Customers.com Technologies

Combining Content Curation with Customer Communities

By Sue McKittrick

What’s the best way to lure customers to your web site and to your wares and to keep them coming back for more? 1) Provide compelling, seductive, timely, and relevant information to your target audience—not sales pitches, but authoritative information from objective third parties and great tips from their peers. 2) Make sure that targeted information turns up everywhere your target audience is likely to go—not just on your web site, but also on others’ sites, in the social media conversations they follow, and in the news. 3) Supplement your online forums with relevant tidbits of 3rd party information that address your customers’ concerns, pique their interest, and stimulate dialog.

It’s tough to grow a vibrant online customer community. It takes a lot of care and feeding and a lot of fresh information to keep your audience engaged. That’s why many of the “content curation” solutions that have been pouring into the market over the last three years are now addressing online communities as well as enterprise-level content curation.

There are now over 20 different suppliers of content curation tools. By and large, these solutions are designed for marketers and for publishers. They provide content aggregation, filtering, and categorization services that yield pre-categorized excerpts of articles and blog posts that are timely and relevant for your targeted audience(s). These content curation solutions typically offer workflows that speed up the job of finding, organizing, adding valuable commentary to the article excerpts, and getting internal approvals to publish those links and commentaries. They also manage the distribution of the targeted content via email, social media, and/or into your online (public and private) user communities. As these solutions evolve, so does our advice about how to select the right solution for your needs. This week, Sue McKittrick offers the third version of her Content Curation Evaluation Framework. Even if you aren’t “in the market” for content curation tools, this up-to-date description of the state of the art in content curation is worth reading, if only to understand what’s possible!

Content Curation Evaluation Framework, Version 3
What to Consider When Evaluating Content Curation Platforms for Marketing
By Susan McKittrick, Analyst and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, September 8, 2011

Empowering Your Subject Matter Experts to Engage with Social Media

By Patricia Seybold and Susan McKittrick

In B2B marketing, experts' content lures prospects and drives online engagement…but the marketers who run these marketing campaigns, by and large, usually aren’t the technical experts in the content areas that interest their company’s customers. It's often hard for marketers to get the real experts in the company to participate in social media conversations; these SMEs are too busy and/or they undervalue the results that can be obtained by commenting publicly and/or contributing their own perspectives to the topics of interest to customers.

That's why we became interested in a social media curation and commenting platform that's designed to help professional subject matter experts become social media curators and commenters. ConnectedN focuses on your experts' needs to:

a) Identify interesting content from trusted sources

b) Highlight or comment on that content on a branded microsite

c) Get legal/marketing approvals for any content or commentary that needs it

c) Redistribute links to highlighted content and/or the expert's comments on third-party content to a variety of social media sites (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.)

d) Control the time(s) of the day/week, etc. that they devote to reviewing and commenting on potentially relevant and useful content

ConnectedN’s Content Curation for Social Media Engagement
Enabling Busy Subject Matter Experts to Deliver Valuable Content to Clients and Prospects
By Susan McKittrick, Analyst and Senior Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, March 24, 2011