Tag: User-generated content

How to harvest content in the age of ‘trusted relationships’…

Michael Moon – author of the book Firebrands – hypothesized prophetically and correctly 15 years ago when he stated that we had moved beyond the information age to the age of trusted relationships. I always found this curious because we had just entered the era of the personal internet – surely THIS was the information age! What was Moon thinking?

Just a few years later, however, Eric Schmidt of Google stated:

Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003, according to Schmidt. That’s something like five exabytes of data, he says.

Let me repeat that: we create as much information in two days now as we did from the dawn of man through 2003.

“The real issue is user-generated content,” Schmidt said. He noted that pictures, instant messages, and tweets all add to this.

So apparently Moon really nailed it when he said that we would need to rely on trust networks in order to manage all the information we need to do our jobs; networks of trusted sites, searches and sources that would wade through all these exabytes with surgical precision and deliver the goods we need to do nourish our expertise.

Recently, author Nilofer Merchant added a new aspect to the ‘trust network’ discussion in her book 11 Rules for Creating Value in the Social Era [affiliate link] when she pointed out that another aspect of work in the #socialera – work is now freed from jobs:

“This means that human resources change when most of the people who create value are neither hired nor paid by you. And competition has changed so that any company can achieve the benefits of scale through a network of resources”.

Merchant, Nilofer (2012-09-12). 11 Rules for Creating Value in the Social Era (Kindle Locations 665-676). Perseus Books Group. Kindle Edition.

As Schmidt says the real issue is user-generated content. People all over the internet are posting, pinning and tweeting up a storm! We can leverage all this activity for our own thought leadership if we simply track the sites, searches and sources that publish in our brand space and then leverage that content to provide social proof of our own thought leadership…

I’ll try to explain it better here:
http://youtu.be/v-JuBUg1nmU

http://youtu.be/q_02PmfLvhQ

Here’s a growing list of tools that help me track the sites, searches and sources I need to nourish my thinking:

[listly id=”6P9″ layout=”full”]

 

This list will have a permanent home on the site here. Questions? Feedback? Specifically, do you have a cool tool that I missed?

4

David Meerman Scott

I think someone must have peed in David Meerman Scott‘s cornflakes a couple of weeks back. He was so hacked off that he went off on a rant on content curation:

You may have noticed that content curation has grown very quickly as a way for people and organizations to publish on the Web.

Sure, there are some benefits to this effort. But as a strategy for generating attention for yourself or your business, content curation is nowhere near as powerful as generating original content.

Content curation

Unlike writing your own blog post or shooting your own video, content curation simply involves pointing to others’ work.

Services like Scoop.it and Paper.li have sprung up to make it easy for anyone to publish an online magazine by linking to anything on the Web.

Yes, there is value in pointing to others work. But that is the point – it is other people’s work, not your own.

Many organizations use guest writers to create content, which in my mind is another form of content curation. Nothing wrong with having a guest blog post now and then, but if you never showcase your own peoples’ ideas, I think it is a mistake.

Original Content: The focus a successful marketing [sic]

The best way to generate attention is to create original web content including text based information (sites, blogs, a Twitter feed), video content, photographs, infographics, and the like.

You brand yourself as an organization worthy of doing business with. Done well, an added bonus is that the search engines rank the content highly and people are eager to share the content on their social networks.

And hey if you generate some interesting stuff, then the content curators will link to you!! Wouldn’t you rather have the links come in?” via Content Curation: A Poor Substitute for Original Content | Social Media Today.

Now David’s a really smart guy — I even own his book “The Rules of Marketing & PR” — but this article doesn’t reflect that especially on the topic of curation…

The kind of curation David talks about is only one kind of curation — linking to other people’s content. This post is another type of curation. Sure, I point to David’s site and quoted a couple of his paragraphs but I’m adding my own value by pointing out that there’s another form of curation that David chose not to consider but that actually adds value. It looks alot like this…

There is a ‘wrong’ way and a ‘right’ way to curate and a lot of it carries over from the ‘wrong’ way and ‘right’ way to write a term paper; correctly leveraging a quote is appropriate and brings power to your writing and your Search Engine Optimization [SEO] done properly. Like this post.

0

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?

Related articles by Zemanta
4

Start a Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑