Simply gathering stuff won’t cut it. You have to be selective. Very selective. And you have to know how to judge your audience. There can be a learning curve there for anyone and for any business, but analytical skills and critical thinking skills are vital to the process.
News curators must collect, summarize, make sense, add value, attribute, link, intrigue and entice.
Digital First Media announced today that Julie Westfall will lead our curation team, joined by Angi Carter and Karen Workman.
I am delighted with our selections for this team and look forward to working with them as they explore and demonstrate what a news curation team should be.
Mandy Jenkins introduces the candidates in her blog. Here I will discuss our expectations for those team members as well as for other Digital First journalists who will curate local content.
Successful curation will make sense on its own if you don’t click through to any of the content you are curating, but will entice many people to click through and read or watch more. Finding and presenting the collected content is important, but effective curation boosts the experience of each of the pieces by presenting multiple pieces in a context that enhances your understanding of each piece.
Link and attribute
Linking and attribution are the nearly non-negotiable ethical principles of curation. Curation derives much of its value from other people’s original work. You can can and should add value using the techniques discussed later here. But you must absolutely attribute and you must absolutely link. In almost all cases, you should both attribute and link.
Attribution should be complete, citing the journalist and news organization, if both are identified in the original source. Vague references such as “media reports” or passive verbs such as “was reported” are not sufficient. Even if the source is a competitor, attribute completely and by name.
If you are citing non-journalism sources, you still should attribute as completely as possible, identifying the person, organization and/or site. Embedded tweets don’t need attribution if the username, shown in the tweet, makes the attribution clear, but if a username doesn’t identify a person and/or organization clearly, you should provide that attribution in text if you know it.
An exception would be a Storify where you are compiling lots of tweets that are essentially a conversation among the public, where the individual identities aren’t a key to the story. Slowing that flow down for real-name attribution when the tweet shows the username clearly is not necessary. But if the real name and organization are relevant, slow down and attribute.
Other embeds, such as YouTube videos and Scribd or SlideShare documents, may not make attribution as immediately evident, so you should provide attribution in text.
Sometimes the name of a person or organization is not sufficient attribution. If the person or organization is not well-known, do a little research (Google will provide quick answers in many cases; sometimes an “about us” page will help). Especially in political content, you want to note whether you are linking to partisan sources. A liberal or conservative think tank or political action committee is an entirely different kind of source from a professional media outlet or an independent fact-checking site.
Articles purporting to present research also merit some checking. Who funds the research?
Ryan Holiday’s manipulation of the media as a bogus expert, reported by Forbes, underscores why curators need to research the sources we curate.
Where you can’t learn much about the source of content you’re curating, consider crowdsourcing the question: Note the name and organization, tell readers what you’ve found and that you’re continuing research and ask them what they know about the source.
Where the source of online content is unclear, you should be clear about what you know and where you found the material. For instance, a few years ago I took a journalist to task privately for using the animated graphic below, which is widely reproduced on the web. I don’t know where it originated and I’m not sure it would be worth the trouble to find out. It’s a few years old, so it’s not likely to be newsworthy, but if it surfaces again in discussions of government efficiency, as it does from time to time, a curator who used it should note its ubiquity and note where it is being used in the current context.
Government Snow Plow… This is Priceless...
I think the only instances where you might not link (but you’d still attribute) would be if you were curating about something highly offensive, such as a pornography or a video by terrorists of a beheading or other heinous act. In those cases, the decision not to link should be a joint decision, discussed with other curation team members and editors.
You should always disclose to readers why you choose not to link. If you discuss whether to link because content is offensive and decide to link, you might consider whether you should explain that decision, too, and whether and how to offer a warning about the offensive content.
I shared with candidates for our curation team an analysis of BuzzFeed curation practices by Farhad Manjoo. I told the candidates that BuzzFeed’s curation practice, as described in the article was thoughtful and its research was effective. The BuzzFeed example examined in the greatest detail was a slide show of 21 photos that restore your faith in humanity. Manjoo noted that it was pretty clearly a mashup of two other slide shows of 13 and 7 photos, both curated by Ned Hardy, that restore your faith in humanity, though it never links to either of those lists.
Imitation is acceptable in journalism curation, but I believe curators should credit those whose ideas they use. For instance, a better way to present the photos that restore your faith in humanity would be to openly acknowledge the first two lists, choosing a few photos from each, find more than one other photo to add beyond the lists you’re mashing up (searching on terms such as “rescue” and “good Samaritan” would undoubtedly help you find a few more). And then crowdsource the growth of the list, seeking nominations for other uplifiting photos and adding them throughout the day (or a couple days if the response has some staying power).
Curators must add value
The curator adds value to the collected content in a variety of ways:
Summarize. The best curation will provide a good overview of a story or issue, so the reader gets a basic understanding whether or not they click through to the various content you have collected.
Organize. You add value by grouping related content together: You gather news reports, blog posts, tweets, videos and other content on related issues, giving the compilation value beyond the sum of its parts. The organization within the curation adds further value: grouping the pro arguments and the con arguments or telling a story chronologically from multiple sources.
Original reporting. While curation is by its nature derived from the work of others, it doesn’t have to be just a compilation of external content. Our curators will at times fill gaps with their own reporting or by including in the curation summaries from and links to original reporting by Digital First newsrooms.
Context. Curators should place news in context, linking to background materials and to related content. Much of curators’ work focuses on the news, but you should always remember the value you can add from linking to your own archives and archives of other news organizations, Wikipedia and other reference sites. Topic pages are a helpful way to provide context, giving an overview of a running issue or a person frequently in the news, with links to earlier content.
Different types of curation
Stories breaking on social media. Some stories unfold first or heavily on social media. Our curation team will track the course of those stories, in the manner of NPR’s Andy Carvin, who has provided a great model for curators in his tweeting, retweeting and Storifying of developments in the Arab Spring uprisings.
Reaction. Many days curators should consider rounding up the reaction to the top story of the day. We’ll coordinate with Digital First editors who are handling the big story(ies) of the day and discuss which stories might merit a curation of the reaction by bloggers and commentators and/or the reaction on social media. For some stories, we might mix the blog/commentator reaction with social media reaction and other times we might decide they should be separate curation projects or that we should focus on one or the other.
For instance, last month the reaction to the Supreme Court’s health care ruling was voluminous enough that separate curations of reaction on social media and by commentators might be the way to go. But the reaction to the appointment of Marissa Mayer as CEO of Yahoo, and the subsequent story that she is pregnant might have worked best with curation of blogs and social media together.
“Talker” stories. Some stories generate such conversation that the talk becomes the story. A great example would be last month’s story about the controversy in the Michigan House of Representatives over a member’s use of the word vagina during debate. The curation of that story (done for the Oakland Press by Karen Workman, who’s joining our curation team) could be a standalone project. Talker stories could come from fun trending hashtags on Twitter – newsy hashtags such as Sunday’s #RetroactiveRomney discussion or silly hashtags such as #worstwesternsever, which had a nice ride last week.
Daily features. Our curation team might develop some annual, monthly, weekly or even daily curation projects. For instance, many newspapers routinely run daily lists of celebrity birthdays. (Link to some birthday sites.) A curation team wouldn’t just rip off one of these lists. You might curate a slideshow of the people whose birthday it is or a collection of video clips. Or maybe you select one person whose birthday it is and curate a “best-of” collection of movie scenes, songs or athletic plays. Maybe you add a poll, asking users to vote for the celeb’s very best moment.
Our curation team might give the birthday approach a try for the first few weeks or months, monitoring traffic. If it’s consistently popular, then it becomes a daily routine. If not, we try something else. Even if it’s a daily routine, you can vary it depending on the news flow. The curation I compiled for today’s birthdays took about half an hour, if that, pulling in bios and video clips of three people and a link to a celebrity-birthday site that listed more. On a slow day, you might pull in more clips. On a busy day, you could feature one and link to the longer list.
Birthdays aren’t the only possibility for daily curation projects. You could do a daily “top of the news” curation that rounds up the biggest stories of the day at particular times: Maybe an early-morning roundup for people starting their day, a midday roundup for people checking the web on their lunch hours and an evening tablet-designed version. (Of course, since our newsrooms serve four different time zones, the top-of-the-news product could be continuously updated.)
Or you could do daily roundups on a number of topics: sports, health, education, humor, etc. If the birthdays catch on, we might try some other daily curations that reflect traditional newspaper content: linking to comics, horoscopes, games, puzzles and advice. Or we might do a more digital roundup, linking to or embedding clips from the previous night’s comedy shows. Popularity will be the key to which roundups become worth daily attention.
Vetting, verifying and correcting
Curators should be as skeptical as reporters. Because a curation team isn’t breaking any stories, curators should be cautious and transparent in using content that has not been confirmed.
We’ve had two great examples this year of stories where false reports could have presented traps for a curation team: the premature reports of the death of Joe Paterno and the erroneous reports by CNN and Fox, jumping prematurely to conclusions about the Supreme Court’s health care ruling.
In both cases, a curation team compiling reports from other media would be vulnerable to passing along those errors. A curation team should react quickly to the news, but doesn’t have to react instantly to the first reports.
In the Paterno case, some news sites were reporting his death, but the news site that had been leading the way in coverage of the controversy that led to his resignation – the Patriot-News of Harrisburg, Pa. – was not reporting the death. In such a case, we should not just report the death. We should take one of two approaches:
- Report that some sites had reported the death, but note that other leading sources, such as the Patriot-News, the Associated Press and the Digital First newsroom that was covering the story closely, the York Daily Record, were not yet reporting the death, and it had not been announced officially by the family, the university or the hospital.
- Seek independent confirmation of the reports of his death. In such a case, our curators probably would not have had good enough sources to get immediate answers. But by waiting until we could confirm, we would soon have seen the reports, shortly after the false report, about the family’s statement that Paterno was still alive, or would have received the statement ourselves.
In the case of the Supreme Court ruling, an effective curation team would have watched multiple sources for the first reports about the ruling and would have seen right away that SCOTUSblog was reporting a different conclusion than CNN and Fox. That confusion would be enough to either report that initial reports were conflicting or to wait a little longer to sort out the conflicts.
In either case, if the curation team decides something merits passing along, they want to attribute, hedge, place stories in context and avoid jumping to conclusions.
For instance, it wouldn’t be inaccurate to report that Penn State athletes received an email saying Paterno was dead (they did; it was bogus) and that you were seeking confirmation. And it wouldn’t be inaccurate to report that Chief Justice John Roberts said the Constitution’s commerce clause didn’t allow the individual mandate of the Affordable Care Act (he did) and that you were awaiting further information about the ruling’s conclusion as reporters finished reading the Supreme Court’s opinions. But it was inaccurate to report that Paterno was dead and that the Supreme Court overturned the health care reform law.
Our curation team is going to make errors. All journalists do. We will correct them quickly and transparently, acknowledging even small errors and explaining major ones.
Content to curate
Curators need to curate a variety of content: news reports, blogs, tweets, videos, photos. Many of the best curations will combine different types of content.
More to come on curation
The curation team will blog about the curation tools and techniques they use. They will know curation much better than I do. I plan to learn a lot from them and they will teach curation practices to their Digital First colleagues.
My earlier posts about curation
Tips on curating the community conversation
How should a news curation team work
Aggregation guidelines: Link attribute, add value
Other links about curation
Introducing the curator’s code by Maria Popova
How to make a viral hit in four easy steps by Farhad Manjoo
Curation of a conversation about curation as an occupation by Gina Dvorak
What should a curation team do? by Gina Dvorak
Some initial thoughts on #DFMcuration by Cheryl Sadler
Towards a better definition of curation in journalism by Adam Schweigert
Evaluation role is natural for curation team by Cynthia Parkhill
Useful questions for information by Cynthia Parkhill
We need a curation team today because here’s what will happen in five years by Dani Fankhauser
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Do you suffer from information overload? Do you find it difficult to organise and process the things you find online so that you can apply them productively in your day-to-day working life? If so then curation tools could transform your experience of the digital world. Increasingly seen as the ‘next big thing’ of social media, the last year has seen an explosion of different tools which can be used to manage, sort and catalogue material. However the novelty, as well as the choices available, render them confusing – what tool should you use and how should you use it? Furthermore what are the specific uses to which academics can put these tools?
Curation is the broader concept behind Pinterest, by far the most famous of these tools, which was the subject of Deborah Lupton’s great article a few weeks ago. She notes how Pinterest “draws upon the idea of older techniques of collage or scrapbooking: collecting interesting images, grouping them together under a theme and displaying them to others“. It allows the user to go round the internet, collecting images they find through the use of a convenient browser button (in a similar way to creating new browser bookmarks) and make these titled pinboards available online. Crucially, it also allows users to add a commentary to each ‘pinned’ item and, I would argue, this is where collating online material becomes curating in the proper sense of the term. As Lupton says, few academics seem to have heard of Pinterest. Yet even fewer academics, as well as internet users more broadly, seem to realise how many curation tools are out there. I briefly discuss four I’ve experimented with below though, I should stress, there are others out there. At the heart of all these tools are the same core practical tasks which anyone working in an information rich environment faces: collecting, sorting, evaluating and sharing information.
While Pinterest is primarily focused on images, the others are, arguably, more versatile. Furthermore as Lupton astutely points out of Pinterest and its ‘pinboards’, these tools tend to be structured around some central embodied metaphor e.g. ‘bundling’ up a range of things you find online or ‘scooping up’ things you find online and pasting them into your ‘magazine’. Beyond the practical features of each, for instance the centrality of images in Pinterest, I would suggest that these metaphors are actually a key factor in why particular individuals will take to particular services e.g. without realising it I’ve been thinking in bundles for a long time and just got the point of the service instantly when I used it. So it’s definitely worth experimenting with them and seeing which one you’re most intuitively comfortable with. Much as with other digital tools, there’s no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way to use these – it all comes down to your practical purposes, how they unfold as you experiment with different tools and which ones you ultimately find most useful for your personal needs.
- Storify is perhaps the mostly widely known of these four. It allows you to search multiple social networks and knit together items you find into sequential stories. I’ve found this useful for preserving Twitter debates that I’ve particularly enjoyed. However I’m aware this only represents part of what the tool is capable of if you combine a sufficiently diverse range of elements, whereas my uses have merely been reconstructing conversations on one medium that I was actively involved in. The most impressive uses I’ve seen have tended to revolve around covering events either retrospectively or live.
- Bundlr is my personal favourite and I can’t recommend it enough. As with the others, you use a browser button to ‘bundle’ content. When you’re on a web page which you want to curate, press the button and either choose an existing bundle or make a new one. What’s most impressive about Bundlr is how it combines the ability to handle many types of content (e.g. youtube videos, images, tweets, presentations, web pages) with effortlessly making the finished product look aesthetically appealing. With their latest update this became particularly true of embedding bundles in webpages. It’s also incredibly easy to pick up. Within a few hours of signing up to Bundlr I had multiple bundles which had collectively received hundreds of hits. I honestly don’t understand how I kept track of things I wrote and read online prior to using the service.
- Scoop.It allows you to publish ‘magazines’ based on content you scoop through a browser bookmark. Whereas some of the other tools focus more on collating items, Scoop.It offers more room for curation : it gives you more opportunity than the other tools to control what aspects of your ‘scooped’ items are highlighted and what commentary you offer about them. It also has an interesting, though in my experience not quite perfected, tool which offers you ideas about things to ‘scoop’. One feature I particularly like about Scoop.It is that it lets you tweet whenever you scoop a new item. In this way it integrates the curation process with managing twitter accounts. Though this might not be appealing to everyone, it’s a potentially invaluable time saver for those who manage multi-author blogs and multiple social media accounts. I like Scoop.It a lot and, if I had more time, I’d use this. Although I’d qualify this by saying I’d use it in my capacity as a social media manager rather than as an academic researcher.
- Pearl Trees is perhaps the most intriguing and yet, in my experience, the least practical. It takes a mind-mapping approach to curation, enabling you to collect ‘pearls’ (webpages, text notes or photos) and arrange them into hierarchical structures. I found it fascinating to explore and the interface is very different to anything else I’d come across. Nonetheless, I just didn’t ‘get’ it, beyond my abstract curiosity. It’s worth trying though and, even if your reaction is the same as mine, it’s definitely one to watch. When researching this article, I discovered that since I last used Pearl Trees they’ve introduced ‘bi-directional’ synchronization with social media. So rather than just auto tweeting when you add an item to your Pearl Tree, it can also add a pearl whenever you tweet a link. In practice I suspect this might not work as it should but, nonetheless, it has certainly induced me to give Pearl Trees another go.
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What remix culture has taught us is that making derivative works can be a form of real originality, not that all derivative works are original.
In a tangential comment on a discussion of meme culture, a reader of Andrew Sullivan’s nails what needs to be said over and over again – creation and “curation”/remix are a spectrum, not a binary dichotomy, and each point of the spectrum has its own sub-spectrum of greatness and mediocrity.67 notes
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Every hour thousands of new videos are uploaded online. Blog posts are written and published. Millions of tweets and other short messages are shared. To say there is a flood of content being created online now seems like a serious understatement. Until now, the interesting thing is that there are relatively few technologies or tools that have been adopted in a widespread way to manage this deluge. We pretty much just have algorithmic search, with Google (and other search engines) as the most obvious example. Social bookmarking and social news have been around for some time (ie - sites like Digg or delicious), and new models of aggregation like Alltop are springing up to help us navigate all this content as well.
The real question is whether solutions like these will be enough. By some estimates in just a few years we will reach a point where all the information on the Internet will double every 72 hours. Double. I'm running out of metaphors to describe the magnitude of this content creation. The predictable result of this is that brands are beginning to focus on content creation when they start to look at social media. What are we going to create, or what are we going to get our customers/patients/fans/audience/victims to create? Is that really the best question we could be asking?
What if you were to ask about the person that makes sense of it all? The one who sifts through all the content and picks out the best and most worthy. This person is missing from most corporate communications teams. It's not a commonly defined role on any ebusiness teams. In fact, there are few jobs like this at all. The closest comparative role may be contained within the rising Library 2.0 movement (one I wrote about some time ago), but this is not frequently linked to business communication or marketing. If this role did exist, what would it be called?
The name I would give it is Content Curator. A Content Curator is someone who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online. The most important component of this job is the word "continually." In the real time world of the Internet, this is critical. If you look at how many individuals are currently using their Twitter account to highlight interesting bits of content they locate or how del.icio.us users have tagged and shared content on that site for years, you'll understand that this idea has been steadily growing organically.
In an attempt to offer more of a vision for someone who might fill this role, here is my crack at a short manifesto for someone who might take on this job:
MANIFESTO/JOB DESCRIPTION: CONTENT CURATOR
In the near future, experts predict that content on the web will double every 72 hours. The detached analysis of an algorithm will no longer be enough to find what we are looking for. To satisfy the people's hunger for great content on any topic imaginable, there will need to be a new category of individual working online. Someone whose job it is not to create more content, but to make sense of all the content that others are creating. To find the best and most relevant content and bring it forward. The people who choose to take on this role will be known as Content Curators. The future of the social web will be driven by these Content Curators, who take it upon themselves to collect and share the best content online for others to consume and take on the role of citizen editors, publishing highly valuable compilations of content created by others. In time, these curators will bring more utility and order to the social web. In doing so, they will help to add a voice and point of view to organizations and companies that can connect them with customers - creating an entirely new dialogue based on valued content rather than just brand created marketing messages.
After writing this, I can't help but wonder if there might already be people out there with this title. Let's find out: the first person to send me a scan or photo of a business card with this title on it will get a free signed copy of Personality Not Included ... (UPDATE 04/14/11 - This competition is now over!)
Interested in hearing more about content curation? Click here to learn how to book Rohit to speak at your next event.
Additional Posts About Content Curation:
The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
When it comes to the Internet, I imagine it as the warehouse where the Ark is archived at the end of Indiana Jones – Raiders of the Lost Ark.
The Ark is that outstanding content someone has produced and that no other will be able to see again, because it is forgotten and hidden between gazillions of other contents.
Apart from the gigantic volume of pages present in the Internet, for a long time, search spam has been making the discovery of reliable sources difficult; and – let's be honest – Social Media has enhanced this issue, because it added even more noise and dispersion. Actually, as Mitchel Kapor said once, getting information off the Internet is like having a drink from a fire hydrant.
To tell the truth, this problem is not new.
What is Content Curation?
Since the beginning of time, human beings have collected the best humanity has produced in art, literature, science; we invented the museums, the libraries, the Encyclopedia and have written essays and done research. We have always looked at those ones, the curators who were knowing the right sources of that knowledge, to which being able to access to will have solved our needs.
Content Curation is the online expression of something, which is in the same nature of human beings: the need to collect and catalogue only the most interesting things about a subject so to share it for the common benefit.
This is especially needed in the Internet era. And, as Rohit Barghava wrote in the Content Curation Manifesto, Content Curators will bring more utility and order to the social web. In doing so, they will help to add a voice and point of view to organizations and companies that can connect them with customers – creating an entirely new dialogue based on valued content rather than just brand created marketing messages.
Actually five kind of Content Curation types are classified:
- Aggregation, which consists in curating the most relevant content about a topic into one single location. This is the most common way of curating content, and it is at the base of the majority of the content curation services actually present online;
- Distillation, which purpose is to distill the overall noise about a topic to its most important and relevant concept. The best cases of social content curation can be catalogued into this definition;
- Elevation, when curators draft a more general trend or insight from a mass of daily musings;
- Mashups, or to merge different content about a topic creating a new original point of view of the same;
- Chronology, which could be defined as historiographical content curation. Usually it consists in presenting a timeline of curated information to show the evolution of a particular topic.
How to do Content Curation: The Tools
The Discovery Phase and Tools
Actually there are a very large number of sites and tools that help the content curation process, but none is useful without one essential skill: your ability in separate the wheat from the chaff.
That means that at first a curator needs to collect all the information out there about the topic he is going to curate and, then, start selecting.
The best way to collect that information is listening. For instance, if someone would like to start curating the SEO topic, he should have to start visiting on a daily basis sites like SEOmoz, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Watch, and Search Engine Journal, examining the sites/blogs of the people active in those sites, select the objectively most interesting ones, and use two starting tools, RSS and Twitter:
- RSS to track their own content production about the SEO topic;
- Twitter to track the content related to the SEO industry they share.
This discovery phase can be facilitated by tools, two of which – sign ‘o’ times - are not strictly web based but mobile apps:
Zite (for iOs, WebOS and, very recently, for Android too and owned by CNN), is a “Personalized magazine”, which not only offers the opportunity to connect your Google Reader, Twitter and Read it Later accounts in order to have all the content present there in just one place and organized into sections, but also it proposes a large selection of content from other sources it crawled in Internet, and all this content is presented in standard sections like Technology, Politics, Arts & Culture, etc.
You can also add sections based on your specific needs/interests thanks to a sort of “search suggest box”. For instance, I have personalized it with very specific sections dedicated to Content Marketing, Content Management, Copywriting, and all those disciplines that can be included in the Inbound Marketing umbrella.
The “magic” is that with a simple rule of thumbs up/down you can teach Zite which content is the one you really consider relevant and what not. So the next time you access it, the content proposed will be closer to the one you are really interested in. For a curator, this is like having a robotic personal assistant.
Flipboard, (for iOS only, sorry), is another “social magazine”, which can be personalized not only by selecting which sites to be republished on our Flipboard and we want to read the content of, but also from an interesting curators’ list and – especially - adding a bigger number of social accounts we subscribe to: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Instagram, Flickr, 500px, and obviously, Google Reader.
This tool is still in beta (you need to ask for an invitation directly to the site from someone already using it), and it is an almost perfect tool in order to discover what is the most popular content which is published in your stream, for a keyword or for a hashtag and those Twitter lists you may have added.
This is especially useful for three reasons:
- When you log in Strawberry Jam, it syncs with your Twitter account and shows you all the popular links in the previous 24 hours. This is an amazing way to discover what happened when you weren’t online (i.e.: consider my case, living in Europe and sleeping when the Twitter activity is having its peaks in the USA);
- It facilitates the selection of those links, which are useful and interesting for those searches
- (keywords and hashtag, especially) which can be really due a loss of time.
Other tools that can be used for this discovery phase are:
- Evri (for iOs and Kindle Fire), which has the advantage of owning an API which allows to access the data of your Evri “entity” or channels from their site.
- Feedly (for iOS, Android, Chrome, Safari and Firefox), the plus is having browser versions which are always in sync with the mobile apps.
- Factiva (by Dow Jones), a great resource for discovering very authoritative news content.
- My6sense (iOS). This app – apart the classic functionalities of a tool like this – has a very good engine, which is able to understand your tastes and, the more you use it, to present them at the first place. It offers an API for third party development.
- PostPost. It is focused just on Twitter, but it offers the very appreciated function of breaking the content shared in your stream into a faceted navigation (links, photos, videos…) and ordered by priority: First the content from those contacts you interact the most, secondly the content most shared and cited in your stream and, finally, all the rest.
- Delicious, especially now that is starting the implementation of some of the characteristics that made Trunk.ly, which it bought months ago, so popular.
- Faveous, which can be considered a Delicious on steroids. In fact, it can also collect those links you share in Gmail.
- Inbound.org, Hacker News, and any other content curated news site. These sites are a great shortcut to find out valuable content and, even more importantly, other curators specialized in one or two specific topics. In particular, Inbound.org, with its very well thought categorization of the RSS sources, helps considerably the further skimming of the content published.
The Content Curation discovery phase is an ongoing activity, and of every source we should save its RSS in our reader if it's possible in order to commit several useful SEO actions.
The Production Phase and Tools
In the last couple of years, the tools available to content curators literally invaded the web. Some are right now all the hype and have partly changed its nature (Pinterest anyone?), and others have a great user base in the content marketing field, but are less known to SEO and/or Social Media marketers.
Below I will list and describe just those ones that personally I consider the most interesting. It is a very personal selection, so forgive me if I miss some tool (but I invite you to add more in the comments).
My criteria of selection is the following:
- Overall quality of the product;
- Quality of the curators using it and publishing their curated content with it;
- Effectiveness of the content curated publication in the product site;
- Opportunity of publishing the content curated with the tool on our own site (via embed, RSS, widget or API).
Scoop.it is probably the best site for Content Curation right now.
Even though it offers several ways to share on your social sites and to embed on your site the content you curate in your Scoop.it magazine, it is mainly meant to be used as an external property.
The final product is a magazine, where it is possible to publish content suggested by the Scoop.it suggestion engine, from the sources you have set up, from its bookmarklet, and from the other curators you are following on site itself.
The overall quality of the curators present in Scoop.it is quite high, even though you must dig to find the very remarkable ones. The system suggests users related to your topic. But if you desire to explore topics you’re not curating, the Scoop.it search system is not the best one.
As every content curation platform, Scoop.it offers the opportunity to republish your curated content on your site: via widget, which you can configure as you want, and via RSS feed. If you have a Wordpress blog (or a Tumblr) you can connect it with your topic page and republish your curated content there.
Scoop.it is a freemium product, and the free subscription is powerful enough for the average content curation needs. But if you want to use your brand, your own domain/subdomain and have analytics (and connect your magazine to Google Analytics), then you need to subscribe the Business plan.
For more insights about Scoop.it, read this post, which Gabriella Sannino published on Search Engine Journal, or this great guide by Chris Dyson on his blog.
Bundlr is a “clipper site”. Somehow, it is a Pinterest, but not limited to just images and videos. In fact with it you can clip and save in your bundles practically everything you find relevant about an argument: text clips, images, video, code snippets….
Bundlr, as any curation content tool, lets you share on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ what you have clipped and to add your note commenting the clip. This is especially interesting for social content curation.
Moreover, the page can be curated by more than one curator or can be kept private if you are curating a topic for internal use only (both available in the pro version only).
Bundlr lets you embed your topic page in your own site too. The embed will get updated as constantly as you continue to clip new relevant quotes, images about your selected topic. Another way to embed a page in your site is via RSS.
Alternatives to Bundlr.com are:
- Snip.it, in beta and very Facebook oriented;
- Bagtheweb.com, which is a mix between Scoop.it and a clipper site. Its most interesting functionality is that you can create of network of “bags” in order to really create a deeper curated content experience about a topic and its subtopics;
- Clipboard, which offers the opportunity to embed (or share on socials or with a link) just one clip. For instance click this link
- (oh yes) Pinterest.
Storify fulfills perfectly the “Chronology” concept of Content Curation.
In fact, with it, it is possible to narrate a story aggregating the best content about the same topic from different sources, while commenting it and offering your own vision about the event presented, as this Storify by Charles Arthur about Sexism in the web marketing industry displays well.
For this reason, it is now widely used especially by journalists, but also by tweeps and bloggers, whose main topic are current news.
Surely it is a tool that many of you already know and, maybe, experimented, but if you have not tried it yet, I really suggest you to do it.The list of sources Storify let you build your story from is very big:
- Storify itself
- YouTube
- Flickr
- Disqus
- Tumblr
- SoundCloud
are probably the most common sources, but you can also grab content from these other sources: StockTwits, GetGlue, Chute, and BreakingNews
.
Finally, the opportunity to search on Google, embed URLs you may have saved in your favorites or from your RSS reader, makes the potentialities of Storify almost infinite.
Obviously, the stories you create can be exported easily to your Wordpress site (both .com and .org), Tumblr, Posterous. You can also mail your stories directly to the subscribers of your newsletter if you are using MailChimp. In other case, you can embed your story via a line of script. Finally, it is possible to share your story on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ via social buttons.
Be aware that Storify is quite easy to use, to really be able to create a story that engages your readers is not easy at all. This post by Dave Copeland, Do’s and Don’t For Using Storify, describes perfectly how to create a story that won’t let your readers indifferent.
Pearltrees is probably one of the Curation Content sites on the rise among content marketers.
At first it is not that different from any other social bookmarking site:
- You have a browser app which let you “pearl” the page you are visiting;
- You can connect your Twitter and Facebook accounts to your Pearltrees account;
- You can import the links you may have saved in Delicious.
What makes Pearltrees unique is the visual nature and truly social cooperative nature. It lets you organize your interests into Pearls (let’s say “Topic”) and Pearltrees, which are practically folders where you can add the pages you pearled in a branch. Another interesting function of Pearltrees, as said, is its social cooperative nature, as any other curator expert in your topic may ask to team up with you (and vice versa).
The social nature of the site is not limited to the cooperation between curators though. In fact, as soon as you create your pearls, the system will start presenting you related pearls, which can be added to yours completely or just the branch you are most interested in.
For instance, in a pearl I created about SEO, I added the one about Python, a topic which interests me, but I am not absolutely an expert of; hence it is better for me to rely to the deeper knowledge of another curator.
Finally, as any content curation site, it is possible to share your pearls externally (Twitter, Facebook, email) or embed them in your site. But you can share pearl also internally, for instance to your curation team and those one who picked a pearl from you in the past. An interesting function is the ability to export all the links present in your categorized pearls in a RDF file, which can be easily opened with Excel.
Why do I Need to Curate Content?
There are at least six reasons for considering Content Curation as a tactic to follow in your Web Marketing plan.
Conquering the Long Tail
From a strict SEO point of view, to have a section of your own site dedicated to the curation of the best content related to your market, or to dedicate a section of your blog to it, is a powerful way to enhance the long tail reach of your site.
Obviously, you need to follow the principle of Content Curation as described above (discovers and curates, adds value commenting and providing perspective, crediting the sources) in order to not simply push duplicated content onto your own site.
Tools like Scoop.it, with the opportunity they offer to export your curated content feed into your site make this operation easier.
Finding Sources for Original Content Creation
Another great reason why you should do content curation is that doing it you can collect, find, and re-use (always crediting the original source) great ideas and information, with which you can create great original content.
For instance, using discovery tools like the ones above cited, saving the RSS feed of the best sources about a topic and using tools in order to further select the needed content from those sources (i.e.: Yahoo Pipes and some hacking, as described in this classic post by Dawn Foster).
Sure, for some specific topics it may be very hard to find content online, but don’t forget that a world outside the web exists with tons of sources, which can be easily collected and curated, as I explain in this video I had the pleasure to shoot for Distilled:
Finding Great Contacts for Link Building Outreach
This is almost a natural effect of the Content Curation.
To discover and share only the best content online (and offline) about your niche, puts yourself on the radar of the content creators, fact which can lead you to:
- Having them linking to your curated content.
- Establishing a contact with them, and possibly creating a collaboration with them.
- Creating the opportunity for the creation of original content with them.
To create original content based on the content you have curated can be an excellent method for obtaining links back too from the sources you cite and use.
Then, social curation content is maybe the best way to fulfill the objective of any RSS (Really Simple Stalking) plan, as it was described by Wil Reynolds at the last LinkLove conference.
Obtaining a Great Amount of Social Signals for Your Site (or Social Media Profiles)
Every well executed action of content curation tend to attract readers and to generate a great amount of social signals (tweets, +1s, likes...).
Just take as an example the "anti-Google" posts Aaron Wall writes from time to time on SEObook. They are a classic case of "Elevation Content Curation", as Aaron in those posts usually draft a more general trend or insight from a mass of daily musings, which he widely credits with links and citations.
Another example is what Expo Comic Mx did so to obtain better results from its Facebook page: to post a tender photoset featuring a happy Stormtrooper family using the photos of Kristina Alexanderson. That photo - a great example of targeted content curation you can see here below - has obtained more than 13K likes, 756 comments, and was shared more than 7,000 times nowadays.
Branding, ORM and Reference Traffic
The explosion of Pinterest, even though now it has evolved into a more complex social marketing tool, is a wonderful example of the benefits of being active and using Content Curation platforms.
Creating a qualified presence for your brand in those kind of sites, practicing a wise Content Curation activity, and being participative with other curators has been demonstrated as a relatively easy way to enhance the thought-out knowledge of a brand. It helps in dominating the SERPs for your brand name (which is great if you have Online Reputation Management issues), and it provides a constant flux of organic traffic to your site; traffic that - as happened with Pinterest - can become really big if those Curation Content sites you are using become widely known to the masses.
Finally, from a strict SEO point of view, the active use of the Curation Content sites helps in making of your site an Entity to Google's eyes, which is now essential in order to gain authority and relevance and not being considered just a minor presence in the web.
Becoming a Reference in Your Industry
Curating the best sources about your industry on your site and, especially, using your social media profiles as a medium to share your discoveries, can really help you in obtaining the objective of becoming - if not the - at least one of reference in your industry.
Again, the reason is quite easy to understand: if you share, comment, and credit only the best sources, then people will tend to look at you as an authoritative source of information, and the creators you cite will start desiring to be cited by you.
And we all know what does it mean to become an authoritative source, also for Google.
The top 8 curation tools Besides being totally focused on improving Bundlr based on our community feedback, we sometimes take a look at other curation tools. We know Bundlr it’s not the perfect tool...
Be part of the content ecosystem, not just a re-packager of it. Often, people think of themselves as either creators or curators as if these two things are mutually exclusive. What a curator really should do is embrace content as both a maker and an organizer.
Yesterday I had the opportunity of being a guest on #RTB on the Radio. Many of you may be familiar with this crew, but if you’re not…you’re really missing out! Really! So jump in and join the conversation. Michael McClure, Todd Waller, and Maya Paveza are hitting the #RTB nail on the head with each and every guest on their show, as well as just by being their uber-professional selves out there in the RE.net. Lead by example folks, woohoo!
I told them this already, but I’ll put it in writing again…I could have spent all day chatting about life, liberty and the pursuit of professionalism. But we all have day jobs (some of us more than one) so we had to keep it to an hour. Anyway, as our conversation unfolded the topic of the noise and particularly signal to noise ratio was raised (thank you Marc Davison). Anyway, we had so much to talk about yesterday, that we didn’t have much time to dive into this issue. And lately…it’s all I can think about…so I thought I’d ring out a few of my own thoughts here.
The REAL Issue as I See It
Real estate professionals are being mis-advised. Broadcasting what you THINK may be relevant information again and again, without pre-screening the source and considering the context is a waste of your time. Sure you might get “a hit” or heck, even a lead. But it won’t work consistently and it won’t be successful over the long haul.
So, while some “experts” may be leading you down their automated paths or filling you up with hope of launching a comprehensive social media marketing plan in 5, 10 or 12 days….my advice is “think for yourself”. There are no quick fixes with social media, it takes work and it takes drive….just like with any successful marketing or business plan. Most importantly, it begins with content. The tools and strategies for sharing good content with your sphere can be learned. But, creating and sharing good content takes skill.
So, what’s next?
Identify, Recognize, & Organize
Identify your role in obtaining good, relevant content. Are you a content creator a content curator? Or perhaps you’re both.
A content creator is someone who identifies the “needs” within their audience and seeks to help by creating original and highly relevant content. This content is most often in the form of articles, videos, or a mixture of media shared usually via your own blog…as well as on social outposts.
A content curator is someone who sifts through the Web to find and deliver the most relevant content for their intended audience. Sort of a Hunter-Gatherer 2.0! I know many of you might be saying, “Yeah, yeah…I’ve been doing this for awhile!” And it’s true, we have! We share links to helpful media in our tweets, status updates and even within our blog posts. But a thoughtful content curator is more than just a broadcaster of good info. It’s someone who understands their brand and their audience well enough to identify the relevancy of the content, as well as the best context for sharing.
Recognize the sources that deliver consistently rockin’ content. You probably have your favorite news and resource sites that you visit on a regular basis. If not, you need to recognize both local and national sites that can assist your content delivery efforts. And if you ROCK a niche, be sure to recognize those sites as well. If you’re not sure where to go to find sites based on relevancy…start at Regator and Alltop and search by category or keywords.
Organize your sources in a dashboard or reader format for easy access. Once you’ve recognized the sites that provide highly relevant content, organize them into a personalized news dashboard. Now I’m lucky because I have a “Reggie”…and “Reggies” are hard to come by. But my Reggie rocks at splicing and dicing feeds which can be displayed in my own personal resource dashboard. If you don’t have a Reggie, other DIY favorites for content organization include: Alltop, Regator, and Google Reader.
Your Challenge
Balance & Frequency
Balance the type of content you share. The content you share represents you, and your brand. So be sure to really check out what you share with your network. If you share an article, read it first. If you share a video, watch it first. Don’t let fancy titles rule your sharing. And don’t let poor tips and products be a reflection on your brand. Your goal should be to find and share content that REALLY helps your audience…or is REALLY interesting.
Don’t ask me to give you a personal to professional ratio…but I will tell you this much…your consumers don’t gain anything from a constant stream of commentless Foursquare checkins…and the same could be said about listing tweets that are not framed in a social context. If it doesn’t add value or create conversation….don’t share it! Local market trends and charts, interesting events, homeowner tips, niche resources….those add value! And yes, I know that my son changing his spelling test grade doesn’t add value, but it surely creates conversation.
Moderate your frequency level and improve your quality of life. For those of us that love our spouse, and enjoy spending time with our kids, family, and friends…..this is for you! I know I’m not the only one who feels that their attention has been diverted far too many times by the compelling feeling to tweet, post, snap, and share on a regular basis. The feeling is important…you need to be motivated to deliver consistency with social media. That being said, I’m far more concerned with delivering better quality content than quantity. And so should you if your strategy is to become your network’s trusted advisor.
And in order to do that, you need to listen, share, and respond. I see a lot of sharing out there….but far less listening and responding. Social media is about creating opportunities to engage with others. So rather than auto-posting 20 articles a day….try scheduling 3-5 REALLY GOOD shares…and then focus on listening and responding, as well as interacting with others’ shared content.
Now I have much more to say on this topic…but I gotta run…I’m off to get a mani-pedi with my munchkin! But if you have any thoughts or ideas about content creation and curation, I’d love to hear them!
This article is written by a member of our expert contributor community.
Yesterday, the ever-churning machine that is the Internet pumped out more unfiltered digital data.
Yesterday, 250 million photos were uploaded to Facebook, 864,000 hours of video were uploaded to YouTube, and 294 BILLION emails were sent. And that's not counting all the check-ins, friend requests, Yelp reviews and Amazon posts, and pins on Pintrest.
The volume of information being created is growing faster than your software is able to sort it out. As a result, you're often unable to determine the difference between a fake LinkedIn friend request, and a picture from your best friend in college of his new baby. Even with good metadata, it's still all "data"--whether raw unfiltered, or tagged and sourced, it's all treated like another input to your digital inbox.
What's happened is the web has gotten better at making data. Way better, as it turns out. And while algorithms have gotten better at detecting spam, they aren't keeping up with the massive tide of real-time data.
While devices struggle to separate spam from friends, critical information from nonsense, and signal from noise, the amount of data coming at us is increasingly mind-boggling.
In 2010 we frolicked, Googled, waded, and drowned in 1.2 zettabytes of digital bits and bytes. A year later volume was on an exponential growth curve toward 1.8 zettabytes. (A zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes; that’s a 1 with 21 zeros trailing behind it.)
Which means it's time to enlist the web's secret power--humans.
If you want to understand how fast curation is growing on the web, just take a look at Pinterest. The two-year-old visual clipping and publishing platform has now surpassed 10 million users, making it the fastest-growing web service on the web ever, according to Comscore. Comscore reported that Pinterest was the fastest independent site to hit 10 million monthly uniques in the U.S.
Curation is the act of individuals with a passion for a content area to find, contextualize, and organize information. Curators provide a consistent update regarding what's interesting, happening, and cool in their focus. Curators tend to have a unique and consistent point of view--providing a reliable context for the content that they discover and organize. To be clear, Pinterest both creates tools to organize the noisy web and, at the same time, creates more instances of information in a different context. So it's both part of the problem, and a solution. The trick is finding the Pinterest pinboards that you like, and tune out the rest.
Sites like BoingBoing and Brain Pickings are great content curators. And now brands are getting into the act. Harley Davidson's site Ridebook features content in culture, style, music, and travel. And increasingly, curators are emerging as a critical filter that helps niche content consumers find "signal" in noise. Jason Hirschhorn's Media reDEFined newsletter distributes posts on digital media, mobile, gaming, and web content. A barebones newsletter of links, it has become a "must read" curated daily offering for anyone trying to stay in touch with the fast-moving pace of change in media. But curation isn't limited to media. The Haymarket-owned site Clinical Advisor now curates web video for nurse practitioners.
Superheroes are extraordinary humans who dedicate themselves to protecting the public. And anyone who's trying to keep their head above the proverbial "water" of the web, the rising tide of data and information, knows that we need super-help...and fast.
So anyone who steps up and volunteers to curate in their area of knowledge and passion is taking on a Herculean task. They're going to stand between the web and their readers, using all of the tools at their disposal to "listen" to the web, and then pull out of the data stream nuggets of wisdom, breaking news, important new voices, and other salient details. It's real work, and requires a tireless commitment to being engaged and ready to rebroadcast timely material. While there may be an economic benefit for being a "thought leader" and "trusted curator," it's not going to happen overnight. Which is to say, being a superhero is often a thankless job.
The growth in content, both in terms of pure volume and the speed of publishing, has raised some questions about what best practices are in the curation space. Here's where you should start
1. If you don't add context, or opinion, or voice and simply lift content, it's stealing.
2. If you don't provide attribution, and a link back to the source, it's stealing.
3. If you take a large portion of the original content, it's stealing.
4. If someone asks you not to curate their material, and you don't respect that request, it's stealing.
5. Respect published rights. If images don't allow creative commons use, reach out to the image creator--don't just grab it and ask questions later.How will curation evolve? A group of curators led by blogger Maria Popova are promoting a Curators Code. But this new collection of attribution symbols is getting early mixed reviews. New York Times columnist David Carr called the code a useful attempt for “creating visible connections between seemingly disparate pieces of information.” But others pointed out that the hyperlink has been providing attribution for years.
One thing I'm sure of--the web is going to keep growing fast. And the solution to making sense of the massive volume is a new engaged partnership between humans and machines. There are a number of companies building cool solutions you can explore if you're looking for curation tools. Among them: Curata, CurationSoft, Scoop.it, Google+, Storify.com, PearlTrees.com, MySyndicaat.com, Curated.by, Storyful,Evri, Paper.li, Pearltrees, and of course Magnify.net (where I hang my hat).
So, if you're ready to be a superhero, now's the time. The web needs you. Your readers need you. All you need is a web browser and a cape. The rest is up to you.
[Image: Flickr user Zach Dischner]
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
The very reason this title is so intriguing is its obvious incongruousness. While this may be an attraction in fiction, it does not serve us well in our daily lives, which are full of decision-making, requiring informative sources. What we need is for our sources to be in line with our goals. And if we’re creating sources for others, we need to ensure they find value in those sources. Content needs to be coherent and cohesive. It needs to be written for the consumer, the client. Put yourself in their shoes and offer them something of real value. The job of a curator is collect and organize things of value for a particular purpose; to be a filter for others who don’t have the time to do it for themselves. You’re essentially creating a set of value propositions. This process requires several skills not accomplishable by computers or programs. The human touch is necessary here, for we have the ability to judge nuances of style, preference and perception.
The Media Maze
Time management can get tricky for the social media specialist. It’s so easy get lost in the social media maze. But, by and large, any time you spend wandering from link to link is time not spent profitably. If you’re on a mission to get something done and you see a site or an article you want to look at or read for some purpose other than what you are immediately pursuing, save the link, or open it in a new tab, and go back to it later. This will help you to control your time. I go tab-crazy…at any given moment I might have between 4 and 10 tabs open in my browser. I have a very curious mind and I’m always trying to learn way too much. I have had to develop strategies to keep that from getting in the way of my work. If you do this too, then you’re a natural curator. Don’t fight it, just learn to manage it. After all, it’s a good place to start in developing curation skills. But curation isn’t just about aggregation.
Curation Is Not Hording
Simply gathering stuff won’t cut it. You have to be selective. Very selective. And you have to know how to judge your audience. There can be a learning curve there for anyone and for any business, but analytical skills and critical thinking skills are vital to the process. The voice of the consumer is becoming louder (to everyone’s ultimate benefit) and we have to listen. Why wouldn’t we? Afterall, we’re consumers, too. There is a shift in control, gaining momentum, and if we don’t pay attention we will be eating dust, make no mistake. It’s not about who’s selling what. It’s about whose expectations are where. Don’t just gather, horde or aggregate content…it’s useless and valueless. Select, arrange and exhibit. In a word: curate. It’s not just for people who work with antiquities.
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Tagged as Advertising, Article Writing, Blog, Business, Consumers, Content, Content Curation, Content Writing, Curation, Curator, Customers, Economic Development, Economy, Entrepreneurship, Facebook, Human Capital, Keywords, Linkedin, Market Value, Marketing, Maze, Media, New Economy, Personality Branding, PR, Return on Investment, ROI, SEO, Small Business, Social Media, Syntax, Twitter
The concept of curating news is not new. One can look to the supply-chain process of a news organization to see that several roles (editor, managing editor, etc.) have curation as a core competency; that is, the organizing of information filed by reporters into a deliverable packages for readers.
Don't worry, we won't post anything.
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