Why do we need content curation? To help us find and highlight the gems of useful information among the clutter. Content curation aggregates, filters, organizes, and highlights information for a specific audience. There’s a growing ecosystem of professional content curators (a hot career opportunity!), suppliers of technology to automate content curation, and marketers and social media practitioners who are using content curation to attract prospects, to nurture leads, and to keep customers engaged with their brands. We’ve been covering content curation as a hot new discipline. Sue McKittrick has created a framework for evaluating content curation platforms and services that are used by B2B marketers. She has also reviewed a number of content curation platforms, including ConnectedN, Eqentia, Loud3R, and today, Curata. She looks at how well these solutions make it easy for the marketer, content curator, and subject matter expert to do their jobs. She also reviews these platforms from an information-consumer’s point of view. But, today, let’s step back and think about this evolving ecosystem. How well does it actually help end-customers get the information they care about?
This relatively new discipline has emerged because:
1. There’s a glut of information but too little sense-making:
- The Web is ubiquitous and mobile, and the amount of content grows exponentially every hour.
- Professional publishers, broadcasters, and studios compete with amateurs whose opinions, passions, and expertise may be equally interesting and relevant (or not).
- Most information is now freely available—at least the summaries and abstracts, if not the full digital content.
- Search engines can help you find information but don’t tell you whether or not it’s relevant to you or accurate.
- Therefore, information overload is here to stay.
2. Businesses, governments, trade associations, and not-for-profits have points of view they want to promulgate and customers they want to attract and to nurture, but to do so requires providing information that will keep prospects engaged, e.g., its quality will rise above the noise/clutter:
- The high metabolism of social media requires constant streams of interesting tidbits.
- Every company or brand needs relevant content to keep their web sites and their social media channels fresh and engaging.
- Marketers want to keep prospective buyers and existing customers engaged by providing them relevant, useful information on an ongoing basis.
- Meeting the demands of providing a constant stream of relevant, useful information to a target audience requires a focused effort.
- The good news is that there’s a huge amount of freely available information from which to choose.
- The bad news is that most of the tools that are on the market today still don’t provide an automated feedback loop from the information consumer to the content curator.
How Can We Make Content Curation More Customer-Centric? My question is: how well is this ecosystem evolving to actually help people get the information they need and want? The current content curation ecosystem appears to me to be more of a “push” ecosystem than a “pull” ecosystem. Brand marketers filter, refine, and highlight information that they think someone in my situation or context would find of interest. But, so far, there appears to be little or no feedback loop involved in letting customers/end-users vote on relevance and gradually refine the information that is being targeted “at” them. Nor is there any real connection between the tools that marketers use and the tools being created to let end-users do their own content curation. Combine End-User Curation Tools with Marketers’ Curation Tools and Provide Relevance Feedback and Personalized Delivery What’s needed IMHO is a combination of capabilities:
1) Good end-user centric tools for aggregating, filtering, curating, and adding value to information that end-users in a specific situation care about.
Whether you are interested in tracking a particular political issue, finding the solution to a pressing problem, or keeping abreast of the latest developments in a field, when you find something of interest, you tend to save it, tag it, and/or comment on it. Sometimes, you’re perfectly willing to do so publicly.
Examples of the “curation” tools used by end-users today are ones provided by Delicious, Evernote, iPaper, and other feedreaders, and by blogging platforms.
2) Good marketer-centric tools for content curation that provide the ability for end-users to rate the relevance of the information being provided to them, and, where those user ratings are used, to automatically fine tune the content being provided to them.
3) The ability for content curation platforms to aggregate and filter end-user curated content as one of their key sources.
4) Don’t obliterate the serendipity factor: we all need serendipity. We don’t want to refine the information that comes our way to the point that we miss the unexpected items that will surprise and delight us!
Perhaps this is part of the strategy that YouTube founders Steve Chen and Chad Hurley had in mind when they acquired Delicious from Yahoo. In announcing the purchase, the YouTube co-founders said they would use Delicious to develop innovative features to help solve the problem of information overload. What if the revitalized Delicious (and/or Evernote or other popular end-user curation platforms) provided tools for both end-users and marketers in a user-centric closed loop feedback system? How would that increase the relevance and value of the information we filter and consume? HiveFire’s Curata This week, Sue McKittrick reviews Curata—a simple curation service that does a good job of streamlining the content curation tasks for B2B marketers. One of the things I like about this platform is that is does enable end-users to nominate their own content to be added to a Curata-curated collection. But what’s missing from Curata (and from the competitive offerings) is a way to take into account what specific end-users found relevant, building a profile of what they found useful, and using that profile to evolve increasingly targeted content for them.
HiveFire’s Curata Platform for B2B Content Curation
Streamlining Multi-Channel Content Curation for B2B Marketers
By Susan McKittrick, Analyst and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, May 5, 2011
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