Tag: Curation

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  • Valuable to me, not to you. It has to be valuable to your consumers (not to you). All too often content produced at the corporate level is self-serving at best and thinly veiled advertising at worse.
  • Unique perspective. While there is a ton of content that is based on similar content that already exists, no one can bring your perspective to it. It’s your perspective that makes the content unique, and it is your challenge to nurture your content and discover your unique voice, so that more and more people find the value in those unique perspectives. As Oscar Wilde once said, “be you because others are already taken.”
  • Shareable. Value content gets shared. It not only has to  impresses the consumer, but it must be of such quality that the person consuming it feels like they should share it with the people they know because it will also be valuable to them. Great content gets shared not because you have a widget that makes it easy to share, but because it’s truly valuable.
  • Findable. Value-based content gets found. In search engines, online social networks and offline. The audience dictates the true value, and the content that is valuable gets linked to, talked about and shared. All of these little actions make the content you are producing that much more findable to those who are looking for it – and for those who will just stumble across it.
  • Curate the content. Because there is so much content being created, another way to create value-based content is to curate what already exists and focus (like a laser) on what is important to your audience. Nobody will have the ability to read everything that is being published, so any organization that can make sense of the mess is one that is adding tremendous value. I’ve seen great curation happen on Blogs, in Podcasts and in email newsletters. Becoming a respected curator adds value.
  • Value that I can count on. In a world where any one individual can publish their thoughts in text, images, audio and video instantly (and for free) to the world, it’s hard to tell what is the truth, what is opinion and, ultimately, what has value. Any organization that is creating content must be trustworthy, non-partisan and credible. It’s that last word (“credible”) where your time and energy should be spent. Before publishing any piece of content, ask yourself: “how credible will my organization be perceived once we hit the publish button?” The organizations that produce credible content are the organizations that are creating value-based content.
    • via twistimage.com

    I tell my ‘students’ that the difference between a thinker and a thought leader is that while they both have a point of view, the thought leader publishes content that is ‘searchable, findable, knowable, usable, shareable’ and through that process they may become ‘credible’ — the six ‘ibbles’ of content marketing! You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source if you’re interested in Mitch Joel’s perspective. You can also follow @danavan on Twitter for lots of great ideas on the topic…

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    John Jantsch
    Image via Wikipedia

    John Jantsch recently wrote on the topic of “Profiting from other people’s content”. He says…

    “Don’t be alarmed by that title — I’m not talking about stealing content for gain, I’m talking about adding the filtering and aggregating of content to your content consumption, creation and sharing routine.

    Pretty much everyone has bought into the idea that they need to produce lots of valuable content in order to build the trust and search engine eyes of today’s online prospect. One way to supplement your content strategy while still providing lots of value, is to get good at finding and filtering other people’s content that your prospects and customers will find useful as well. (Done right, the other people will thank you for giving a wider audience to their content).

    It should go without saying that giving credit to the original source and full attribution to the author when appropriate is a must.” Source: Profiting From Other People’s Content | Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

    John talks about his “consumption, creation and sharing routine” — my mantra is ‘listen, publish, promote’ which is a little more elegant in my book but we’re both trying to say the same thing and use an alliteration in the process. If I were John, I might go for ‘consume, create, communicate‘ — in fact, I might start using that instead. Either way, the point is that gathering good content effectively and commenting on it is a great way to build your personal brand. I’ve been using this strategy for years — most recently, I amped it up by using Posterous [another tool that John advocates] and saving more content directly to my blog instead of shared bookmarks as I used to do. Here are the results:

    I think the results are really quite good for an ‘army of one’, don’t you? I do all my ‘creation and communication’ as a result of my daily ‘consumption’ — because my system is easy to implement and use, I work it frequently. I call quoting other sites ‘curation’ and my rare original thoughts ‘creation’. The curation works to draw people to my creation. Does it work? You betcha [you’re reading this, aren’t you?]. The average person drawn into my blog through effective communication reads 3.3 pages and spends 2:52 minutes on the site, while only 4.75% ‘bounce’ to another site. Over 71% are new visitors…

    Jantsch goes on to give three tactical implementations of his ‘profiting from content’ suggestion. They are…

    “Make yourself a better resource

    Creating a habit of filtering content related to your industry, products, competitors and customers will make you better at what you do, allow you to keep up with trends and give you data to help you build deeper relationships with customers.

    Share content to draw attention

    Pointing out useful resources and good finds is a great way to build your social media and blog followings. Consistently sharing relevant links and sharing them on Twitter is a strategy that many find helps them be seen as follow worthy. Creating a once a week blog post roundup of good stuff is a great way to add content and keep readers engaged.

    Filter personalized content

    A more advanced strategy is to use your filter skills to create your own industry research briefs. If you specialize in several market niches you can create laser specific new pages and email newsletter roundups that feature the best of what you find each week. You can even use RSS technology to deliver dynamically changing web content password protected for your best clients.” Source: Profiting From Other People’s Content | Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

    Clearly, John and I share a lot of the same ‘common sense’. He goes on to list 10 different resources [you can follow the link] you can use as tools to find other people’s content. One of them — Kurrently — is one I’ll have to add to my toolkit. For me, however, this is where we part ways. My paradigm is “Google Reader is the answer. Now what is the question?“.

    I use Google Reader like a tactical nuke. It’s the one tool I use to manage the ‘rest of the internet’ and I use it like a virtual newspaper or better yet, news bureau, where I manage hundreds of little newsbots that do my news aggregation for me. I have 5 great ways to get relevant content into Google Reader and they include most of John’s 10 tools — it’s just that in my book, Google Reader is the one tool that rules them all. It really is the driver in my ‘e1evation workflow’ outlined below. Either you get it and you can use it or I can help you implement it but the point is that if you have a brand and you want to build it online, we can help…

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    Personal brands vs. corporate brands…

    “As the Millenial Generation comes online in the business world, corporate leaders will increasingly need to factor how-to deal with “personal brands” in their thinking.

    While we’ve all grown accustomed to the fact that prospective employers will be Googling us and scouring our Facebook profiles for incriminating photos, at some point the reverse will also be true: star employees will carefully evaluate the reputation and socialstreams of their would-be employers, to determine whether they want to associate their personal brand with that of the corporation. This will only accelerate as the improving economy increases young employees’ options.

    It makes sense. It takes an incredible commitment to cultivate a personal brand. To go from 3 Facebook friends to 3,000 is no small feat; same goes for Twitter — to grow a personal fan base requires a savvy combination of content creation, curation, promotion and cool.

    Why would someone go to the trouble of grooming their social graph into a consequential aspect of their job market attractiveness, only to grab at the first offer from a crappy company whose own reputation (or following) is not as impeccable or large as the employee’s own?” Source: “Our Corporate Brand is Cramping My Personal Brand”

    Interesting. I’m evaluating a couple of merger offers at the moment and my personal brand [or my corporate brand – same thing for me as a freelancer] is better than either of the corporate brands that I’m considering…

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    How To Provide Attribution in the Blogging World

    John Maxwell Speaks at Grand Nationals
    Image by Old Shoe Woman via Flickr

    Though the Internet has no set guidelines for how to provide attribution, one rule is clear: Links are the currency of the Web.

    If you use someone else’s content, whether licensed directly or through fair use, it is important to be sure to provide a clickable link to the original site if at all possible. This not only helps visitors to your site find the original work, but also provide SEO benefits for the creator of the content and guards against your site from being mistaken by the search engines as the original work.

    With that in mind, let us take a look at several common situations many bloggers find themselves in and the way most feel is appropriate to attribute them.

    1. Quoting: If the original work is part of a larger work, for example block quoting part of another article, an inline link is usually all that is required. Typically, when inline linking, you mention the person’s name and/or the site they write for and link to the original article. This can be done very easily in any blogging application and takes only seconds to do.
    Go to the source of the quote here: blogherald.com

    Many of my students ask me about my curation style. My understanding is based on articles like the one I quoted here. To date, only two people have ever complained about being quoted on my blog; John Maxwell and an obscure blogger from South Dakota. With over 2,700 posts I’m satisfied that I’m compliant with internet standards. Questions? Feedback?

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    5 Steps to Reduce the Pain of Starting a Business Blog

    Darren Rowse - Photography Blogger Extrodinaire
    Image by kk+ via Flickr

    Blogging can be intimidating for someone who hasn’t done it in the past or grown up in the age where everyone has a personal blog.  It is, however, critical that business owners and marketers ‘blog for business.’  Putting pen to paper or more appropriately, putting fingers to your keyboard is the biggest challenge for most people.  So let’s talk about how to get started.

    via blog.hubspot.com

    If you’re interested in blogging but not sure how to get started, you’ll want to follow the ‘via’ link above to read the rest of this article. If you’re going to start, I encourage you to set a goal of posting once per day. If that seems like a lot, remember that all your content does not need to be original! In my book, there are two main types of posts; creation [original thoughts] and curation [quoting someone’s content with proper attribution]. I uses tools like Gist and Google Reader to listen to subject matter experts in my field, quote their articles, and then post my opinion just like I’m doing now…

    Comment, call or use the contact form to connect so we can talk about how this applies to your business!

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    Tumblr Leaves Posterous in the Dust [?!]

    Image representing Posterous as depicted in Cr...
    Image via CrunchBase

    Rising social media rockstar Kelly Neuville of Envano sent me an article from ReadWriteWeb [you can follow the ‘via’ link below the graph to the source and read the rest of the article if you’re interested] that would seem to suggest at first glance that I should abandon my love of the Posterous platform in favor of my first interest in this space, Tumblr. If I apply logic like this at every level in my life, I would learn a lesson from the flies on my farm and favor a steady diet of cow manure — after all, the sheer volume of their vote would indicate that manure is clearly a better food product, right? :-D

    Now I’m not saying that Kelly was wrong to send me the article or that Tumblr = cow manure, although it would appear my analogy is heading in that direction. What I am saying is that there will always be a reason why the masses favor one product over another and it may have nothing to do with elegance or technological superiority. I posted the same data from a different perspective yesterday here; the article postulates that ‘The growth in Tumblr’s visitors probably has something to do with its popularity among celebs.’ and says ‘Earlier this week John Mayer made waves this week by shutting down his Twitter account, where he had 3.7 million followers, and switching to Tumblr full time.’ If that’s the case, then Tumblr has an ‘unfair advantage’ — it’s becoming the destination of choice for the MySpace crowd. My response? Meh…

    via readwriteweb.com

    Laura Ingraham was right — entertainers should shut up and sing. What I want to know is what are the thought leaders using? I was really impressed with Tumblr until I saw that Guy Kawasaki picked Posterous for his Holy Kaw! blog and then I wondered “what did I miss”?! And what about social media rockstar Steve Rubel? And what about me? Seriously, Posterous rocks at the two most important things I could expect any blogging tool to do; ingest almost any content for creation and curation effortlessly and autopost as part of my homebase and outpost strategy. I use Posterous as the foundation of my ‘e1evation workflow‘ and it made me one of the top thought leaders in my industry on the internet rapidly elevating my site to within the top 40k of all websites in the US in 3 months. I will and I have put my humble Posterous blogs up against the best and they’ve held their ground — believe me when I say I have no fear of Katy Perry on Tumblr…

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    The importance of curation

    From a 30,000 foot view, there are two types of bloggers; creators and curators. Let’s talk about curation as an ‘art’ form…

    “Content aggregation (the automated gathering of links) can be seen on sites like Google News. Overall, this type of aggregation has been seen as a positive thing for content creators and publishers, and up until very recently, it was left to technology. Content creation, meanwhile, was a human effort.

    But all that changes with curation — the act of human editors adding their work to the machines that gather, organize and filter content.

    “Curation comes up when search stops working,” says author and NYU Professor Clay Shirky. But it’s more than a human-powered filter. “Curation comes up when people realize that it isn’t just about information seeking, it’s also about synchronizing a community.”

    Part of the reason that human curation is so critical is simply the vast number of people who are now making and sharing media. “Everyone is a media outlet”, says Shirky. “The point of everyone being a media outlet is really not at all complicated. It just means that we can all put things out in the public view now.”

    Who are curators? What can they gather and re-publish? Do they have the right to get paid for curation? If so, who’s adding the real value, the content makers or the curators/publishers?

    For creators — people who’ve spent their careers making content and trying to sort out an economic model — curation can seem like an end-run around hard work. And so the conflict ultimately comes down to this: Is curation about saving money? Or about adding value? The answer, it appears, is “yes” to both.

    http://curationnation.magnify.net/embed/player/?layout=&playlist_cid=&media_type=video&content=X4R3BR2QN5MNHDJC&widget_type_cid=svp

    “A lot of it is economic — doing more with less — and it has crossed every media industry,” explains Allen Weiner of Gartner Group. “If you think about the tools you want to give an editor to make him or her more complete, you want to give them curation tools.” It could be “something they add to their own content. As more old media companies attempt to do more with less, publishing tools that allow this efficiency without demeaning the product quality … [are] going to be very important.”

    So certain things are clear — there’s an economic imperative to add curation to the content mix. And from a user perspective, well done curation is a huge value-add in a world where unfiltered signal overwhelms noise by an ever increasing factor.” Source: Why Content Curation Is Here to Stay

    My guess is that this blog is 3% creation and 97% curation. Does it work? You’re here, aren’t you?

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    Creators and Curators

    From my perspective, there are two main types of blog content; creation and curation…

    “The idea behind curators and content curation is that there is such a flood of new content pouring through the Internet pipes these days that being aware of all of it and sorting it out in meaningful ways is simply not possible. Curators are people or organizations that do the hard work of sifting through the content within a particular topic area or “meme” and pulling out the things that seem to make most sense. This effort involves significantly more than finding and regurgitating links, though.” Source: Who are your curators? | Content curator | Digital Curator

    You don’t have to ‘create’ original content in order have original blog content — you can curate content from other thought leaders for incorporation into your site. The content you aggregate from other sites [properly attributed, of course] along with your perspective is a public reflection of your brand as well! I rarely post anything without at least one quote from another thought leader — in fact, it’s usually those quotes [like the one in this post] that encourage me to weigh in on my blog in the first place. Where do you fall on this issue?

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    Are location-based services overrated?

    Image representing Foursquare Solutions as dep...
    Image via CrunchBase

    Please consider this…

    “Despite the buzz around location-based services, I have been ambivalent, if not skeptical about the technology.As much as social media has encouraged people to share information, I have not been convinced there is the same amount of enthusiasm for broadcasting your location.There’s the issue of privacy, as well as few “rewards” for telling the world your location.

    In many respects, however, being unconvinced about the potential of location-based services has been like a Don Quixote-like experience, particularly when you’re an enthusiastic member of the social media community. The idea that you don’t really buy into the next new thing seems almost sacrosanct.

    It was interesting and, to be honest, encouraging to read Joshua Brustein’s column in yesterday’s New York Times about whether the excitement surrounding location-based services is being driven by technology companies and investors, while consumers only seem modestly interested.

    Brustein’s column came on the heels of a Pew Internet and American Life Project survey that discovered only 4% of Americans use location services like Foursquare and Gowalla, compared with 5% last May. Even among smartphone-toting 18 to 29-year-olds, only 8% use location-based services.

    It may just be that location-based services won’t be widely embraced. Or it could be that location-based services have yet to find their sweet spot. However you want to explain it, the reality is location-based services have failed to live up to lofty expectations as social media’s next hot thing.

    Perhaps Facebook’s entry into the market will change things, particularly if consumers are attracted to the link between the company’s Places and Deals services.

    Or maybe not. It could be that most people have no use for location-based services despite the best efforts of companies and investors.

    After all, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink” Source: Do Consumers Really Want Location-based Services? | Social Media Today

    When I teach ‘curation’ as a form of blogging, I usually say that the author’s comment can be ‘yes, no or maybe so’. In this case, my response is a ‘maybe so’, but I’m leaning toward no. Let me tell you why…

    Something like 87% of Americans have cell phones. Of that, 25% have smartphones. That number is projected to grow to 50% in 2011. The default mapping application on the two fastest growing platforms is Google Maps. Google just released a new product called Hotpot that makes it easy for patrons to write reviews directly on to Google Maps. Think about the implications. Say someone’s driving through Algoma, WI on their way to Door County and they’re looking for a place to grab a bite. They check Google Maps to see the options and as they try to decide, they check the reviews from Hotpot directly on Google Maps. Unfortunately, earlier that week someone had a rare bad experience at one of their choices. Do you think that won’t have an impact?

    Michael Moon quoted Peter Drucker astutely in his book ‘Firebrands’ over a decade ago when he said that we’ve moved beyond the information age to the aged of ‘trusted relationships’. I believe that tech-savvy people with smartphones are going to change the face of American retail business by holding retailers accountable through mobile tools that allow them to report good or bad experiences immediately as they happen. These ‘trusted’ mobile ‘relationships’ will have the power to guide purchasing decisions at the mobile ‘point of sale’ like an endcap in a grocery store, directing potential customers to the ‘right’ place. Smart business owners will keep an eye on this trend…

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