publications

If you pay attention to business communication—public relations, marketing, advertising or social media discussions—you’ve most likely heard of content curation. It has become an industry buzzword.

The first thing that probably comes to mind when you think of curation is a museum. Museums are overseen by curators, content specialists who are responsible for taking care of the museum’s collections.

About a year ago, the term curator was hijacked and applied to digital communication. Nowadays, when you go to conferences about online communication, almost every presenter is preaching that “content is king,” that “it’s all about the content,” and instructing you to act like a “content curator.”

There are two kinds of content involved in content curation: the content you publish for your organization and the online information gathering you do to willingly share with others.

First, let’s look at what you publish. Together with your communication team, you brainstorm ideas, add to them, nourish them, then go to work and eventually produce the content you envisioned. This content that you develop and share can take the form of any sort of online text, video, audio file, image, game, widget, app, etc. It could be a news release, a blog post, a video on YouTube, or an audio podcast episode posted online and sent to iTunes.

One of my favorite examples of self-publishing is Southwest Airlines. Take a look at their blog, and check out the breadth and depth of different kinds of digital content they’re creating and sharing. This content doesn’t just happen. They have a culture that encourages and nourishes content development.

The second type of content necessary for content curation involves researching, gathering and sharing content you feel is noteworthy. This type of content provides a unique opportunity for your organization.

If you consider the trillions of pieces of content now available on the Web and how we’re bombarded with more news and information in a day than our grandparents probably saw in a month, you quickly realize the value of aggregation—of someone or something sorting through the tons of information and delivering just the most important, most entertaining and most pertinent morsels to you.

Herein is the opportunity for us communicators to fill a role as the providers of just the right amount of information. It’s a role similar to that of a newspaper editor, but it’s tailored to your specific niche.

Functioning as a content curator for your constituents will mean that you’re actively perusing the Web for pertinent, noteworthy items. It means you have a good grip on all that’s happening in the social media space, from Facebook to Twitter, YouTube to Flicker. It also means that you’re positioned to be seen as a thought leader.

There are some cool tools available to help you in your role as curator.

Google Reader allows you to import RSS feeds from specific sites and even from blog and Twitter searches. You can use Reader as your online listening platform to mine the Web for information. It’s like the fire hose that leads to your garden hose.

Probably the best, most well-known example of a content curator is @GuyKawasaki. Kawasaki’s site, Alltop, boasts all the news that’s hot. However, the content offered is still very much like a fire hose. One look at his Twitter stream or Alltop’s home page, and it’s easy to be overwhelmed. So take his approach across a spectrum of topics and narrow it down to what’s most important to your organization or a group of its constituents. Then use tools like a blog or Twitter to share links to noteworthy content.

There are even blogging tools designed to be quick-and-dirty ways to deliver your curated content, like Posterous or Tumblr.

Social bookmarking sites are ideally suited for content curation. Set up a StumbleUpon or Digg account for your organization and begin linking to and commenting on noteworthy content. How about creating an account just for linking to news articles about your organization? This could serve as your online newsroom’s “in the news” section.

Look no further than your Facebook page for a content curation tool. Facebook pages allow organizations to share short bits of commentary and links to online resources. The page will also most likely double as a window into the content your organization is publishing.

So with all this talk of content curation and the tools you can use to gather and publish content—yours and others’—you may be left asking why you should try it.

If you function as a content curator for your constituents, you will strengthen your position as a thought leader. You will also increase the affinity your customers have for your brand because of the service you’re providing them.

You, in essence, will become the go-to place when they’re looking for information.

I believe the best approach to engagement online follows Pareto’s Principle, or the 80/20 rule: Spend the majority of your time supporting others (comments, retweets, links, etc.) and less time promoting yourself.

In this way, you maximize goodwill towards your organization, and your organization will become viewed as an appreciated resource or partner rather than as an unwanted intruder.