So how exactly is the word “curation” applied online? Just like the museum curator, who picks out which paintings are shown, online curators pick out which bits of content are shown.
If you think about it, hasn’t this been going on since the dawn of communication?
Human’s have always shared what they felt was the most important, most relevant information to others around them. Even if they were the original source of that information.
Lately however, marketers have decided to call this “curation” in order to make it sound new. Regardless of whether it’s new or not, it is a very solid content strategy. Especially in this day and age! Let’s face it, there is an overwhelming amount of content out there now. We’ve become our own media outlet now that we have these smartphones in our pocket.
With an overabundance of content comes a growing demand for that content to be sifted and sorted. Curated to bring only the best bits to the forefront!
One old example of this online is The Drudge Report. This site produces no original content. Everyday they update the links on the one page they have. That’s it! This site gets butt loads of traffic, and it is worth millions. They employ a very small staff that “hand picks” the news they will feature on their homepage every day.
A better example would be The Huffingtonpost. As you can see, they add their own voice and opinion on the topic at hand in addition to syndicating content from other authoritative websites. It’s important to note that the owner of that site recently sold it for to AOL for $315 million dollars!
In regards to the word “curation”, Business Insider goes on to explain why it is becoming so popular with media companies large and small:
“..It’s a word that gained a lot of traction in the past 12 months as the overarching trends of ubiquitous distribution and mass content creation have emerged as the two headed dragon that may slay media as we know it.
The old model was “one to many” (NBC -> viewers). The new model is “one to a few” (YOU -> your friends and followers). That means there is an overwhelming explosion of content being created (Twitter feeds, blog posts, Flickr photos, Facebook updates) and most of it is interesting to a very small number of people. But, mixed in with this cacophony of consumer content, there is contextually relevant material that needs to be discovered, sorted, and made “brand safe” for advertisers.
Curation is the new role of media professionals.
Separating the wheat from the chaff, assigning editorial weight, and — most importantly – giving folks who don’t want to spend their lives looking for an editorial needle in a haystack a high-quality collection of content that is contextual and coherent. It’s what we always expected from our media, and now they’ve got the tools to do it better.
Yes, that’s right, the future of media is better, not worse. It’s more detailed, multi-faceted and nuanced. And, just more.“
A lot of content creators aren’t so happy about the growing popularity of “editorial curation — human filtering and organizing”. Steve Rosenbaum, the CEO of Magnify.net, explains why:
I don’t know about you, but I find it very entertaining to watch how the Internet continues to evolve. It truly boggles the mind when you realize just how fast technology is advancing. This new Google update is a welcome change since I feel it can only increase the quality of the search results. Not everybody agrees of course.
“Google Search has always been about finding the best results for you. Sometimes that means results from the public web, but sometimes it means your personal content or things shared with you by people you care about. These wonderful people and this rich personal content is currently missing from your search experience. Search is still limited to a universe of webpages created publicly, mostly by people you’ve never met. Today, we’re changing that by bringing your world, rich with people and information, into search.
Search is pretty amazing at finding that one needle in a haystack of billions of webpages, images, videos, news and much more. But clearly, that isn’t enough. You should also be able to find your own stuff on the web, the people you know and things they’ve shared with you, as well as the people you don’t know but might want to… all from one search box.
We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships. We began this transformation with Social Search, and today we’re taking another big step in this direction by introducing three new features:
Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page;
Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and,
People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community.
Together, these features combine to create Search plus Your World. Search is simply better with your world in it, and we’re just getting started.[Read more]
What are your personal feelings regarding this new update to Google’s algorithm update? Please leave a comment.
The popularity of social media seems to have come out of nowhere for most business owners. This leaves many scratching their heads wondering how exactly they’re supposed to utilize sites like Facebook or Twitter.
Mashable gives us 5 great tips for a successful social media content strategy:
“1. Know Your Voice
Everything you say on the social web should “sound” like your brand. It’s something Skittles does well. Some of its status messages garner more than 1,000 comments, and many exceed 10,000 “Likes” on Facebook.
Why are these little content snippets so successful? The writing is just like the candy: colorful, playful and imaginative. The pithy, daily, flavor-packed observations are reliably surprising. You can relish today’s post and look forward to tomorrow’s — like candy in word form.
2. Time Your Content
Create a calendar that spells out what you’re going to say and when you’re going to say. Make sure it’s relevant to where people are in their lives and the season. Nobody cares about Santa Claus in January, but a whole lot of people care about sales after Christmas. A quick look at Google Trends will confirm that.
Banana Republic’s tweeters got the memo.
Macy’s and Walmart didn’t.
3. Know Your Audience
Why does somebody follow you? Why do they like you? It’s because your brand offers them something. Make sure you deliver. Here’s SKYY Vodka on Twitter with a message that’s relevant to most of its…” [Read more]
What is your social media content strategy? Leave a comment below!
Yes, it’s true. It was only a matter of time really. The more webmasters see how crucial Facebook is to their online presence, the more demand there will be for “likes”. Unfortunately, there have been plenty of companies popping up offering just that. Facebook fans for sale!
At the price many of these companies are charging, I can’t imagine these being real people liking your page. Even if you look at it as a strategy to simply get the ball rolling, there are better ways to get “likes”, and from real people at that. See my blog post here to find out how I was able to get 100 REAL “likes” in less than 24 hours.
“In our experiment, we decided to buy 1000 Facebook fans for an Australian fan page, and 2000 Facebook fans for a United Kingdom fan page.
Within days, we began to receive new fans, as promised. But there were some problems.
1. We paid extra for the “targeted fans” option, and clearly specified that we wanted Australian fans and United Kingdom fans respectively. However, it became clear early on that all fans were from the USA. When we replied to SocialKik.com to ask them why we weren’t getting geographically targeted fans, they did not reply. Unfortunately this did not improve and we ended up with almost exclusively USA fans.
2. Some of the “fans” began to leave weird comments on our fan pages. Things like “hello” or “i feel bad today”. That’s no big deal, but the thing is, some fans made identical comments on both of our fan pages. This leads us to suspect that many of the fans (or at least the ones that comment) are either junk profiles, or perhaps paid to join our page and comment. Why else would they join both pages and make the same weird/random comment on both of our seperate fan pages?
3. The fans don’t interact, or seem interested at all. This is no big drama, as we expected this. We can’t be exactly sure how SocialKik.com find the fans, but you can be pretty sure that they’re not joining your fan page because they are genuinely interested. So don’t expect much out of the fans, it’s really more about boosting numbers.
4. We had some issues getting the fans in the promised amount of time. For our UK page we were told that we would get 2000 fans in 21 days. In fact it took several months to get that number of fans, and only after several emails and complaints that it was taking so long.“
Any tools that can help us spot trends is very welcome. If you spot trends early enough you can position yourself in a market before there is too much competition.
“With hundreds of thousands of websites integrating with Facebook Likes and 250 million people engaging with Likes just a little after a year after the Like button made its first appearance at F8, the space of Facebook Likes aggregation is about to get competitive. Facebook search engine Booshaka just released their own Facebook Likes categorization yesterday, for example. Likester just overhauled its platform, wanting to become the go-to Facebook Likes aggregator.
What Likester does differently from Booshaka is that it shows users realtime and popular Like trends, including what your friends are Liking, what everyone is Liking, what’s trending and a chronological log of all your friends Likes. A maps feature adds locality to what Likes are popular where.
As an example of the potential of this service, Likester is currently trying to predict the winner of American Idol by tracking how many people Like certain contestants during the show.
The best part about Likester is the drill down effects of item affinity when you hit the Details button on a specific Like. You can look into “Likesters who liked this also like” recommendations as well as suggest the content to friends and post it on your Facebook wall. Founder Kevin McCarthy says he is also experimenting with anti affinity, or figuring out what people…” [Read more]
