to be mining your community for what they are talking about in real time.
Relevancy
It is very important to deliver engaging content that is relevant to each user rather than broadcasting the same message to everybody. Content curation gives you enough content to talk on an individual level to every segment of your customer base. What makes content engaging is relevancy. You need to connect the contact information with the correct information.
Insight
The upshot of having engaged readers on multiple channels is that you can learn a huge amount about your market. You can learn content and topic preferences, user behaviors and journeys, segmentation categories, and build up very detailed profiles of each every individual user.
The benefits to you as a business is to attract new customers and advocates, engage and retain existing customers, build authority in your niche, and generate actionable insight.
In a nutshell, your business should aim of becoming a gateway to knowledge and don’t think that you know it all; publish enough content to keep every audience member interested; and generate detailed market insight and customer insight from the actionable customer data.
Creating valuable, compelling content can be quite a challenge for many entrepreneurs, businesses and organisations. And by sticking to the guidelines and key elements that makes curation work, it will make your content curation process perfectly ethical and worry-free. If you think you’re not quite ready for this challenge, you should start practicing the system and learn effective content curation tools and techniques.
