How to Project Manage Your Nonprofit Story
Content curation is one of the new buzz worthy terms you’re hearing a lot about these days. And it’s for good reason. With so much information at the buffet , we need some help figuring out what to select. To pick an ‘object’ and add ‘beauty’ and meaning to it, we need curation from sources we trust. If we do a good job of culling from different sources – creating ‘objects of beauty’ — people will follow us.
Want some tips?
Beth Kanterrecently provided a link to a talk by ‘one of the best content curators on the planet,’ Robin Good . Also, Curation and the Future of Publishing has curated posts/articles on content curation. You can get started right now; then follow Beth and Robin the rest of the year and you’ll be set; seriously, they’re awesome. Follow them.
Curation is not just about collecting links or using the online tools out there –Scoop.it, Pinterest, Diigo, etc.—that will point you towards items that may be of interest based on keywords and algorithms. That’s mostly just aggregation (and that, per Huffington Post can be dangerous!). True curation looks at depth and quality of content and puts things into context in an organized, customized and annotated fashion. Curarein Latin means to take care of or attend to something. Don’t just pick a link and send people to it. Go a step or two further. See what the impact of that material is. See if there are comments. Follow the trail. If you curate content, you’re essentially taking care of your consumers. Think like a detective (or a ghost buster).
Curation is a gift we offer to our constituents. With so much content available to us (e.g., on Facebook the average user – and there are 800 million of them — creates 90 pieces of content each month — a content curator selects what’s important and serves it up in a digestible manner. To do this effectively, we must show our audience that we know them – going right to the heart of building relationships with our constituents.
Collecting is another term that’s germane. Collecting takes judgment, per Stanford Libraries Curator, Henry Lowood . Offering a valuable collection involves finding your own niche. If you curate content in an area where someone else is already doing it, then you’re less valuable to your potential audiences. This is a concept that relates directly back to mission, and being able to answer the question: “What would happen if we ceased to exist.” If nothing would happen (because someone else is already doing what you’re doing), then your case is not very compelling. Your content must be relevant.
Judgment-based filtering is also significant, and an integral part of a content curation strategy. Many of us simply can’t filter on our own; it’s too much work, as per Clay Shirky: all the filters we’re used to are broken and we’d like to blame it on the environment instead of admitting that we’re just, you know, we just don’t understand what’s going on.
Strategic organization is paramount. For great tips on how to gather a hoard of content and store it deliberately for future use, check out My Dirty Little Social Media Secret? Content Hoarding Tools.
Content curators are like ghost busters.
They find the great content others can’t/don’t have time to find, and add meaning to it.
Who ya gonna call? Content curators!
What are your content curation tips?
4 Comments
Just found a great article by Maria Popova of Brain Pickings. http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/06/maria-popova-in-a-new-world-of-informational-abundance-content-curation-is-a-new-kind-of-authorship/ It notes that 'curation' remains the semantic placeholder that best captures the central paradigm of Twitter as a conduit of discovery and direction for what is meaningful, interesting and relevant in the world. Just as its origin in the art world, curation online is premised on the idea that a curator with a point of view culls content around a theme that he or she deems of cultural significance.
A curator 'discovers' and serves as a 'catalyst' for a 'conversation'. The article talks about discovery as a form of creative labor in and of itself. Very interesting read.
The question of "Why curate" comes to mind… to me the act of Curating rather than Editing, suggests that there's a plan perhaps. This article: I read: http://bit.ly/yNT4Dk suggests just that most companies jump on the social media bandwagon without a net, let alone… without a plan.
My key takeaway choice from that article is this:
“Without doubt, many saw the relentless rise of the web and internet marketing as the death knell for paper catalogues and other mailings. In truth, they should lie as uneasy bedfellows — they are at opposite ends of the technological scale; the old dependable versus the wiz kid! But it is clear they each have their place and they can learn from each other.”
It's actually the reason that companies will go towards social media for their marketing needs without a plan or a program. Most companies utilizing a paper catalogue or other paper mailings (save bingo cards, which require a direct physical response) often sent them out to a list without actually having a plan there either. All they saw with the move forward was going beyond their mailing list to the entire world… and in ignorance thinking that the entire world wanted to see their content.
Which brings us back to content curators… and how different the practice is from editing. In this case, a separate "finessed" or "massaged" message is needed for the endless differences in demographics that the "world" provides. So to me… editing is the massaging and finessing but content curation is the derivation of the needs of each demographic… so editors edit… but a content curator defines the focus of that edit.
Interesting perspective Rosie. I think we're all circling around something that's beginning to take shape (whatever we end up calling it!). I like the comparison to Opinion Editors who comment on a collection. In that way, we're also like the folks who write pieces in the New York Review of Books. It's commentary (book reviews of a sort), yet it's also completely original and stands on it's own.
The other thing that makes content curators stand out for me is that they do the sourcing and collecting and arranging; then they comment, elucidate, refine and teach. It is somewhat like a librarian, but only like the very best librarian — the one in the movies — who has read all the books and knows exactly which ones to choose for different readers.
Thanks so much for commenting!
Just found this great article by Robin Good http://advancedmarkettraining.com/2012/03/14/a-journalistic-view-of-content-curation/ that discusses what content curation is/is not. It likens it to journalism for bloggers, noting:
…proper content curation takes work and great deal of journalistic thinking, not to mention a sense of responsibility to your readers…ou can’t just put a positive spin on your friends’ content and be done with it. You have to tell the truth and bring real benefit to what you put your perspective on… It’s more about sharing news from a journalistic perspective to make it easier for your readers to find the pertinent information they’re looking for, and gain an understanding of what it all means.