publications

For years, we have been warned that the consequence of the “everyone-can-publish” Web model will be information overload (or as Edelman Digital's Steve Rubel calls it, "attention crash").

Search engines are less and less helpful in filtering online information. Searching for something specific can often result in thousands of irrelevant links. You can follow Google Alerts, RSS feeds and Twitter accounts devoted to a topic of interest, but your information stream will be polluted with a lot of content that doesn't interest you. And you'll spend an inordinate amount of time checking for the latest updates, something a group of University of California, San Francisco scientists recently noted "impedes short-term memory, especially among older adults."

The problem, though, isn't information overload. After all, I can stand all the information I can possibly get—about things I'm interested in.

Clay Shirky, new media consultant and New York University professor, argues that overload isn't the problem. "It's filter failure," he says. Given the volume of information available online, the need has arisen for trusted guides to assemble the best content on topics about which they have expertise. These could be their personal passions, their careers or their fields of study. By sharing content they have found valuable, they help others interested in the same subject cut through the clutter and get right to the content that answers their question, solves their problem or provides illumination.

Enter the era of the content curator.

Curation is gaining steam. New tools are emerging at a steady clip, resources that offer a variety of approaches to spotlighting the best content are popping up, and even books on the topic—like Curation Nation—are hitting the market. Curation is becoming part of the digital ecosphere, where the decline of any core element (content, search, relationships, context, collaboration, community and relationships) damages the rest.

As curation becomes more and more a standard practice, it is becoming incumbent upon communicators to add curation to their skill sets and begin curating content for their audiences. The role of the communicator, after all, is to provide compelling content that engages readers and helps tell the organization's story. As our audiences increasingly hunger for relevant content, we as communicators can show them the way, becoming that trusted guide and enhancing our organization's visibility and reputation.

While curation isn't yet on the radar screens of most communicators, there are organizations curating content effectively. UPS, for example, is using the PopURLs service, which serves as "a gate to a highly selective collection of the most popular sites, presented in a usable way for every device and service." The UPS site collects headlines and videos in a variety of business categories of interest to UPS customers.

IBM has employed a Tumblr blog to curate third-party content that links with the company's "Smarter Planet" initiative, which (according to Wikipedia) "highlights how forward-thinking leaders in business, government and civil society around the world are capturing the potential of smarter systems to achieve economic growth, near-term efficiency, sustainable development and societal progress." While there's plenty of Smarter Planet content on IBM-owned properties, the company uses the Tumblr blog to collect other peoples' content along with content from IBM blogs.

Airvana, a provider of mobile broadband network infrastructure systems and femtocells—small cellular base stations designed for homes or small businesses—maintains its FemtoHub blog to curate articles about femtocells from a variety of sources, running the gamut from industry trade publications to articles from major metropolitan daily newspapers. According to the site, "As a femtocell vendor, our goal was to help grow the industry by providing a central source for femtocell news, supplemented by our own opinions and observations. Since then, the Femto Hub has become the most active site for femtocell news globally. We publish on average over 140 news items each month, resulting in a searchable archive of over 5,000 articles."

Lawrence Ragan Communications Inc. has found a substantial new audience based on subscriptions to its various curation channels, including PR Daily, HealthCare Marketing & Communications News and HR Communicator. The company SmartBrief has found a revenue model in similar newsletters that cover such topics as restaurants and nutrition, aviation, custom content, animal health, plastic surgery, entertainment, education technology, smart grids, and telecommunications.

Curation can be as simple as a newsletter or as complex as a website dedicated to content that digs deep into an issue. Even a single blog post can serve as curation; you've probably seen posts that list "The Seven Best Twitter Tools" or "40 Great Posts About Search Analytics."

Curation is often confused with aggregation. Simply collecting links is of limited value. The benefit comes from context—the commentary by the curator that explains why the item has been added to the collection, what makes it great and how the audience can use it.

Those who dismiss curation as nothing more than link collecting don't grasp the effort required to create a great collection: Research, organization and documentation are among the steps curators take to produce genuine value in which the collection is greater than the sum of its parts.

I've been experimenting with some curation tools. Storify lets me find content from a variety of channels—from Google to Twitter, from YouTube to Flickr—and add the relevant items I find to a "story." My ongoing "story" contains material that reinforces my belief that companies should open social media access to employees. I have another self-contained "story" that’s a collection of tweets and other content from a daylong conference that provides a quick summary of the key points made by every speaker at the event.

Pearltrees allows you to create a visualization of content. For example, I have a Pearltree on the open-access to social media issue. Orbiting the primary "pearl" are two sub-trees, one on the reasons companies block social media access to employees and one on the benefits organizations could gain by opening access. Surrounding the first sub-tree are the four main reasons companies block access; surrounding the other are eight benefits companies could accrue. Each of these sub-sub-trees is populated with links to supporting content from across the Web.

At Magnify.net—where you can find and collect videos—I've created Road Warrior Central. So far, I've added a few videos on great luggage. If I ever decide to curate a site on being a road warrior, I could have a page of just video by importing my Magnify.net page into the site.

These are just a few of the hundreds of curation tools hitting the market as curation becomes a new form of communication. You'll be hearing a lot more about curation as a communication activity. Don't wait. Get started by identifying a topic for which your customers or other stakeholders need a trusted guide, and begin exploring the means by which you can best curate content on their behalf. It'll put you a full step ahead of your company's competitors and give you a leg up on learning this critical new skill.