Last year, there were 8.8 million visits to Louvre . The visitors came from all over the world. Louvre has a world wide community of fans.

In the real world, it’s a lot simpler to be a world class museum curator than it is to be a world class artist. Curators pull together great art pieces and make money by displaying them. By comparison, artists constantly struggle against poverty and  only become famous after they are dead .

In the age of social media, content marketers should strive to create the  Louvre online . In order to do so, they have to consistently discover and publish great content in order to build a passionate online community . Here, content curation holds the key.

There are four benefits of content curation in building an online community.

1. Publish enough content

A recent report on B2B content marketing reveals that producing enough content is the #1 challenge for B2B content marketers. Just like it takes enormous amount of time for an artist to paint, creating original content is a very time consuming process.

There are 3000 tweets per second . When your goal is to establish brand awareness on Twitter, publishing lots of content is key. Hence, it’s much more effective to consistently curate and publish content. This allows you to consistently get in front of you target customers.

2. Establish thought leadership

Consistently getting in front of your potential customers is only good when you have something interesting to say.

Over this year, I’ve met plenty of advertising people moving to the social media age.

They would buy fake Twitter followers and fill up their social channels with ads. Is this really how you want to represent your brand online? Who are you fooling?To these ad men, social media is just another medium to shit out ads.I’ve blogged about why fake followers won’t get you anywhere and why you should stop shitting out ads online .Instead, a good content marketer attracts by creating and sharing great content. This helps establish thought leadership in a niche, establish trust and create brand awareness online. 3. Build relationship At the end of the day, social media is powerful because you directly control the relationship with your customers.Traditionally, there were newspaper, radios, and tvs . What these have in common is that they control the relationship between you and your potential customers. Now, as we move to the social media [...]

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Category: Blog May 20, 2013 Creating content is the best way to build a loyal following, and scale your business. But what if creating is too time-intensive? Or you don’t have the budget?

You don’t need to avoid content creation all together. Instead, you can test the waters of content creation through content  curation.

Photo credit: geraldbrazil

Curation – what is it? 

Content curation is the process of sorting through relevant information in your industry and sharing it in a meaningful, helpful, and consistent way. Curating content through  shared media  isn’t the  best  strategy. But it’s something that can get you started in the meantime.

Why do it?

Curation is often less time than creating content from scratch. And it’s all a part of your  virtual handshake . While curation (without creation) isn’t the firmest handshake there is, at least you’re standing up straight and making good eye contact. Customers typically respect and appreciate this.

But curating isn’t about sharing any random meme you find. Mindful editing and collaborative news filtering need to happen before you curate.

How to curate content:

1. Look at what your competitors curate. Visit their social media sites to see what content gets shared, and which magazines or resources provided the information.

2. Have a system in place. Create a Twitter list of others who share relevant information about your industry. Make sure that you remember who found the articles to give proper credit – or to give them a hat tip (h/t on Twitter).3. Sign up for feedly. It allows you to organize, read, and share the content of your favorite sites. It allows you to group content by subject matter, and it integrates very nicely with your Google Reader. But make sure to sign up before Reader goes away on July 1st.4. Remember that kitschy is not always cool. Respect your audience.5. Be meaningful. Add your insight or opinion when sharing the content. A good content curator knows the difference between being helpful and being a nuisance. Don’t share just to share. Make sure there’s context and relevance for your audience. Save the fun, quirky content for the weekend or for your personal social media pages.6. Curate around a theme. Share video, audio, photos, and articles on different days of the week. Set structure like this if you need it.7. Make sure people are listening when you tweet. Platforms like Tweriod can help [...]

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The future of content

Gigaom ran a very interesting piece this week, on how New York Times found great success running a major magazine story called SnowFall. In fact, the feature was so successful no less than GigaOm founder Om Malik wrote about how traditional mainstream media outlets like the New York Times may finally have found a way to compete with Buzzfeed and Huffington Post.

This is huge. This is a complete turnaround from a story GigaOm also published last year about what lessons the mainstream media can take from the likes of BuzzFeed. Heck, this story is timely for the fact that BuzzFeed itself is planning to expand their work and teach ad agencies how they do what they do.

Admittedly, this story may be a little hard to put together for the casual blog reader, even the average social media marketer, so I’m going to try to explain in unelaborate terms the relationship between content, the mainstream media, Google, blogging, and the future of the Internet. This is closer to you than you think. Mainstream media dilemma

Mainstream media outlets have been seeing their industry decline, not so much on the journalism end of it as the business end. Newspapers and magazines have been slowly dying out, with subscriptions falling and readership declining.

The web has disrupted the business of news, in several ways. Google Ads actually started the disruption years ago proving that online ads were a more effective ad platform than traditional classified ads in the papers. The product called news has also been co-opted by the web, first on message boards, RSS and blogs, and now social media. The web created so many news delivery platforms that had the immediacy news outlets, even 24/7 cable news, didn’t.

Some argue this immediacy from the web has also devalued the quality of news received, as people with no training in journalism or journalism standards provide live updates and do their own news curation using so many accessible tools (the most elaborate being privately owned spy drones providing live camera feeds. No, really).

Still, traditional news outlets have managed to create an uneasy truce with these platforms. Their openness has allowed mainstream media individuals to actually integrate among them, as journalist bloggers, Twitter and Facebook users, etc. Furthermore, the media found the opportunity to themselves take stories from the web, easing the work of investigative journalism and opening opportunities for more introspection, [...]

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I want to give you a quick set of definitions for the terms that revolve around CONTENT CURATION . I’ve written about content curation definitions before, and I’ll write about it again, no doubt! But I’m happy to report a growing understanding among SEOs and marketers, that content curation, if done correctly, always involves the human element of finding the right stuff, giving context to it, and then adding a bit of perspective through original commenting or analysis. Tools and automation have their place in allowing us to do the best curation. But to truly curate content (according to best practices in content marketing) it cannot be fully automated. Definition of Content Scraping, Content Curating and related terms

Some of  these definitions are adapted and expanded from an article by a good content curator as he described his own curation process. Thank you Nathan Weller for your great article on curation !

Content Creation:  The act of writing original words, taking an original picture, shooting an original video, etc. Inspiration, information and ideas are found through interacting with other people’s content. But if it’s “content creation” we’re talking about, then the author will be composing something new, something different, something that goes beyond the other pieces that he’s looking at.

Content Sharing:  Taking a piece of content created by yourself or others and distributing it to a following or audience. This can be done in many ways and through many channels; blogs and social media outlets being just a few of the more popular examples. We can share our own creations, or we can share the work of others. When it’s “content sharing”, it’s clear that what we’re doing is simply telling our friends where to find a piece that’s of interest (the share is not the creation or curation).

Content Scraping: I’m highlighting ‘scraping’ because it represents the opposite of white hat, best practices in content marketing. Content scraping is the label we assign to basic plagiarism, where a person takes an entire post or article from someone else’s site, and then republishes it on their own site, giving no attribution, and making almost no change to the original piece. Scraping is NOT a white hat practice for it leaves the reader with the impression that the piece of content (video, image, text) being displayed has originated there on that website (when in fact, it was scraped from [...]

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Content Curation is Where Your Content Strategy Starts

So, you’ve realized that implementing a content strategy is smart business – a new marketing approach that will create a tighter bond with your audience and has the promise of greater ROI than traditional marketing approaches.

But now it’s time to start creating content, and you’re stuck. Content creation is hard work, and it never stops, and everyone in your organization seems busy with their primary duties. Of course there are resources you can deploy to help with the day-in, day-out rinse and repeat of content creation .

However, just because you haven’t quite solved the content creation puzzle doesn’t mean you need to sit on the sidelines. In fact, content strategy is often best served by starting with content curation – serving as a clearinghouse for content produced by others in order to help the audience sift through the endless volume of information on the Internet. We’re all overwhelmed by the information at our disposal – figuring out what’s really important to know and what information you can safely put off for another day has become a critical business skill.

If your organization serves as content curator for your industry, it can be an important service that your customers and prospects quickly appreciate. Most importantly, it begins to build trust with your audience, trust that is critical in today’s era of preference marketing .

Of course, you have to do it the right way. Content curation gets a bit of a bad name because it can be perceived as claiming you’re taller becasue you’re standing on the shoulders of others. There are plenty of examples of organizations appropriating content produced by others and passing it off as their own; some even build a business out of it, but it’s still plagiarism, and it diminishes trust. That’s not good, so make sure you bring an ethical approach to content curation – simply put, credit the original author. Easy.

The goal of content marketing is to participate and shape your industry conversation; if you aren’t creating your own content, your ability to shape the conversation is likely minimal. But that doesn’t mean you can’t participate and have a voice. By curating and promoting the ideas of others, you’re stirring that conversation and bringing value; I can tell you that I’m indebted to the many people and organizations I follow on Twitter and LinkedIn because they’re curating [...]

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In the first of this two part post, we talked about content curation strategies. Content curation is applicable to three interrelated content marketing goals: driving targeted website traffic; generating thought or brand leadership; and nurturing leads.

To drive traffic, you can curate to your blog , an industry news or niche topic site which links to your website and social media sharing. To generate thought and brand leadership, you produce both original content and add your expert commentary to curated industry news and blog posts.  Then post these curated excerpts on your company blog and share via social media. Also, sharing other peoples high quality content that you curate via social media and an industry niche site promotes your brand. Curated content is also great for nurturing lead in both an email newsletter of sharing via social media. Curation Strategy Overview Content Curated Industry Site

Sometimes called microsites, industry news portals, or topic sites, curated industry niche websites are a great way to drive traffic and brand and thought leadership. This is the ultimate in sharing with and organizing for your audience all the benefits of curation we discussed earlier. Own Your Niche!

Becoming a resource for your profession or industry niche makes you the go-to resource when your services or product is needed. Customers and leads are the goals of your B2B content marketing.

Hosting your curated content on an industry topic site will increase the authority of your company website as you will link to it as the sponsor and, of course, include your own original content. The curated site will have increasing authority and so will your own site. You will enlarge your SEO footprint faster than your competitors’.

Content Curated Newsletters

I hope, as part of your content-marketing strategy, you have both a reason and mechanism to capture email addresses. It is also a good idea to have the emails of your customers. For both leads and customers, newsletters are a great way to maintain relevance and be top-of-mind with them. Lead nurturing

Industry news

Best of the week posts and newsletters. Social Media Sharing

Social media, by its nature, tends to be very time sensitive. Therefore, sharing is often a key to rising above the noise and having your content shared. When done correctly, sharing on social networks will not only create awareness but also drive traffic to your website.

Here are some social media stats [...]

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Photo by Stuck in Customs What is Content Curation?

Content curation is the process of sorting through the vast amounts of content on the web and presenting it in a meaningful and organized way around a specific theme.  The work  involves  sifting, sorting, arranging, and publishing information.  A content curator cherry picks the best content that is important and relevant to share with their community. It isn’t unlike what a museum curator does to produce an exhibition:   They identify the theme, they provide the context, they decide which paintings to hang on the wall, how they should be annotated, and how they should be displayed for the public.

Content curation is not about collecting links or being an information pack rat, it is more about putting them into a context with organization, annotation, and presentation.     Content curators provide a customized, vetted selection of the best and most relevant  resources on a very specific topic or theme.  As  Rohit Bhargava points out  in this post via Robin Good ,   a content curator continually  seeks,  makes sense of,  and shares the best and most relevant content on a particular topic online.   Content curators have integrated this skill into their daily routine.

Why is Content Curation Valuable?

People and organizations are now making and sharing media and content all over the social web.   For example, on Facebook the average user creates 90 pieces of content each month .  If you multiply that by the 800 million Facebook users,  it isn’t surprising that  data or content on the Internet is  measured in exabytes, or billions of gigabytes.      Simply put, we are living an era of content abundance.     A content curator  offers high value to anyone looking for quality content because finding that information (and making sense of it) requires more and more time, attention, and focus .

Content Curation Provides Value from the Inside Out

What does that mean for nonprofits and the people who work for them?  I think there are many benefits for both individuals as well as the organization.

For some staff members, content curation can be professional of learning.   Professional development used to be about getting trained or acquiring a specific skill.   But, with so much information available and coming at us from many sources,  we often don’t know if it’s the right information or if it’s current.   And depending on our field,  it can [...]

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Rather than relying on a search or their own sifting powers, visitors to a content-curated site borrow the time and expertise of a human curator. For content consumers   and producers, curation   is a time saver and accelerator. Sharing and highlighting the most useful content, curators help cut through the mounds of fluff and irrelevance cluttering the web. Ultimately, that is why it is a hot topic and important to B2B content marketing. Search Engines and SEO

As a content marketer, you have probably already heard the continued buzz around search engine changes, particularly at Google , which focus on quality content or, more specifically, providing value to their search users , which is their bread and butter and often overlooked. Content curation has therefore become a powerful tool for search engine optimization (SEO) for several reasons:

Efficiency

Lists of relevant resources coupled with brief descriptions allow you to provide mountains of content with a lot less time and cost investment than creating it yourselves, and adding your own unique perspective helps make you an expert and thought leader. Long Tail Effects

By providing links to targeted content and less-popular websites, you increase your visibility to those running low-probability searches.

Authority

Providing targeted content-curation pages signals that you are an expert in a subject. By pointing to an industry niche and evaluating their content, you imply that you are qualified to judge their content. Over time, this, in turn, generates links to your original content as an authority. Inbound links are SEO gold. Visibility

When you add a content-curation page to your site, in addition to the SEO benefits, you will begin exporting your traffic to other sites to help answer visitor questions. The owners of these sites will notice that you are feeding them page views, and they may link to your site in exchange, increasing your authority ! Timeliness

Google is now ranking “freshness” as part of its search rank algorithm. Curation allows a steady stream of fresh content – a marketer’s biggest challenge!

  Social Media Sharing Have you heard of Pinterest and Twitter ? I sure hope you, as a content marketer, have. Social media is still growing, is becoming entrenched in our lives, and is a hotbed for curation. Social sharing is a POPULAR form of content curation. Pinterest is a content [...]

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By now, most business owners understand the importance of putting valuable, relevant content onto the Web. This information helps with search engine rankings, and shows potential clients that you’re an authority in your field. However, this task becomes more difficult when you know you need to say something, but don’t know exactly what.

For many professionals, interacting with clients, focusing on marketing, and other tasks are easy. However, creating fresh written content can pose a real challenge. For this reason, content curation is often the best option for business owners who value marketing materials, but don’t have the time or energy to create this content themselves.

Content curation involves browsing the Web to find useful, interesting, and thought-provoking articles and blogs, and then sharing this information with your audience. If creating your own fresh content each day is simply not an option, content curation allows you to turn your site into a spot where visitors come to find out what they need to know that day.

If content curation is something your business values, here are the 10 easiest ways to do it effectively: Choose high quality materials: In order to establish your site as an authority in your field, you’ll need to display only the most relevant and accurate pieces. Though there are probably thousands of articles on topics relating to your industry, select only the most reliable works. When users know that they can trust your site to show them the best materials from that day, they will check back frequently.

Put yourself in your reader’s shoes: To come up with pieces that will prove relevant to your audience, come up with your own questions and then go find content that helps to provide insight into these inquiries. Chances are that if you’ve got a question, so do other members of your industry.

Check out Google Insights: This innovative tool allows a user to analyze search patterns from various geographic regions, categories, and time periods. It aims to predict the popularity of search terms, which can prove useful when it comes to keeping your website relevant.

Stay on top of it: Just because you’re not actually writing the materials yourself, doesn’t mean that you can let the same content sit for three days. The Internet moves quickly, and you’ll need to keep up with this pace. If you’re still linking to a story from a week ago, chances are that [...]

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Sending Traffic by Linking to Other Sites – Is this Bad?

A common concern is that a by linking to other websites you will drive traffic away. However, the SEO benefits are clear: linking to other sites creates repeat visiting and quality inbound links.

If you use a branded, curated niche portal such as a topic site or industry news site, then traffic will actually be driven to, not taken away from, your site.

Do not forget the benefits these links have in generating thought and brand leadership. Giving Knowledge Away – How do I Sell my Services?

This is a common question from professional service providers, who worry that giving too much information will actually solve a potential customer’s problem, making the actual service unnecessary. In the B2B case, this is misguided – we are a world of specialists. If prospects are going to do it themselves, they do not need information from you – they will find it somewhere on the web from someone else.

I know how to cut a 2×4 and pound a nail, and I may actually do it to put up a shelf in the garage (maybe), but I will hire a professional to add a room to my house – one recommended by someone I trust who has seen their work. Businesses are the same, just on a larger scale.

If a business needs your professional services, they want to know that you know your stuff, that you are the expert. Curation is perfect for this. I wrote several other post on the, the most popular being one on top-of-mind marketing , that has a case study. Do I share Content from a Competitor?

Part of almost every B2B buying process includes awareness of the problem needing to be solved, discovery of options and information, compiling a short list of possible solution or service providers to help solve the problem, and then making a decision. Therefore, your prospects are likely going to find your competitors anyway if they wish – you cannot hide them. If their content is valuable, share it – it positions your business as a resource and an industry thought leader.

Curation also gives you the chance to capture traffic or searches for them when your curated content shows up in the search results ahead of the competitor’s content.

We do this here at the B2B ContentEngine when it adds value for our customers or [...]

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