Summary: Why is content curation a hot topic, and why should you care? This 19-minute podcast explores what curation is, how individuals and brands can use it, which tools make it easy, and how to get started. Much of the content in this discussion originated with presentations in November 2011 to the IABC Western Region conference in Whistler, British Columbia, and the IABC/Toronto west end group. You can listen to the podcast now with the player above or download it to listen later. Or subscribe to this podcast in iTunes using the link at the top of this page. Here are the show notes: 00:01 Introduction and welcome 01:10 Link to slides from presentation to IABC Western Region conference in Whistler, BC, #iabccanwest, November 2011; link to write-up of IABC/Toronto session by Sue Horner on her blog. 01:36 What comes to mind when you hear the word curation? Museums? Good analogy! Curation defined: finding, organizing, categorizing, describing and sharing content 02:22 Why is curation a hot topic? Fast Company says so. 03:00 Information overload or filter failure? Clay Shirky says it’s filter failure. 04:00 Finding, grouping and sharing the best of relevant content 04:20 Why curate? As an individual, you can be seen as an important industry resource. Example of Dave Williams in e-publishing with his nascent site, Ebooksdecoded.com 06:10 Use of social bookmarking tool Delicious in content curation. Donna’s video about how to use Delicious; slightly out of date but still relevant; benefit of adding multiple tags; easy to share bookmarks 07:45 Brands and curation: especially important in the B2B sector with its long sales cycle; essential to be seen often in front of your prospects as a trusted source of information. 08:20 Examples of businesses using curation in this way: CMO.com from Adobe; Intel Free Press; these are not marketing or advertising sites. They are vendor-neutral. 09:30 What’s the difference between aggregation and curation? The human factor. 10:02 Select the best of relevant content, add own opinion and then share. 10:21 Fire hose of information: Lots of tools available to help you. Storify.com makes it easy to collect tweets and other information, particularly from events, and tell a story with them, adding your own thoughts. Scoop.it lets you put stories together easily. 11:30 Example of Smartbrief.com, curating content in hundreds of topics. 12:05 See screenshots in presentation. 12:16 Not just text. You can curate videos with Shortform. 12:40 Use Paper.li to curate content from Twitter. Older video from Donna on how to use Paper.li to curate Twitter content. 13:10 Other ways to share curated content: blog, enewsletter, widget, microsite. Example of Donna’s blog post on GooglePlus. 14:05 Curata example: Green Data Center News from Verne Global. 15:25 More on curation tools: Curation Station, Diigo, Pealtrees, Storify, Paper.li, Scoop.it, Mangify.net and more. 15:55 Developing a curation strategy: what role does content play in your overall strategy? 16:12 Industry news, expert tips and advice, presentations, case studies, event and book reviews, infographics, photos, podcasts, videos, etc. Anything that can be communicated can be curated. 16:30 Important to be discerning, discriminating 16:40 Company news, industry news, competitor news, etc. – curation in internal communications. 17:02 Curation best practices: understand your market and your place in it; what are you trying to achieve? What does your audience care about? Pick a curation platform or a curation tool. Keep your information organized; use tags. Add your own flavour; tell a story with your content. Share content and make it easy for others to share. 17:45 Always link to the original source! 18:00 Think like a curator and you’ll be a curator; be consistently helpful. 18:21 Please send your curation stories or other comments to donna AT trafcom DOT com.
