Combining Content Curation with Customer Communities

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. 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