The 30 Best Content Curation Resources for Marketers and Business Pros When I first graduated from college almost 20 years ago, I quickly learned that I was not prepared to have conversations with experienced business professionals on the reality of the business challenges they were confronting. My approach was to subscribe to 3 magazines: BusinessWeek, Fast Company and Newsweek and I read the newspaper every single day. I have been a voracious consumer of news ever since. Today, there are so many options available and we each have to find a way to find, filter, consume and share the information that is relevant for us. I use email alerts from RSS feeds, Twitter lists and a few key websites I visit every day to make sure I can stay on top of the latest trends and news in business and marketing. So here, I have curated my own list of the top sites of business and marketing information – some of which are great examples of content curation themselves.
Pepsi to Provide Free Music Downloads on Twitter Pepsi will begin curating new music for fans on Twitter through a year-long partnership with the messaging platform, both companies announced Wednesday. The "Live for Now Music" initiative is an extension of Pepsi's recently launched "Live for Now" global campaign, will offer free music downloads, music videos and a series of pop-up concerts this summer and fall. Every Wednesday for the next 52 weeks, Pepsi will offer videos providing an overview of the artists, music and music news trending on Twitter that week. In addition, @pepsi will offer free downloads from the Amazon MP3 store for fans who follow the brand on Twitter and use the hashtag #PepsiMusicNOW in their tweets. The brand will also use Twitter to announce pop-up concerts, which it will offer on-demand afterward for fans who want to watch it later. The deal comes about two weeks after Twitter announced another long-term deal with ESPN to create custom ad programs around major sporting events.
Content Pandemics and the Impetus for Enterprise Content Curation The age of ferocious mediocrity is upon us. Like a virus slowly evolving and afflicting greater and greater portions of the population; mediocre content has been infecting every medium it touches. Not only has it overwhelmed and made scarce good content but it has reshaped our perception of what good content is. It is, in fact, what I refer to as a content pandemic. Classically a pandemic refers to a virus that has attributes like passing from species to species, affecting wide spread regions, and having an aggressive evolutionary lifecycle which makes it difficult to treat. We can look at mediocre content the same way. When we made the tools available to self-broadcast, we let the Genie out of the bottle. But what does this mean to the enterprise? On Wednesday Feb 22 edition of #Bizforum Twitter chat, we debated the Role of Content Curation in the Enterprise. Quality content is a sustainable competitive advantage Content curation delivers value to everyone, not just prospective customers
A Marketer’s Guide to Content Curation | Power Tools for Thought Leaders Image via CrunchBase Kipp Bodnar of HubSpot shares his thoughts on curation as a marketing strategy… There is an elephant in the online marketing “room,” and the elephant’s name is Curation. Curation is the most important part of online marketing that no one is talking about. With the rise of inbound marketing, content has become front and center in the minds of marketers. This focus on content as an important marketing tactic creates two extremely important problems. First, content creation is difficult. Applying Curation to Our Problems As marketers, how do we solve these two problems? Curation has become a fixture for many successful news blogs on the web today. Source: A Marketer’s Guide to Content Curation Go to the source if you’d like the rest of his perspective. Content curation can improve audience loyalty (e1evation.com) The Beginner’s Guide To Content Marketing (e1evation.com) This Year’s Highlights for B2B Marketing (business2community.com)
Content Curation Is Listening and Engaging Content curation is the organizing, filtering and “making sense of” information on the web and sharing the very best pieces of content that you’ve cherry picked with your network. But finding and organizing the information is only half of the task. As Mari Smith points out in this video about why curation is important and some tools for doing it. By sharing the information and giving credit to the source where you found the link, you build relationships and a network. I used to describe this process as “Listening and Engaging” but really like focusing it the process around a content strategy – makes listening and engaging much more actionable. Last week, I helped launch a peer exchange for Packard Foundation for Children’s Health Insurance grantees with Spitfire Communications (creators of the SMART chart). Bruce Lesley is one of a growing number of nonprofit executive directors and senior leaders that use Twitter. What do the experts say?
Curation is More Than Integration The term “Curation” doesn’t yet score a hit in the archive of Scott Adam’s Dilbert cartoons, which means it’s still living the short half-life between entering the pop management lexicon and becoming the object of ridicule. Trust me. There are enough people running around the marketing world babbling about “curating,” that it won’t be long before Dogbert or the Pointy-Haired Boss skewer us all for using language that no real human being would ever utter. We hear a term like “curate” crop up in a few business conversations. When “curate” first showed in our world, it was being used as a new way to speak about integration; of activating the various disciplines of marketing communications to work in synergistic harmony with one another. In truth, curation has more to do with the multi-participant communications flowing in the stream of social media conversation. Someone has to be the raconteur, the one who shares anecdotes in a skillful, amusing and engaging manner. Learn more at gyro.com.
Is Content Curation the New Community Builder? Content curation has drawn my interest. I was at a tech conference last week and saw a couple of pretty cool applications for curating content. Setting a side the debate of right or wrong, these new content curation tools will make their mark. Over a year ago Mashable reported Why Content Curation Is Here To Stay; The debate pits creators against curators, asking big questions about the rules and ethical questions around content aggregation. Media Curation is the emerging trend toward integrating and pondering media content using a mix of machine and human resources. Media Curation is a complex subject among media professionals, with notable professionals both for and against the practice. But just as passionate are an emerging class of new publications and editors like Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post and Michael Arrington of TechCrunch. The large and unwieldy volume of content being created and pushed to public space on the web overwhelm individual web browsers.
Sharing Content to Show Thought Leadership Creating, finding and sharing compelling content can prove to consumers that a company knows its territory, is a thought leader in its industry and wants to help customers keep up-to-date on important developments. Marketers are placing an ever-greater emphasis on content marketing’s ability to add value for targets and prospects. According to February 2011 research from content curation firm HiveFire, nearly half of US marketing professionals surveyed are now curating content as part of their strategy, and another 42% are familiar with the practice but not participating. The main objectives of content curation, according to the survey, were establishing thought leadership and improving brand buzz. Earlier research conducted by Junta42 and MarketingProfs in May 2010 found that brand awareness was the top goal of content marketing for business-to-business marketers in North America, cited by 78% of respondents. Keep your business ahead of the digital curve.
How to use content curation to add value to your own website If you are responsible for adding high-value content to your website, you are constantly being challenged to find page or post topics which are new, shareable, helpful and original. As Google’s recent Panda update taught us, quick and easy content is not going to get our pages listed on page one of the search results. Besides which, quick and easy content does little to impress, engage or retain our readers. So, given that you are now going to focus on high-value content, are there ways and methods you can use to deepen your expertise as a real-time expert? I believe there are. Being a curator means seeking out the best of the best, wherever it is being published, and then collecting it in one place. No, I’m not suggesting you have to publish curated content on your own site or sites, although you can. Let’s look at how various content curation tools and services can help you do that. 1. When you sign up at Paper.li, you will be asked for your Twitter and Facebook account information. 2.