It seems that right now the hottest thing in the world of content is curation.
Curation is a useful way for anyone to pull together great content for a variety of sources, add their comments to that content and publish new content.
Curated content can supplement the content you already have; it can be used to start a blog or website from scratch and it has infinite uses as an internal corporate tool for education, manuals and communication.
I’m excited about curation. As a content creator and former journalist, I know that no one person can be the expert or authority on a single subject. This is where content curation comes in. it gives you the power to pull in other articles, video, blogs, chart, whatever is out there and offer your take on it. Thus, providing your audience well-rounded coverage of any subject matter.
It can also help establish your website as a destination for information on specific topic, further establish you as an authority on that subject, offer a wider range of and deeper range of topics to your readers and help you get ranked higher in the search engines.
Currently, platforms are beginning to show up that make the process of curation easier. Shareist, from MechMedia, is among this those platforms gathering some steam. Shareist is now in its final beta stage, but is being tested extensively by online marketers. It is the result of an internal platform built my MechMedia to power their own affiliate sites and has evolved into a product that can help others do the same.
But make no mistake content curation is not simply an automated aggregation process. It’s not a set and forget it process. It’s a way to bring in content pick and choose from sources and add that content to enhance what you already have, the platforms simply make that process much easier to do so. It is based on human filtering and organizing.
In a recent discussion with MechMedia co-founder and President, Scott Jangro, I told him that I found curation to be magical, but it is not magic. He agreed. Curation requires oversight and management. This is a place to expand what others see with the point of view of the curator infused.
Let’s look at curation if you have an affiliate website. Perhaps, you have a coupon site and attempt to offer deals and discounts to a large audience. You have a loyal base of users that look to you as a trusted place to get these deals. However, perhaps, you find that often people might want to know about product recalls before they purchase.
That is content you can create by hiring someone to follow all the recalls, rewrite them and consistently update the page. Or you can make a page for recalls; set up keywords to bring that information to your attention and then added manually what is appropriate to your customers. Yes, someone will have to oversee the process but the painstaking efforts are significantly reduced and you’ve just added some additional value to your site for your users.
Another example: You have a blog that focuses on a subject like baseball books and interviews with authors. Joe Maginess has the website Baseballisms.com, where he interviews authors of books about baseball. . But he found that many people came to his site searching for information on the history of the Negro baseball leagues. He could have done a lot research and put together articles. That is not the focus of his site and his not an expert on that topic. Instead he used Shareist to pull together content from many experts on that subject. Now he has added value and serviced his readers with what they were look for. This is a great use of the curation model.
I can also see application in business and education. Hospitals could set up curated pages for all their departments. That means that the radiology department would have a page that is seen only internally and has the latest new, articles, papers and blogs about that subject, thus keeping doctors in that department up to date on the latest information in their field.
I have also seen applications where agencies use curated pages to help inform their clients of what they are doing for them. The page could be pulling in tweets, Facebook posts, blog post and other things that relate to the clients. Again, it can only be accessed by the client and agencies, but it gives agencies a way to let clients know about the extra services and support they are providing to clients.
In Content Curation is Hot Part 2 we will discuss some ethical issue about the use of content, duplicate content and how that is handled by search.
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