Sean Carton wrote an interesting piece, Become a Content Curation King. He first noted that this high flying buzzword is not actually a word. My spell checker agrees but I am sure that Webster will add it soon. He defines curation as “the act of sorting through the vast amounts of content on the web and presenting it in a coherent way, organized around a specific topic(s).” Sean gores on the rightly note that this has been going on for some time with many blog providing links to interesting stuff (such as this post) and that portals did the same thing in the 90s.
So what is new? Sean quotes NYU Professor Clay Shirky: "Curation comes up when search stops working…[and] when people realize that it isn't just about information seeking, it's also about synchronizing a community." Sean goes on to add that it's the "community" part that's at the heart of the whole curation movement …Just as a carefully-curated museum exhibit is sure to draw like-minded people together, carefully-curated content on the web has the potential to attract (and/or build) an online community of people who are into the same stuff.”
Sean provides a number of useful suggestions for how you can make curation work for your brand. I think the tips are not limited to marketing as curation can serve many functions. He begins by noting that you must think like a curator and simply be an aggregator. First, you need to know your audience and make a commitment to meeting their needs. Think about your niche and help the community make sense of its niche. Provide an ongoing resource (not just an event) and offer an attractive user experience.
These are all useful suggestions. I will add more. Select some useful tools to help you with the curation process. If you spend too much energy looking for useful content, it will interfere with your ability to make sense of it. This is where the Darwin Awareness Engine™ can help. It is specifically designed to help content curators. I have covered it a good bit on this blog and will not go into too may details now. You can find an overview of the Awareness Engine here, a manual here and a list of FAQs here.
Rob Paterson used the Awareness Engine as he acted as a content curator for the St. Louis community around the topic of immigration through their PBS station, KETC. Rob said that “what I have found incredibly helpful about Darwin is the uncovering of emerging trends and gaining clarity on the issues…The value of Darwin is that on a daily basis it starts to reveal patterns of content on the Web. It could be immigration but it could be anything.” Rob said it saved him several hours a day by bringing together the content on immigration in one source. He could focus on the results rather than spending a great del of time looking. Darwin works best in the hands of a skilled curator who knows his or her topic well. Then they can see the anomalies and pull out the interesting and useful content.
The fight for the content, also known as fight for information, everyone even causing stuff just to have news first, king of content, so you say.
Posted by: Content King | November 03, 2011 at 02:11 PM