Following on the popularity of my original post "6 Content Curation Examples Illustrated", here's another 6 examples of outstanding content curation for different uses cases aross the web.

1. Content Curation for Recruiting

In order to improve their brand visibility, 3M has added a widget for curated content their careers page.  This widget (highlighted in blue) contains selected curated news articles which mention 3M in a positive light.  Because this is not for a major branding or thought leadership initiative, and a simple value add to their microsite, they decided to implement this as a widget rather than a full-blown microsite.  Last month, I covered the pro's and con's of the content curation venues (microsite vs. widget vs. email newsletter).

2. Content Curation for CMO's

Adobe runs and maintains CMO.com which targets Chief Marketing Officers.  As any good content curation site should, this site contains both original thought leadership content as well as more frequently updated curated content from various marketing oriented publications such as BizReport, Adage and MediaPost among others.  Adobe has taken the high ground by positioning this as a vendor neutral site with a minimal sponsorship advertisement in the top right corner.

3. Content Curation for Category Ownership

Overture Networks runs a CNN like site entitled Carrier Ethernet News.   Carrier Ethernet is an emerging means of internet connectivity for busineses, academic institutions and metros.  Overture Networks has positioned themselves as an industry leader by selectively curating only the most pertinet content on this topic from a wide variety of telecom publications. They juxtapose that industry content with original content written by thought leaders in their company with call to actions that lead to their website.  As a result, they have created a central industry destination and over time have risen in search engine rankings as well.

4. Content Curation for Industry Newsletters

SmartBrief produces 25 industry specific daily newsletters with curated content from around the web.  They do not produce original content themselves, but rather add value by finding the most relevant content on these specific industries and editorializing the snippets, which are delivered by email newsletters. Over time, they have built a subscriber base of over 3 million subscribers.

5. Content Curation for Technology and Web 2.0 News

With the advent of the blogosphere, TechMeme was launched by Gabe Rivera in 2005 as a purely automated content aggregator of Web 2.0 and Technology news.  It grew in popularity but in 2008, they came to the realization that aggregation was fundamentally broken because computers alone did not have insight into what really made a breaking headline.  As a result, they famously announced they were hiring an editor and moved to a curation model where the technology finds the news but a curator had final editorial say.  Since then, they have continued to grow and now have a team of about six editors.  

6. Content Curation for Analysts

Recently the Yankee Group, a major IT market research and analyst firm, relaunch 4G Trends.  The site contains a mix of links to external articles on the emerging 4G mobile market, as well as original analyst insights on this space.  They also use this site as a marketing vehicle to promote various 4G events hosted by their firm.

After seeing these examples, are you inspired become a content curator?  It's not as hard as you think.  If you want to learn more, a good place to start is our new eBook "5 Simple Steps to Becoming a Content Curation Rockstar".