5 Reasons Content Curation Needs a Human Touch

Content curation helps businesses establish their online presence as a resource people are willing to recommend. It generates trust and increases authority. When you understand how content curation works, you begin to see it’s much like museum curation. Curators care for and increase the size of the museum’s permanent collection. Here are five reasons content curation needs a human touch as much as your neighborhood museum does:

#1: Weeding Through the Acquisitions

Museums often have hundreds – if not thousands – of pieces that never see the light of day. Why? The curator has to choose the best of the best to put on display.

A program can pull thousands of documents from the Internet about a specific topic. However,  only a human has any hope of defining what other humans would consider “the best of the best”. In curation, it is important to set the most specific parameters in order to get the best results from a curation software or service. Without this “personal touch”, your specific message will not be conveyed.

#2: Filling in the Content Gaps

Part of a museum curator’s job is to find the gaps in a collection and fill them in. They might notice a collection heavy in pieces and recommend thinning it out.

Content curation fills in the gaps between original content. For example, a marketing blog has several articles on content strategies, but their branding section is lacking. Curation software and services can help provide content to the user if they don’t have time to create it themselves. The curator then has to accurately bridge the gap between the curated content and their own ideas to create a new original cohesive message that still stays on brand.

#3: Exhibitions, Features, Collections and Categories

A museum curator once asked, “What good is a collection if no one ever gets to see it?” Designing and planning an exhibition is half the enjoyment of being a curator. –And, exhibitions are as important in content curation as they are for a museum.

A content curator may decide under which tags and categories to list the content. These categories are smaller “exhibits” of a larger “collection,” and inappropriate categorization is immediately noticeable. Programs can’t add new tags and/or categories if needed, and only apply provided ones in a “best guestimate” manner.

#4: Providing Insight about the Piece

When you go to a museum, descriptive panels tell you about an exhibition, collection and piece. In smaller museums, the curator writes these collections.

A program could simply copy a snippet from the curated piece and post it as a description, but that’s not curating. A content curator’s thoughts about a piece provide why they thought it was relevant or important to the reader, adding additional value to the curated contend. Readers form stronger opinion about the curator. Comments and personal insights help build authority and trust. 

#5: Sharing for Your Brand

Content curation works to build your brand, among other things, by sharing quality content as a resource (by association, as a quality resource). The content curator is always in the process of filling in gaps, weeding through documents and searching for the best of the best to increase brand recognition. Content curation helps with the glowing buzz words every business loves: brand authority; brand trust; brand power. A curator also can curate on what’s trending for the moment, switching or updating the curated contents tone, a machine wouldn’t be able to tackle this.

The True value of Content Curation

Although it may sound analytical the human filter helps distinguish between relevance, quality and community interest. This allows a good marriage between the user and the curation software or service.

Much like a dog helping dig a hole, a program can help the human curator save a lot of time. A program can pull in tons of documents based on a specific search and it can make categorizing and tagging easier. However, a dog still needs human direction, and content curation still needs a human touch.

If you are interested in learning about how to become a content curator Rockstar, download our eBook