6 Content Curation Examples Illustrated

As 2011 online marketing and social media predictions start rolling in, we are hearing more and more about curation and how it’s going to be huge every day.  But most of the discussion is conceptual and theoretical, talking about information overload and parallels to curation in museums.  To help demonstrate what content curation actually means in the flesh, I have compiled a list of a 6 illustrated examples of curation in action by marketers, publishers and every day consumers.

1. Curation for Category Creation by Novell

Intelligent workload management (IWM) is an emerging method of IT systems management arising that draws from dynamic infrastructure, virtualization, identity management, and software appliance development.  Novell is making strides in defining this emerging approach to resource management.  To support this initiative, they have created www.intelligentworkloadmanagement.com, an industry destination site, with curated content from selected industry publications from the cloud computing, virtualization, and other tangential categories — along with their own original white papers and blog content.

2. Video Curation of User Generated Content by the Big Apple Circus

The Big Apple Circus has created a section of their website for videos.  Rather than solely relying on their own original content, they publish curated videos from third-party user generated content sites such as YouTube.  

3. Annotated Curated Content by IBM 

IBM runs a stream of curated content at http://smarterplanet.tumblr.com/ as a part of their Smarter Planet marketing campaign to highlight how we are moving towards a world that’s “instrumented, interconnected and intelligent”.  On this site, they regularly post curated content from around the web such as blog posts and videos of technology products, adding commentary on how these advancements relate to their vision of a Smarter Planet.

4. Curation as Revenue Generator for Publishers by the Cambridge Healthtech Institute

Bio-IT World Weekly is a newsletter produced by the Cambridge Healthtech Institute (CHI) that reaches 35,000 readers. Each week they publish five to seven original articles along with a stream of curated content. In the three months since they have supplemented their own content with curated content, CHI has seen a steady growth in their length of visits on their properties. You can read more about their content curation use case at FolioMag.

5. Crowd-Powered Social Curation by Digg

One of most well known examples of curation is Digg.  Digg had over 12 million registered users as of April 2009, and since then the number has grown.  Everyday, millions of users submit interesting content to Digg and collectively vote or “digg” content, surfacing up the best content to the top.  As a result, Digg has grown to become of the most popular content sites on the internet solely by curating third party content.

6. Political News Curation by the Drudge Report

The Drudge Report run by Matt Drudge is one of the most popular news sites online run by Matt Drudge.  Catering to the conservative side of the political spectrum, the Drudge Report consists of a set of links to third party news content that has been editorialized by their internal team.  The Drudge Report is now the 15th most popular news website online. 

If you are intrigued by these examples of content curation and how it relates to marketing, read our eBook “Content Curation: Taming the Flood in Social Media” to learn more about how curation is an emerging online strategy for many marketers.