Now, in addition to maintaining fresh relevant content on our web sites, we also need to tweet, post, and link several times a day. Social Media Has Upped the Ante The more people link to, tweet about, and “like” the informative and/or entertaining information we provide, the higher our organic search placement will be. That means that when a hot prospect is actually looking for what we offer, they’re going to find it easily. The more people comment, blog about, or reference information that we’ve branded or co-branded, the more buzz we can generate. The more buzz, the more mindshare. The more mindshare, the easier it is to convert tire-kickers to buyers.
As Web site owners, we used to worry about keeping the content on our Web home page fresh. We still do. We also care about ensuring that all of the information on our Web site(s) is up-to-date, accurate, consistent and easy to navigate. Today we also care about having fresh, insightful content anywhere a prospect might stumble upon it.
Why does social media matter?
Now that social media has become such a big part of our interactive marketing repertoires, we need a lot more current, fresh and highly relevant content. Ideally, we should be tweeting several times a day. Good tweets include hyperlinks that our target customers will find useful and retweet to others. We should be blogging daily or weekly, and amplifying those blog posts via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, et al. We should be updating our corporate Facebook pages with engaging links and polls on a daily basis. We need a constant stream of interesting tidbits to feed into our social media and web publishing engines.
Where Can We Get a Constant Stream of Interesting, Relevant Content?
Social media’s high metabolism (several times a day) means we need a constant stream of relevant, timely, informative and interesting content. We need a lot of good information we can showcase in order to lure targeted prospects to our Web sites, blogs, micro-sites and smartphone apps.
Providing a constant stream of high quality, relevant information is a big job. Just ask any publisher.
Keeping the content pipeline filled with fresh and relevant articles and tips to feature can seem overwhelming if you’re not a publisher. But today, whether you’re a financial services firm, an engineering firm, a retailer, a training company, a not-for-profit, a government agency, a manufacturer, a healthcare provider, or a firm in any industry, you’ve become a publisher, too.
Content Curation to the Rescue
The good news is that there IS a lot of interesting and useful information being created, mined, surfaced, and ruminated about every day. That’s because everyone seems to be spending a couple of hours a week writing, opining, answering questions, and/or thinking out loud—all of it online. Some of us do it as part of our jobs. Others of us do it just because we’re human beings with brains. Our brains are tickled by events and they spawn ideas. That’s not new.
What is new is that it’s really really easy to capture those thoughts and ideas and share them.
Of course there’s also a lot more useless crap being spawned as well.
Finding and mining the nuggets is a job for good technology. If you can develop and continuously refine a set of searches and topical filters and point them at high quality sources of relevant information, you can feed your editorial pipeline. Then, all your editors or subject matter experts need to do is cull through the nuggets, add their own spin (or not), and post, tweet, and retweet. In fact, the posting/tweeting part can be automated and scheduled as well using any of a variety of social media tools.
Content aggregation and content curation are new/old uses of technology that now have a new mission in life:
1. Aggregate all the best information on a specific topic targeted for a specific audience.
2. Create a flowing pipeline of that aggregated information.
3. Pass it to human editors and subject matter experts who can curate it—showcasing and commenting on the most valuable items.
4. Check the curated content for quality, legal, and appropriateness, double-check sources, links, and attribution.
5. Post, format, and schedule for “publication” via any and all social media outlets
Wow! That looks a lot like publishing to me!
So, it’s no surprise that many of the players in the now-hot content curation market are firms that originally supplied content curation platforms and tools to traditional publishers. Now, these firms (many of them small, boutique shops) have realized that there’s a much larger market of marketers in non-publishing companies who need the same kinds of tools and processes to feed the appetite of the social media beast. This week, we offer a review of a content curation platform that was originally designed for large publishers, but which is finding a following among marketers in non-publishing organizations.
See Sue McKittrick's product review:
LOUD3R Content Curation Platform
Content Curation for Publishing Moves into Marketing with an Emphasis on Quality Content
By Susan McKittrick, Analyst and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, April 7, 2011
Comments