An Introducion to (and an Interview with) Gary Kim

Curation Insights (Mar 5 2012)

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   I'd like to welcome Gary Kim to the curation team here at Curata. Gary will be providing his curation skills to our blog along with some great insights through some original content in the next few months. Some of you may already be familiar with Gary and his work through the Content Marketing Institute and other organizations. If not, I'd like to provide an introduction to Gary, and I also conducted a quick interview to get his thoughts on our ever growing Curation industry, along with getting a few tips on how he tackles curation.

   Gary, I know you have a background in journalism, how did you get to where you are now?
   I've been a journalist for nearly 30 years, magazines and newspapers mostly in the early days, and almost exclusively online and social today. I generally have worked only in business-to-business media. I've had every job title, from publisher to staff writer. But what I really love is writing. I keep coming back to it, even though, from time to time I've taken time off to work at a telecom company, a streaming media start-up, and a couple of market research firms.
   
   On the other hand, my time away from writing has been really important. You have a much better sense of how to right for business audiences when you are actually working inside such organizations, and you realize people are really way too busy to spend much time reading much of anything not directly related to internal job requirements.
   
   If you want people to spend their valuable time with your media product, it better add value, consistently. Otherwise it really is just a waste of your reader's time.

   What do you find to be most successful technique while you're curating?
   You really have to be a journalist. Media is about "audiences," first and foremost. The way I'd put matters is that journalism is always about audiences, where marketing is always about prospects. That's why content marketing really is a new discipline. You have to produce content in way that makes the audience your boss, even when the pressure to make "our sales funnel" the boss is always there. Still, there has to be a business outcome for doing so.

   You've done a lot of content marketing for a number of different organizations, what are some of the biggest No-No's you see companies do?
   Well, it might be more accurate to say I've been a content creator and curator in a content marketing setting, for a number of firms whose products are hardware or software. The biggest hurdle, in general, is getting people used to the idea that "we curate or write about what our readers care about." The engagements tend to come from marketing staffs, who are of course much more used to "telling stories about us, or our products."
   
   On the other hand, I have learned not to worry about that. Brands either get it, or they don't. You can't convince them if they don't already believe it.

   One of the big challeneges new curators face is finding the right topic to curate on. In your opinion, what are some techniques you use to find the right topic?
   It's a matter of news judgment, which is always hard to explain. Basically, you have to think first like your audience does. What's important to them? What do they care about? In a B2B context, those are fundamentally questions that relate to how they make and lose money. That means trying to find out what is new, what is different, what is unusual, what is dangerous or highly lucrative. Usually that means bigger developments that affect how businesses make money, compete better in markets and get, or lose, customers. It's not a formula, but a matter of judgment and experience.

   Where do you see the curation industry going this year?
   I suspect, given the much higher "buzz" about content marketing, that content curation is going to ride that wave, as well, in 2012. I tend to be suspicious of hype such as "Year of X." That almost always turns out to be wrong. But such appellations almost always indicate a possible, and important, longer term trend.

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