Curation has been steadily rising as a concept as the sheer volume of undifferentiated content has made it nearly impossible for mere mortals to find useful, thoughtful, contextual content on the Web. But its practice is undervalued. In just one example, a 2012 wrap-up in The Atlantic called “curate” one of the “words we’d just as soon never write or see or hear spoken again.”
According the the article, Yahoo is expected to announce that it has acquired Snip.it, a Pinterest-like site for article curation, according to sources who are familiar with the deal. Kara Swisher comments on Yahoo's new approach to become a content destination:
Thus, the thinking goes, while Google is the place people come to search for links, Yahoo then becomes the place users come to find content. That means more partnership deals from third-party sources, with an additional social component layer and synced across a number of devices and platforms, especially video.
However, given Yahoo's track record with integrating start ups and growing them, it's likely that Yahoo will eventually disband Snip.it after a few years. Remember, Yahoo has done this before with another curation start up that had even more traction, del.icio.us.
Is curation a buzz word? We think not but this is one mans perspective.
When asked about the worst words of 2013, The Atlantic’s Richard Lawson responded that he hated the usage of curation. His objection to the word was that it has shifted far from its original high-art meaning: And he’s got a point.
Content marketing is indisputably one of the most effective and most necessary marketing strategies of the day. In order to rank well with the most popular Internet search engines, a website must be filled with relevant and helpful content.
"This group of examples will not only inspire you to think about how you might use curation in your own marketing, but also shows just how powerful curated content can be to illustrate your expertise without the ongoing burden of creating your own content." - Rohit Bhargava
Mathematicians plan to launch a series of free journals that will host their articles similar to arXiv. Under this model, researchers will share and curate the best papers collectively ultimately minimizing cost without involving commercial publishers:
"If people want larger reviews linked to papers, or the possibility of online comments and blogs, we can offer this with only minor changes to the platform."
A Polar Mobile executive at Luxury Daily’s Luxury FirstLook: Strategy 2013 conference said that publishers need to focus on curation versus creation in order to drive traffic and keep mobile users engaged:
“Curate over create is the efficient way to really take your existing content assets and create an experience on a mobile device that is going to keep people engaged,” said Kunal Gupta, CEO of Polar Mobile, Toronto.
If you are curating content on Twitter, its common to retitle content to something more relevant and attractive. In addition, many people also append hashtags as well. For new curators who are not familiar with what hashtags to apply, there's a quick guide on doing so:
However for B2B content marketers just starting out with curation, it can seem difficult to know where to begin. Here’s an inside tip – you can find 85% of the content you need for curation via a simple, often underrated tool: the humble hashtag.
This post has a set of templates for list based blog posts that are comprised of curated links. For example, one such template is Most Recent Influential Tweets About {blank}. Though such posts are getting overly common, mediocre and border-line gimmicky out there, there may be some room for such list based posts on your topic if it is not sufficiently covered.
The first in a three part post series about content curation specifically for B2B marketers. In this post, Louis Foong covers what curation is and is not going back to the basics of content curation. Later in the series he plans to cover how curation is similar to wine tasting, and lastly a review of B2B content curation tools such as Curata.
Mary Meeker is predicting that the amount of content and data online will double in 2014. This has profound implications on how we consume this data, and places a greater urgency and need for curation of that content. In this article, Raj De Datta lays out 6 trends for the coming year, and among them is the growing need for combing through all of the data that is online:
Search marketers can expect to process a tsunami of information. The rate of data creation is accelerating as it becomes simpler for businesses and consumers to create, publish, curate, and share data.
A similar strategy can be applied to curated content. Start with looking at newsletters, ask your audience what they are interested in seeing more of and then adjust your curation techniques to meet the need.
Ricoh VP of Marketing Sandra Zoratti shares some insights for CMI readers on the "listen-ask-share" approach she uses for content creation and outreach.
Infographic illustrating how and what to share on social chanells. Ethical curation is also as important as knowing what the rights are for sharing on social platforms.
As more and more marketers and others curate content in their content marketing efforts, they need to be aware of the legalities of using content that isn't theirs.
Pawan Deshpande's blog post outlining 5 rules for Ethical Curation should also be considered while curating.
We found similar results that marketers are itching for ways to measure their content. We conducted our second annual B2B Marketing Trends report late last year that cites that 87% of marketers are using content marketing which is a 5% increase over 2011.
Content marketing remains the bright, shiny objet du jour for marketers, even as they work to figure out how to best implement it and measure results. Content marketing is attracting its share of marketers' budgets -- 12% on average -- and more than half of marketers plan to spend even more in the coming year, according to a survey Ad Age conducted in late 2012 of nearly 600 marketers.
Is the future of Facebook "curating" for you? Is this really curation?
Facebook is holding a mysterious press conference on Tuesday. There are many conflicting reports about what's going to be announced. (Some of them from the same publications.. We don't know what's coming Tuesday. But, thanks to a source who has been given briefings at Facebook, we do know about one secret project Facebook is working on. It's being led by one of the colleagues whom Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg trusts most, VP of products Chris Cox.
Content curation is unique among content marketing strategies because it relies on third-party off-site content. As a result, audience behavior is very different from traditional online marketing campaigns where all content is consumed within a brand’s online properties. Let’s take a look at metrics to pay attention to specifically for content curation initiatives, and just as importantly, misleading metrics that you should ignore as well. We will provide a walk through of metrics by channels for your curated content namely sites, email newsletters, social media outlets, and feeds.
The future of the web won't be about content sites that drive traffic to commerce sites. It won't be about shopping sites or price matching sites that drive consumers to the lowest price sources. The future is about curation, the thoughtful and useful aggregation and organization of content, context and commerce.
EConsultancy quotes Gabe Rivera of TechMeme around the growth of curation in the coming year as one of the major trends. Rivera talks about an objection commonly held by many about launching a curation site -- that they are competing with other curated outlets:
Rivera recently said in an interview that people launching curation projects are making a mistake thinking they are in competition with other curation sites, and that what they are really in competition with is Facebook and Twitter’s personalized feed.
Article by Pawan Deshpande, CEO of Curata - talks about how content marketing is on the rise and how traditional marketing mediums have seen a decrease.
2012 was a huge year for the content marketing space, and 2013 is likely to follow suit.
When your company's corporate communications staff looks back on what the big trend was in 2012, undoubtedly they're going to think "content curation." (Source: Social Media Today) For many chief marketing officers and PR managers, curation is defined as what successful brands do on their websites, blogs and social media.
Craig Badings of Thought Leadership Strategy provides a framework on identifying a unique topic and position of interest to your prospects. While he talks about this in the context of developing a thought leadership strategy, it is also a prerequisite process to any content curation initiative:
... identify whether anyone else already occupies this space. If so you may be two steps behind already. Thought leaders are always two steps ahead. Then research your market to gain an in depth understanding of their issues and possible solutions.
Many people abuse content curation by simply retweeting worthless content:
In many instances, it is easier to re-tweet something that appears in your newsfeed, even if it’s not that relevant to your industry, than to come up with new material. However, this wastes a valuable opportunity to engage your online stakeholders.
The Canadian Public Relations Society suggests a CIA framework (not not that CIA), but Current, Interesting, & Applicable methodology to decide what content is worth sharing, posting and curating.
Steve Rosenbaum walks through how to create a generic curation strategy. Specifically he focuses on how to plan a video curation strategy, how to determine what sources are appropriate for your visitors, and how you invite and curate user-generated and user-submitted content.
A guest article on CMO.com from Curata about their recent B2B marketing trends survey that highlights the prevalent use of content marketing online, and the growing success of curation a strategy. One interesting finding from the article:
Forty-three percent of content curators are measuring their content curation programs, and 32 percent of those curators have been successfully curating for more than two years.