I’m a huge fan of curation as a means of attracting attention to your thought leadership position. Here’s a great perspective from HubSpot on the value of curation done well…

Curated content, or content aggregated from various sources into one comprehensive resource (be it a blog post, an ebook, a presentation, etc.) can be a valuable part of any marketer’s content mix. That said, the process of actually curating it isn’t easy.

There’s a misconception among marketers that curated content is lazy and unoriginal, but we think it’s the complete opposite. It takes time and careful evaluation to create quality curated content, and the result is oftentimes a very valuable piece of content that helps people seeking information on a given topic to cut through the clutter on the web and save time. After all, what’s better than one awesome resource? How about 15 awesome resources? All accessible in one place! There’s a reason art galleries are so popular.

So how can you take advantage of the power of curated content? Here are our top 10 ideas for great curated content.

Source: 10 Great Ideas for Valuable Curated Content

Go to the source if you want the 10 great ideas. Here are some of my greatest posts and screencasts on the topic of how to do it…
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Some of my ‘greatest hits’ on the topic of curation for content marketing…

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Some of my ‘greatest hits’ on the topic of curation for content marketing…

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Still not convinced on the topic of curation? Read on…

Curation is now a necessity. The web is full of content. More than a person could consume in several lifetimes if all they did was sleep a couple hours per day and surf the web, life after life.

Google can’t help us with our internet A.D.D.  Nor can Facebook or Alltop.

The best we’ve been able to do so far to harness the massive information overload is use tools like Google Reader and RSS feed aggregators like Alltop.  They’ve helped, to be sure, but no one is going through all that information and picking out the best of the best and making sense of it all for you.

Rather than start a new site with the goal of creating a bunch of new content, it’s time for people to think about being content curators.  Organizing and commenting on the best content around a certain topic.

Curators still use blog software to publish their content, but the vast majority of each post is made up of carefully reviewed and organized 3rd party information.

Jack Humphrey says it well here and I encourage you to follow the ‘via’ link and read his 11 reasons. Me? I am the self-styled ‘king of curation’ and my ‘e1evation workflow’ allows you to curate content better and faster than any other system I know of with maximum effect. Comment, call or ‘connect’ so we can talk about how this applies to your organization…

Long before I was a website developer, I was in sales and sales management. The other day, I had a convo with a fellow sales puke and we were discussing the top 3 sales movies of all time. They were, in our opinions, Glengarry Glen Ross, Boiler Room and, of course, Tommy Boy! Here’s the best sales team meeting of all time imho [warning: NSFW!]…

Blake, Alec Baldwin’s sales manager character says ABC means ‘always be closing’, but if you’re a blogger I say ABC means ‘always be curating’!

In my weltanschauung [worldview for those of you behind on your German], blogging, on one level, is little more than the public e-mailing and bookmarking. After all, what is a blog post but a “to whom it may concern” memo to the world? Because most people save bookmarks and send e-mails and links to one another they already have the basic instincts they need for thought leadership marketing. They are however using tools that are sub optimal for the task at hand. Even the person who has 1 million people in their address book cannot match the reach of a tool that can reach out to 2 billion people on the Internet.

What then are the right tools? I believe they are the 10+ tools in the elevation workflow

  • Google Chrome
  • Gmail
  • Google Reader and Feedly
  • Shareaholic
  • Posterous
  • WordPress
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • MailChimp
  • YouTube
  • Dlvr.it

I firmly believe that anyone who wants to be a thought leader can use this combination of tools to establish their public point of view. Many people are using some or all of these tools but have not aligned them in an optimal fashion.

I want to take a moment to talk about Shareaholic. When teaching social media I tell my classes if you only add one extension to Google Chrome [or Firefox], make it Shareaholic. Why? Because Shareaholic is the one tool that allows you to always be curating. With the Shareaholic extension installed I am always ready to share content to the appropriate channel in my vast Internet publishing empire. Shareaholic, I have said earlier, is the Swiss Army knife of sharing. Allow me to demonstrate…

Curation not only adds authority to your public brand, but it will also rock your SEO. Shareaholic is the secret to my success, because with it, to paraphrase Night Ranger, I’m curating and blogging 25 hours a day…

I believe that the elevation workflow is a kick ass solution for thought leadership marketing. Comment, call or ‘connect’ so we can talk about how this applies to your organization — I’m always available for Personal Digital Coaching on the ‘e1evation workflow’…

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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