Content Curation

By Susan McKittrick | Published: February 15, 2012

A poorly understood content marketing tactic could be your most powerful community-building tool

We hear a lot about content curation these days. Some call it a top trend for 2012 and a must-see new technology for marketers. Others say it’s a fad that can’t hold a candle to creation of original content. Take a few minutes to understand what it is and the ways it fits into content marketing strategy. Then make your own decision about its role in your company.

A content curator assembles a quality collection of third-party and original content that is of keen interest to a particular audience, selects the best content for presentation, adds commentary valuable to the audience and publishes to the audience’s preferred channels. Content curation tools use technology to facilitate these steps.

Marketers use content curation to establish a reputation as a trusted resource in a particular area, to build an audience (that eventually buys) above the funnel, and to foster interaction with a community of people who share specific interests. At a tactical level content curation also draws organic search traffic, provides fodder for nurture campaigns and informs marketers so they can intelligently participate in online conversations.

Using content curation to build the trust of a target audience.

You will find a good example of content curation in action at www.cmo.com. Curators of this website draw on top quality content created by others combined with their own original content to present, “digital marketing insight for CMOs.” They feature “need to know” and “recommended for you” content along with selected other articles and news items of interest. After less than two years, the site draws 100,000 views a month and distributes its newsletter to 11,000 subscribers. Adobe, the brand behind the curation, demonstrates through the site that it “gets” digital marketing. It is building trust with an audience important to their success.

What tools do I need to become a content curator?

In its simplest form, content curation can be done with a Twitter account. You find timely, relevant content, add your two cents and tweet the introduction and link. However, using Twitter for curation will drain the time of already overburdened marketers and fail to deliver a customer experience that successfully builds the trust that retains a target audience.

An enterprise content curation tool will:

Help you find the best content
Make it fast and easy to select items and add commentary
Provide flexibility in presentation and distribution of curated content
Support the information consumer’s experience, through personalization
and navigation
Report data marketers need to improve execution, demonstrate value and gain customer insight

Some of the enterprise content curation tools you’ll want to consider are shown below. Each presents a different set of functionality tradeoffs so it is worthwhile to take a look at each of them to explore your own needs fully.