The Next Big Thing: Content Curation

 By Patricia Seybold

Information over-supply and customers’ short attention spans have created the perfect storm of demand for a new genre of tools. Our customers are swimming in a sea of undifferentiated, unfiltered information. Every brand owner wants to provide authoritative information on the topics our customers care about. But our own internal experts now vie with third-party experts, passionate fans, uninformed bigots, and a cacophony of noise for customers’ scarce attention. It’s not enough to provide authoritative information on our Web sites. We also need our content to turn up everywhere our customers hang out. And we can’t rely only on our own internally-generated content. Customers trust third-party sources and each other more than they do the brand owner.

In this new world of content overupply and shorter attention spans, marketers now have three goals in providing the right information at the right time to customers and prospects:

1. Be perceived as authoritative and trusted.

2. Provide high quality information and resources, including valued and trusted third-party experts’ and customers’ contributions.

3. Provide a constant stream of timely, fresh, and valuable information to all the places and channels that customers frequent.

This is a tall order! Therefore marketers now need tools and services that make it easy for them to find, filter, aggregate, and curate targeted content that will appeal to their audiences.

The good news is that content providers abound. Journalists, publishers, out-of-work professionals, and passionate amateurs flood the net with their opinions, best practices, and tips and techniques. Some of this is free content. Some of it is paid content.

The value equation has shifted from content creation to content curation—finding the gems among the huge collection of available resources.

Not surprisingly, there’s a new crop of tools and solutions that will help marketers find, aggregate, and curate the content that will differentiate their Web sites, blogs, RSS feeds, and mobile apps. Many of these content curation solutions come from the publishing industry, which is appropriate since every company is now a publisher. Susan McKittrick offers a valuable framework to help you select a solution that’s right for your needs as well as a list of 10 content curation suppliers.

Comments

[Pawan Deshpande]

As you noted there are a litany of tools that provide content curation solutions. I caution your readers though to be careful when considering these options, as not all solutions are created equal. There is of course a flip side. When done clumsily, content curation can alienate an audience and damage a company's reputation. Unique introductions and conclusions can help brands put their stamp on curated content.