News from our space

by Ellen Curtis, Creative Commander

Content. Content. Content. This is the subject on every marketers mind these days and for a good reason. In social media, there is an 80/20 rule. That is, 80% of your content should add value for your customers. The other 20% is for brand promotion. For most brands, the 20% is a no brainer. It’s the other 80% that leaves most marketer’s scratching their heads. What to write about?  Of all possible content, original content is the most highly prized. In lieu of having a staff of professional writers, most marketers depend on aggregating or curating content. Simply put, you find content that you deem interesting for your subscribers, fans, followers or customers and pass it along.  For most, that’s as far as it goes. But to make an impact you need to do more than shovel the content out. You need to add value.  That’s where the true art of curating comes in. The following are some ideas on content curation.

1. Start with a strategy: Answer the question, “What problem can I solve for my customers?” For example, this blog post addresses the problem of content curation.

2. Make the familiar fresh: Art curators can arrange a show around historical periods like Cubism or Impressionism.  They can also organize a show around a subject matter like the history of flowers in art. Within this collection, the viewer will see some familiar favorites but through a new lens.

3. Dig beyond Digg: Content curators have their reliable sources, Google Reader, Digg, Huffington Post, Mashable, etc. Unfortunately, these sources are the same for people in the same circles. Contemporay art curators spend a large amount of their time unearthing new talent. Do the same with your content. Personally, I rely on my friends outside my field of marketing. They are always sources of content gold.

4. Have a retrospective: Or, as Buddy Media suggests in their white paper about fan engagement, “leverage your assets.”  Social media channels offer a great venue for content that never made it to your website or newsletters. The trick is to make it relevant and interesting to your followers.

5.  Ask for help:  This is the easiest strategy. Don’t know what to write about? Ask your fans, followers and subscribers. Do a poll and ask them what is the biggest problem/challenge they are facing today? Ask them what they want to hear from you.

6. Collect and interpret: Erik Deckers in his blog post, “Rethinking Creation versus Curation: Curators Can Add Value.” says, “As we have access to more and more information, including all the mediocre and/or crappy stuff, we need the curators to help us make sense of it all.” I couldn’t agree more.

7.  Find context: Niru Ratnam, in her article “Hang It All,” reports art curators are now required to engage with new art as it emerges and find a critical context for the reception of that work.  In the same way, content curaters need to explain why something is important and worth paying attention to.

8. Break through the filter bubble: This idea expands on the importance of #3. Even if you search beyond your dependable sources, the Internet may not allow you to. In Chris Cum’s  “Break through the filter bubble: Should Google and Facebook Be Filtering Our Content For Us?” he says, “[Google] results are tailored to who you are, based on your search history and your click history. Since you often click on things you agree with, you keep getting more and more of what you already agree with, which means other stuff gets demoted (effectively filtered).”  Fortunately, there are alternative search engines such as DuckDuckGo that solves that problem.

9.  Extend your audience’s horizon: In another blog post about the filter bubble dilema, “The Filter Bubble: Algorithm vs. Curator & the Value of Serendipity“  Eli Pariser author of the book, The Filter Bubble, is quoted as saying, “The primary purpose of an editor [is] to extend the horizon of what people are interested in and what people know. Giving people what they think they want is easy, but it’s also not very satisfying: the same stuff, over and over again. Great editors are like great matchmakers: they introduce people to whole new ways of thinking, and they fall in love.”  Not always easy but great advice.

10. Connect the Dots: In her blog post “5 ways to curate and add value,” Liz Guthridge advocates, “…making the connections to your business strategy, key themes, and values.”

I hope this blog post achieves that goal. Let me know.