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Content Strategy: How and Why to Curate Content

Content Strategy: How and Why to Curate Content
Most of us understand the value of sharing information. But when the information belongs to others, we wonder “what’s the point?” Yet, as massive amounts of information abound, the art of content curation can help us provide resources to our audiences while positing ourselves as an authority. Here’s how. Curate When You Can't Create It takes more than just words to create content. Where do you turn to find new ideas or inspiration? Pointing others away from your site shouldn’t be regarded as poor marketing, but rather as a savvy way to position yourself and your company as an industry authority. Additionally, sharing secondary resources says that you and your company thinks outside the box. According to Andew Hannelly in his article Needles, Haystacks, and Content Curation for The Magazine Group’s Engage blog, how a company exhibits others information is what customers will regard as their end product. How did you present it to them? The Wisdom on Curated Content

Content Curation versus Content Creation | Uptown Treehouse Blog As many of us know, in the social media marketing game content is king! Without anything to Tweet about or post about on Facebook our communities would fall by the wayside and our customers would stop listening to us. For most brands, the first question that must be answered before starting a social media strategy is “Where do we find good content to post about?” Creating content can be very expensive and time consuming. At Uptown Treehouse, we are responsible for reaching technologists and software developers on behalf of our Microsoft clients. Amongst the two communities that we manage on behalf of Microsoft we are responsible for 20 Tweets and 5 Facebook posts every day. RSS Feeds: Identify a list of blogs and news sources that consistently publish content that your audience enjoys. Twitter Lists: Twitter allows you to create lists containing people of interest. Google Alerts: You’ll want to know every time someone is talking about your brand, product or service online. Facebook Lists:

Ten Steps to Content Curation Content Curation is rapidly becoming one of the buzzwords du jour, as we all drown in a sea of content coming at us from every direction, through multiple devices and on a 24/7/365 always on timeline. What is content curation? My definition may be somewhat abridged from industry pundits – here goes: “organizing and sharing the most relevant content on a finite subject.” Why is content curation important to your brand or business? According to latest news, our ability to store, communicate and compute content has been growing at a rate of 23% per annum since 1986. Ten Steps to Content Curation: 1) Get a grasp of your market focus. 2) Understand what topics are important to and will resonate with your target market. 3) Who are the thought leaders, influencers, bloggers, editors/reporters/digerati you want to connect with. 4) What content platform will reach your target market. 5) Timing of content publishing and curating is essential. 6) Create good content and the market will follow.

News curation: finally, social media's killer app? FORTUNE -- Even the most casual social network user will admit that the Facebook or Twitter experience can be overwhelming -- that merciless stream of status updates and shared content, which sometimes feels less like a stream and more like a deluge, waits for no man, woman, or Web crawler. Of course, there's good reason to feel that way: Facebookers share 30-billion plus pieces of information each month, and Twitter users output 1 billion tweets weekly. There's a tremendous amount of digital information floating around and few great solutions for filtering it, making sense of it, and consuming it. That's changing. Nicholas Negroponte foreshadowed the current state of things back in 1995 with the "Daily Me," a customized news experience, but it's only been over the last 18 months that his idea has manifested itself via mainstream products and services. They all work differently. That same concept is at the core of the Twitter-focused start-up Sulia. More from Fortune:

The Five Stages of Filtering, Relevance and Curation Tonight's news of Gmail taking on information overload directly, using a combination of intelligent algorithms and your own feedback to build in box personalization is yet another hallmark move to taking on the increasing deluge of content approaching us from all directions - be it our e-mail, static Web pages, audio and video, or the many different social streams which we have subscribed to. There is no question that content creation and sharing is exploding and people are completely incapable of giving every single message and item their full attention. And many smart folks are looking to bring solutions to find the best and ignore the rest. As I see it, there are five major ways companies and individuals take on the topic of relevance. 1. Editorial Filtering Loose definition: I am the smartest person. Of course, it is easy for an individual to be a curator. 2. Loose definition: The will of the people can be trusted, and they will decide what is most important, thanks to the most votes.

Curating the Best of the Web: Video The Internet is awash in content — and a whole lot of it is junk, spam or inane status updates. How do you begin to navigate through the zillions of news articles, Web sites, tweets and other stuff online to find content that matters to you? You need digital curators. To see the full article, subscribe here. Screen shot of Nizmlab, a site that sifts through online videos. Screen shot of Chunnel.tv. The Psychological Principle Behind Marketing Success In a Networked World | Jeff Sexton Writes Eight years after it was first pub­lished, Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art has sold sig­nif­i­cantly more copies this year than any year fol­low­ing its ini­tial release. In indus­try where writ­ers expect to lose money on their non-fiction books and to have their titles all but lan­guish after the ini­tial pub­lish­ing push, this rep­re­sents am incred­i­ble suc­cess story – one accom­plished with­out a tra­di­tional mar­ket­ing push, or a plug by Oprah (though it darn well deserves it, if you hap­pen to be read­ing Ms. Win­frey), or even a re-release from the publisher. How did Steve do it? A few rea­sons come to mind, some more salient than others: 1) The book has proved itself a mod­ern clas­sic for its intended audi­ence of writ­ers and reg­u­larly makes appear­ances in Top 10 lists of books for writ­ers. 3) Steve has given away lots of new con­tent writ­ten in the same spirit of and along the same lines as the book. OK, so the list hardly sur­prises, right? Ter­ri­tory vs. 1. 2.

Content Strategy: The Philosophy of Data Not that familiar with “content strategy?” That’s ok. It’s in my job title, and I struggle every time I’m asked what I do for a living. Many people have no idea what it means, but even more people bring their own (wrong) assumptions to the conversation. Usually they think it has something to do with writing copy. The analogy I’ve been using recently is that content strategy is to copywriting as information architecture is to design. The irony of this communication challenge is that the main goal of content strategy is to use words and data to create unambiguous content that supports meaningful, interactive experiences. So, why has it been so hard for us to communicate what we do? Perhaps the problem is that, because content is so pervasive, everyone thinks they know all there is to know about it. Everything is content Everything is content? How did the need for detailed focus on content emerge in the heavily visually oriented field of web design? Critical mass Time to get practical

The Four Essential Phases of Social Media Adoption When discussing social media with business executives, I'm frequently reminded of the fable of the elephant and the blind men. In the story, six blind men, hearing that an elephant has been brought to their village (and having no idea what an elephant is), go to the village square to investigate. One feels the elephant's side and proclaims that an elephant is like a wall. Although each man's description was accurate, each perceived only part of the elephant; none had a perspective of the entire beast. It's the same with many business executives and their views of social media: "Social media? Such statements reflect perceptions of "parts of the beast"—components (tools) of social media. Here is a four-phase adoption model designed to reveal the entire elephant that is social media. Phase I: Observation As Yogi Berra famously noted, "You can observe a lot just by watching." Some of the questions to answer in this phase: Where are people talking about our company, industry, and competitors?

Curation - The Third Web Frontier Posted by Guest Writer - January 8, 2011 Here is a guest article by Partice Lamothe - CEO of Pearltrees (Pearltrees is a consulting client of SVW.) This is a lightly edited version of "La troisième frontière du Web" that appeared in the magazine OWNI - Digital Journalism - March 2010. The article argues that the founding pricinciples of the Internet are only now being implemented and that the next frontier is in organizing, or curating, the Internet. By Patrice Lamothe Everyone realizes that the web is entering a new phase in its development. One indication of this transition is the proliferation of attempts to explain the changes that are occurring. Although these explanations are both pertinent and intriguing, none of them offers an analytical matrix for assessing the developments that are now underway. The "real time web," for example, is one of the clearest and most influential trends right now. In contrast, other explanations are far too broad to serve any useful purpose.

Writing - Five Ways to Gain Attention the 'Write' Way Imagine this headline in an ad for a low-cost mobile phone targeted at low-income consumers: "65000-color display will make your life as colorful as a rainbow and new sound technology will ensure clear sound." Does it work? Or, consider this: a software product requirement document for adding new features reads, in part, "The users should be able to collaborate while using the product." Unfortunately, the answer to both questions is No. Now, imagine this headline in the case of the first example: "Cool colors, clear calls!" Marketing, in simple terms, is communication about and among business, product, customer, and customer service. For software product companies, identifying client requirements or innovative features through market research (and providing them to the software development team in a neat, clean, and concise manner) is a good start to developing a usable software product. Now imagine the power of effective writing in such an important business function. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Curation And The Human Web... Posted by Tom Foremski - November 16, 2010 There is no doubt in my mind that the topic of curation and the Internet, is an important one and that it will be a dominant topic in 2011. Curation is important because we are reaching the limits of what can be achieved through algorithms and machines in organizing and navigating the Internet. Aggregation looks like curation but it's not. I define curation as a person, or a group of people, engaged in choosing and presenting a collection of things related to a specific topic and context. Aggregation employs software (algorithms) and machines (servers) to assemble a collection of things related to a specific topic and context. Aggregation tools can be employed by curators but the human act of curation adds a layer of value that aggregation alone cannot provide. A good example is Techmeme, the news aggregator run by Gabe Rivera. Techmeme uses an algorithm to find and publish links to the most important tech news of the day.

Problemen Blackberry volledig opgelost | nu.nl/internet AMSTERDAM - Alle Blackberrydiensten wereldwijd werken donderdagmiddag vanaf 16.00 uur weer na een storing van bijna vier dagen. Foto: ANP Dat zei topman Mike Lazaridis van fabrikant Research in Motion (RIM) donderdag tijdens een persconferentie. ''We nemen onmiddellijk daadkrachtige maatregelen om te voorkomen dat deze problemen zich nog eens voordoen'', zei Lazaridis. Nadat de storing zich maandag en dinsdag alleen voordeed in Europa, het Midden-Oosten, Afrika en Zuid-Amerika, breidden de problemen zich woensdag uit naar de Verenigde Staten en Canada. Stuwmeer RIM meldde woensdag dat een defect in het Europese netwerk de oorzaak is van de storing. Het bedrijf liet woensdag weten dat het systeem niet gehackt is. E-mail en ping De storing zorgde er voor dat onder meer e-mailen, pingen en Whatsappen niet beschikbaar waren. Mogelijk helpt het voor gebruikers om hun accu te verwijderen en de telefoon opnieuw op te starten.

Why Social Media Curation Matters - Technorati Blogging Over the past few weeks I've raved about the current raft of social media curation start-ups. I've rambled on and on about all of the new features that are being added to sites like Curated.By, Storify and Keepstream. What I haven’t explained to my friends, family, Twitter followers and just about anybody I engage in tech conversation with for more than a couple of minutes, is why it all matters. With registered Twitter users numbering somewhere in the region of 150 million, their fire hose is pumping out tens of millions of tweets a day. Granted, not all of this data is worth capturing. So, how do you decide what’s worth keeping?

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