"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
A deep insightful interview with Maria Popova, the architect behind Brain Pickings. Maria talks about her daily life as well as how she finds content, consumes it, generates new thoughts and ideas. As a professional curator, she cites discipline and regularity as an important factor:
Because the volume of what I need to get done in a day is so enormous, I’m super disciplined and there’s a routine to my day that helps center and move me along.
Even if you are curating only as a small part of your daily job, it's worth a read to get in the mindset of a professional.
How do SEO and Content Marketing meet and mingle? Where is the line? How does an integrated approach rank? This blog post sheds some light.
Content marketing is a huge, vitally important part of company and marketing strategy. But if you’re considering content marketing as an alternative to SEO, you must first understand integrated marketing across search, digital, and offline channels.
Slides from Elizabeth Weaver Engel of Spark Consulting on "Attention Doesn't Scale: The Role of Content Curation in Membership Associations" for the Indiana Society of Association Executives. In her presentation she specifically focuses on applications of content curation for membership associations saying that:
A case study of one curator, Scott Beale, and his lead at Laughing Squid, who has accelerate this branding of his web hosting business by curating interesting content that has nothing to do with web hosting:
His company's core business is web hosting. But Laughing Squid is far better known as a curator of interesting, odd and - above all - unique finds in culture, art and technology.
A curated collection of the voters hitting the polls yesterday during the election.
After months of campaigning, rallies and debates, Americans voted Tuesday to re-elect President Barack Obama, who held off a challenge for the White House by Republican Gov. Mitt Romney.
Blog post on how content curation helps with lead generation with some interesting case study statistics:
- Contact conversion rate of 12% (contact forms).
- Qualified leads are approximately 50% or more of the captured contacts (meeting the customer persona, company profile and lead scoring efforts).
- Sales-ready leads (prospect) after one month of capture data is approximately 20%.
A concise list of great tips on how to get that blog done with out skimping on quality.
Advice on how struggling old-world agencies can quickly pivot to focus on content and editorial needs of their customers:
Your brand narrative simply isn’t enough — customers want information. They want justification. They want value. They want proof. And brands must sustain the ability to deliver on these needs every day.
Great example of curated content working.
I had a chance to publish my article in the Cellular Therapy and Transplantation journal in which I wrote about how I try to save time by using social media tools, how I do crowdsourcing in medicine and how I develop Webicina.com.
Resourceful Mommy criticizes instances where curators have curated content unethically. There's a fine line between ethical and unethical curation and this post highlights a few examples of where it has been crossed. For example, even if you cite the source, which source you cite is important:
It is not okay to list Pinterest.com as the source for the content you are sharing just as you would not list Google.com as a source. Imagine getting to the Bibliography of your college term paper and listing “Library” and the address where the building is located. That is precisely what these authors did.
Many marketers wonder what content will work best for their marketing objectives. Here are a few quick suggestions on five types of content if you are going for thought leadership specifically including: News, Tips and Advice, Resource Pages, Case Studies & Reports, and Infographics.
Chief Content Officer magazine interviews Bryan Rhoads the editor in chief in Intel's newly launched curation site IQ. Bryan says that unlike other brands, they are curating to simply feed the content beast, and not create a destination:
Our strategy is not to create a destination, but to feed the social graph. You’re not going to pour your morning cup of coffee and go dial up IQ.Intel.com. Instead you’re going to see our stories on Facebook, Twitter, Google+. It’s a platform built for sharing.
Overview of a few select brands that are creating exceptional content as a part of their marketing efforts:
...we've compiled a starter list of B2B companies that create killer content on a regular basis to keep prospects coming back to their website and engaging with their business. Still think your company is too boring to create compelling content? You might want to think again.
Kevin, a medical librarian and archivist, presents a data curation model for librarians that parallels the content curation process followed by many marketers:
Digital preservation and data curation are two areas that librarians should be very keen to pursue. With the influx of research data that is created, there should be plenty of work out there for librarians to utilize their skills. The collaborative and organizational nature of data curation work is ideal for a librarian’s skill set.
Dell launches a corporate page on Pinterest:
The Dell Pinterest page was started in March 2012. Though it is just a little over four months old, it is growing steadily, with a few new pins every week. We have ideas for some new boards that will enable us to keep communicating our growth as a company as well as what we stand for.
Replacemyself.com launches content curation training module for their subscribers and Filipino VAs.
The process works works by filtering or “cherry-picking” the best information out there about your niche and placing that information on your blog or website.
Search meets social in an entirely new content curation site, ROCKzi, which lets people visually consume and share important news and events. The co-founders of the search engine blekko created the site. If ROCKzi can attract users, combining it with blekko would give marketers and advertisers the long-awaited social-search engine supported by analytics tools. ROCKzi supports searchable topics in 33 news boards for categories like fashion, tech, sports and politics.
HubSpot suggests "curating" peer and expert content such as social media threads testimonial quotes, case studies and featuring them very prominently on your site. This lets prospects trust you more than you doing all the talking:
While it's great to provide your own take on your product and the industry, you are of course biased, so providing any third-party recommendations -- from users or experts -- is a great way to ease a prospects' decision to go with your company. At HubSpot, for example, we curate social media threads, blog articles, and case studies from customers and experts and feature them on our website -- even on our homepage .
Fast Company talks about automation versus a human curator and decides its best to mix up the two:
The companies that are truly winning over audiences and driving consumers are the ones that are experimenting with a balance of automated aggregation and human-directed curation. It's a process of out-sourcing and in-sourcing.
A robust list prepared by Robin Good of current content curation tools, categorized into categories.
Blog post highlighting 4 ways higher education can utlitize cotnent curation for their students.
Whether its’s via social media, email newsletters, or university webpages ... four ways that for-profit universities can serve their students using curated content
An overview of the process used to create brand engagement.
Set goals. Not every content curation program has the same set of goals, which means not every content curation program will be measured by the same set of metrics to assess ROI.
A quick overview of content curation with a few real life examples of curated news content - including the Duluth Flooding in Minnesota.