Blog search engine Technorati tracks over 100 million blogs on the web. New business blogs are started every day, on top of micromedia like Twitter, pseudo micro/blogging services like Amplify and actual long form articles from companies that realize consumers are no longer satisfied with basic products and services information. They want more. Creating new content on a daily basis is a challenge for most companies because they're not staffed to be a publisher. Even with copywriters, topics can get stale after a while. In other words, content creation over the long term can be a real challenge.

Enter the world of content curation marketing where you'll get a mix of definitions from industry thought leaders on what content curation is and what it can do as part of an online marketing program.

Even if you buy into the idea that curating content authored by others makes sense and that you can avoid any appearance of appropriating content in a way the author didn't intend, there's the issue of implementation. You can assign a person or people in your company to do it manually. This takes some coordination and cooperation between the people responsible for reading industry newsletter, blogs and feeds to identify content worth extracting and including in your curated publishing platform. Many popular marketing newsletters do this such as SmartBrief or sites like Social Media Today. The challenge is that it takes time and the sites you follow may not post something useful every day. Manual input takes time too.

On the other end of the spectrum is fully automated aggregation using third party tools that convert RSS to HTML. The pro of this method is that it takes no time at all after setup. It's all automatic. The down side, and believe me, there is some serious down side to this, is that it's not curation. Sure, you might make some editorial decisions when selecting the initial feed sources, but after that it's all splog. ie spam blog. Curation is about editorial discretion at the article level. But wait, I said above that manually culling great content out of multiple streams is too time consuming.

How can you get editorial discretion efficiently? One way is to use a service like the one our client Curata offers. Curata pulls in feeds based on keyword topics you identify and algorithmically filters content streams accordingly. At the same time, the publisher of the Curata blog can add comments to the excerpt as well as add their own blog posts. The mix of efficiently and intelligently curated content along with original content results in a productive source of information that is useful to readers, beneficial for publishers and a great complement to a content marketing program.

As will all software that manages content, it's a tool and customization as well as expertise in use translate into greater effectiveness in implementation.

Labels: content curation