Content Curation Software

As curation continues its upward climb in blogger and news room attention, more and more great stuff is coming out about how curation is done and how to incorporate it into any content marketing plan.

Beth Kanter (Photo credit: jdlasica)

Below are some of the best, recent resources from two thought leaders in curation: Robin Good and Beth Canter.

Honest, Caring Curation Is As Important as Creation

www.internetbillboards.net9/6/12  See on Scoop.it – Information Economy Note from Beth: This article was curated by Robin Good who used to point out the difference between sharing and. … Great advice for anyone wanting to become an effective content curator: “Whether in tweets, in blog posts, in podcasts, or in newsletters, be ruthless with your attention. … Some adopt a strategy of blanket-curation, throwing everything new or fresh or remotely interesting online and letting other consumers make …

The Key Benefits of Content Curation by Beth Kanter: Presentation

www.scoop.it9/26/11  Robin Good: Here is the official presentation that Beth Kanter delivered yesterday, accompanied by a curated bundle of user contributions (mostly tweets) and relevant resources (stats, some visuals and other resources) outlining the key benefits that content curation can bring. To do so, she used Storify.com which allowed her to pull in … Ten Great Google Plus Tips | Rainbow SEO | digital marketing strategy | Scoop.it. Your Google Plus page reflects your businesses …

ROBIN GOOD POP MILANO PROFESSIONAL ONLINE PUBLISHER (Photo credit: Michele Ficara Manganelli)

Digital Curator or Content Curator – Beth Kanter Interviews Robin

sigaloncuration.soup.io1/29/12 - Digital Curator or Content Curator – Beth Kanter Interviews Robin Good – Insights & Tips On Curation For Non- Profits [Video] | Content Curation, Social Business and Beyond. Beth Kanter interviewed Robin Good a few days …

Curation-ism, Part II: 4 Steps to Take to Go Forth and Curate

www.business2community.com4/12/12 - So in the spirit of that advice, here is a run-down of OpenView’s content curation process, with tips as well as a list of tools and other examples of curation models from around the web below. … For an even more substantial overview of content curation, check out Beth Kanter’s terrific “Content Curation Primer”. And for … Robin Good has a lot of interesting things to say regarding the importance of your visual delivery of content curation, and what’s in store for the future.

Adding more value to your Blog: How to write a Digest | Web

www.web-strategist.com10/3/07 - Beth Kanter asks in the comments form today’s Social Networking Strategy: “I’m remembering Robin Good’s piece on news mastering techniques — this is what you’re doing here. So, any tips or secrets you want to share with …

Shallow vs. Quality Curation

Robin discusses the difference between the two and the differences are very important.   Machine aggregated content and curation using only software tools without context, meaning, and opinion being provided by the curator is what he calls shallow curation.

One of the things we drill into customers from the very beginning of their CurationSoft usage is that neither our tool, nor any other tool, gives you a completely curated, professional blog post.  A piece of software cannot come up with a good opinion, relevant to the discussion at hand.

That’s why CurationSoft is a “content assistant” rather than being touted as a set-it-and-forget it tool like so many others.  The editor HAS to be involved and HAS to put the human touch on every piece of content they touch.

Why?

Because it increases relevance and meaning for readers and the search engines who track what readers are liking, tweeting, and talking about around the web.  The only way to get people to share and love your content is to do it better than an aggregator which only supplies search results.

This video by Percolate is really quite good.  Curation is very serious business.  You won’t find dime store internet marketers doing it well.  Or even properly.  Don’t let the spammy techniques that some are passing off as curation color your view of just how powerful a good curator can become on the web…

Download “Curation Myths Busted!” Just released this week at Blog Success.

Here’s a great case study on how Tom Treanor, from Right Mix Marketing, uses CurationSoft to help him curate great content onto his Pinterest board.

My Secret Weapon for Pinterest Content Curation

“I’ve been a user and affiliate of CurationSoft for a while now. I’ve used it mainly for writing curated blog posts (with it’s content discovery and drag and drop feature). If your strategy involves curating articles, I recommend you take a look at it. Anyway, in addition to curating content for blog posts, I’ve found two other good uses for CurationSoft. One of them is blog commenting. It’s a great tool to find recent blog posts on topics that I write about (and you can add “comment luv”, “Disqus” or “Liverfyre” as part of the search phrase if you have preferred commenting platform).”

Read the entire guide and watch Tom’s video as he takes you through his process of Pinterest curation.   Check out the resulting board where Tom has collected some incredibly helpful, current, informative articles and tips.

We love it when our customers come up with new and creative ways to use CurationSoft!

Remember:  CurationSoft works all over the place.  Not just on WordPress.  Take Tom’s case study into consideration if you are ever woo’ed by other “me too” curation products solely designed for WordPress.

Download a free copy of CurationSoft

Image via Wikipedia

This is one of the most often asked questions I get from beginner content marketers who are investigating  curation.  I say “beginner” because once you’ve read a few sites  that aren’t just shopping or direct sales sites, you quickly realize that everyone is linking to other sites – a lot.  And not by gun point, but willingly.

What’s more, sites that send people away are some of the highest traffic sites on the web.  So how can a site that actively sends people away, like Mashable.com, be one of the highest traffic sites on the web?

The answer is not to over think the answer.  It is so obvious that people don’t believe it at first.

As a content marketer you MUST send people away from your site in order to get a lot of traffic.  You don’t have to understand why to know it’s true.  If sending traffic away from your site was bad, all the major blogs, news sites, and niche content sites that link to resources outside their own domains would be unpopular instead of rolling in readers.

Some of the lowest traffic sites on the web, conversely, don’t link to anything outside their own domain.  Though there are sites that dead-end on the web which also get traffic, it is either paid traffic or comes from affiliates who are paid to send traffic from their sites and lists.  I’m talking about organic search and direct traffic from straight links on, you guessed it, other sites.

So Why Do You Get More Traffic By Linking To Other Sites?

Again, this answer is simple, but true.  Sites that actively (gleefully even) send people to other sites are hubs.  They are the watering holes of the internet.  In Africa, once a Zebra is full up on water, the watering hole sends them away, happy to live another day.  But do you think for a second that Zebra hasn’t burned the coordinates of a watering hole into their mind?  Of course it has.

Image via Wikipedia

Not only that, but the Zebra is going to lead any and all other Zebras he finds back to that watering hole.  ”The water is good, cold, and plentiful here.  We should always come back to this place.”

A hub site that delivers great and plentiful information to people who are thirsty for it has the exact same effect.  People come in throngs to sites like Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Mashable, Boing Boing and thousands of others every single day.  And what do each of those sites do?  They send those people right back out on the web to quench their thirst for information.

And those people bookmark, share, Like, Tweet, and email the crap out of those sites’ links to share the great watering holes they’ve found.  And the news spreads far and wide, virally, that there is this great place to learn about do-it-yourself projects, or about the trials of motherhood, or a site that has all the latest news on Android apps.

That is not just a primer on how to get a lot of traffic.  It’s exactly how the entire web actually works.  If hubs didn’t exist and no one ever showed their visitors the information that they’ve discovered elsewhere on the web, there would be no web at all.

Related articles

• Friday Traffic Report: Curation tips for bloggers (fridaytrafficreport.com)
• Curation As A Content Marketing Strategy (business2community.com)
• Types of Curation Part 2: Curated Hubs (curationsoft.com)

This is Part 2 in a series.  (Read Types of Curation Part 1)

Today:  Curated Hubs

While many people extol the virtues and value of social or real-time curation, my personal favorite from a branding and monetization standpoint is the curated hub, which is just a fancy name for blog curation.  A curated hub contains regularly published stories that contain citations of great informatin and resources on a particular keyword topic.  Curated content is formed into a blog post, with commentary from the author that gives the topic more depth, context, and standalone value.

The effects of a well-curated hub:

• save readers time finding the good stuff themselves
• inform readers by providing context and meaning to the citations and the overall topic
• trackback links from cited sites, which improve search rankings for the curator
• loyal following from readers who have chosen your site to be the trusted “filter” on a topic
• monetization through traditional methods of paid advertising, affiliate sales, list marketing, or products and services you provide directly

How Curated Hubs Bring Value To A Niche Market

One thing is for sure:  if you provide something of value to a large enough group of interested people, you can expect a loyal and growing following.  Along with good search rankings, links, and direct traffic from sites who reference and link to your stuff.

A site on the web today has to provide a much higher level of real value to earn loyal fans who recommend it to others.  People have serious A.D.D. these days with all the social, mobile, and web channels they follow.  So much noise, so little time.  It makes for a hardcore weeding-out process for web publishers.  You have to have your A Game going at all times to successfully compete for attention these days.

The value proposition in a curated hub is essentially twofold:

1. The site must create a knee-jerk reaction in first time visitors to want to bookmark, subscribe, or somehow make a note that this is a site they must visit regularly.  This is done firstly by providing content that helps them get a bird’s-eye view and deeper understanding of an overall interest which saves them time over finding all the good stuff themselves or elsewhere.
2. The person behind the curation is not just an aggregator of content, but someone with opinion and insight to add to the discussion and the outside sources they curate into their posts.  i.e. – the readers have to get connected to the person behind the information for “imprinting” to take place which causes them to really want to follow and talk about your site.

Why is that?  It’s because they like the way the information is delivered and the way each site chooses things to curate and talk about.  It is how the reporting culture is set up behind the scenes and in the writing itself.  When Samsung comes out with a new phone and each site curates a story on it, they aren’t talking about two different phones.  But their loyal readers like the delivery and the coverage of one over the other.  Each brings a different value to different reader tastes in how they like to consume information on gadgets and tech.

All of this “bonding” has everything to do with editorial policy and the people behind the curation, and nothing to do with the technology helping the curator to research, pick, and publish curated 3rd party content.

What Being a Great Hub Curator Means

Getting hub curation right means providing a value in the marketplace that is sought after by a significant portion of the ideal reader demographic you wish to attract.  Get this down, and you’ll have the traffic, rankings, and discussion on social networks to provide you with monetization opportunities out the wazoo.

At the end of the day, all hub curation is is a way to do content marketing that can take less time, help you publish more often, while becoming a necessary, crucial site for readers to visit regularly.  It is a way to attract a demographic to advertising, products and services, or affiliate offers that are placed throughout your site and in your email newsletter.

And doing it on your own domain, your own “hub,” means you control the entire process.  You control the flow of readers from other sites and search engines.  You control how they flow from content to ads or content to email list subscription, or to take whatever action you want them to take that makes your content marketing profitable.

Who’s Castle Are You Building?

Image via Wikipedia

This you cannot do on a third-party site owned by someone else.  In every instance where someone has built a third-party, hosted solution for publishing it has been an utter failure for the publishers in terms of maximizing profitability of all the eyes they attract.  It is always better for the owner of the network than it is the publisher. Always.

So never put your business in the hands of anyone else.  You home site – your curated hub – absolutely must be on your own domain and under your full control if you want to have a successful content marketing business.  Use outposts like social networks, personal curation sites like Scoop.it, and other places to help draw attention to your curated hub where the real business of content marketing gets done.  If one of your outposts changes the rules or dies, your loss is only a fraction of your overall efforts rather than a complete decimation of your entire business.

Things A Curated Hub Can Sell Well

• Books and courses (your own or as an affiliate)
• Services (your own or as an affiliate)
• Advertising
• YOU (as a personal brand)
• Consulting
• Coaching
• Memberships (your own or as an affiliate)
• Any number of hard or digital affiliate products related to readership interests

Image via Wikipedia

Curation is a particularly sweet kind of honey that attracts stressed out, overstimulated, overloaded bees (readers) who want to follow someone who cuts through the noise for them and presents them with only the best content with appealing insight, commentary and thought leadership.

Part 1 of a two part series…

There are several different types of curation.  In fact, there are almost as many types of curation as there are definitions of what exactly curation is.

But there are only two, count them, TWO types of curation that can be monetized well and used for brand-building.

With that in mind, there are two major types of curation happening today:

1. Real-time curation, and
2. Blog Curation (or Curated Hubs)

Real-Time Curation

This is the realm of curation that is personified by people like Robert Scoble, Guy Kawasaki, and Mari Smith.  They are followed on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ by so many people because of their ability to surface and post content their readers appreciate, enjoy, and spread around their own networks.

Real-time curation is all about being in-the-know and reporting on the latest breaking news and new information around a specific topic range.  Scoble is all about tech, startups, cool apps and social news.  Smith is all about sharing content on social media, branding, thought leadership, and marketing via social.

Kawasaki is the hardest to put into a box.  He shares just about anything and everything falling under the vague and subjective category of “interesting.”  But he’s done the best job of anyone in making general, real-time curation work for his brand.

The real-time curator relies on the same tools as anyone does to pick up on the latest news and information.  They live on RSS readers and other info gathering tools and they follow rich sources of information from the top content creators and leaders in their market.

Monetization of Real-Time Curation

Robert Scoble works for Rackspace.  He’s actually paid to “be” Scoble and draw attention to Rackspace.  Any company in the world would love to have Scoble as their mascot.  The amount of attention he garners with his blogging, interviews with tech leaders, and his social following is nothing short of amazing.  When he drops news about Rackspace, they are able to show off their ninja skills by keeping their servers from crashing under the massive influx of traffic Scoble can generate.

Mari Smith monetizes her real-time curation by building her brand, selling her books, and selling her expertise.

Guy Kawasaki monetizes his massive social following with book sales.  His is the house that real-time curation built.

A study of these three social mavens (by following them and watching what, when, how, and where they curate) would go a long way in developing your own strategy for successful real-time curation.

Part Two:  Blog Curation (A Curated Hub)

What about context?

Since everyone is pretty much focused on the technology behind curation these days (shiny new thing syndrome), I thought it would be nice to pull back and look at why curation works.

Specifically, why proper curation causes readership to rise and engagement to increase, as well as notable increases in social “buzz.”

The whole point of content marketing is to provide something of value which is highly desired by the target market you are trying to woo.  So it is definitely not enough to simply switch to a partial or total curation model and expect numbers to rise in all the categories above.

Nor is it a matter of which tools you choose to use to make curation possible, efficient, and effective from the publishing standpoint.  The thread which sews all these parts together is the human being doing the curation.

These Are Not The Droids You’re Looking For

Image via Wikipedia

There are dozens of sites and services that use the word curation to describe what they offer their users.

Unfortunately, most casual users of such sites are doing nothing more fancy than when we used to experiment with aggregating content onto our blogs from RSS feeds and other sources around certain keywords.  With no input from the curator as to why items were chosen or commentary that makes sense of the news or media curated, the new services for curation are just fancy versions of the “splogs” that are so frowned upon by mainstream online media.

Sure they look fabulous in some cases.  And very important looking too.  But without context and the human touch, landing on pages of “curated” content that is nothing more than aggregated content puts a big question mark over the heads of visitors.

Where the failure comes into play is a lack of education on just how to curate effectively.  On most of the sites we’ve reviewed where curation is the buzzword, the focus is on the technology and not the art of curating effectively to achieve reader engagement, rankings, loyalty, or social buzz.  The result is often just a mashup of seemingly unrelated or loosely related content completely out of context and with no added value or use to the reader.

True Curation Delivers The Goods

True curation works precisely because of the opinion, commentary, and engagement of the curators themselves.  Even the simple act of attaching a question to your readers at the end of a curated piece can result in vastly more engagement from your readership.

This type of extra input delivers vast potential in increased traffic, better rankings, more links, and more social buzz.  Not to mention a loyal readership that is happy to curate your  stuff on their social networks, bringing you more readers all the time.

Related articles

• Hand-Picked Content Is Marketing Gold (curationsoft.com)
• Chaos produces opportunity (curationsoft.com)

I’ve been playing with Scoop.it lately.  Some would say I’ve been sleeping with the enemy, but in truth, Scoop.it and CurationSoft play really nicely together.

While getting to know the interface and features, I saw a perfect opportunity for the two to work together through RSS.  Every Scoop.it curation page has an RSS feed (the little green RSS icon shows under the title of each page as seen below).

While Scoop.it allows you to publish “scoops” to your blog, it is in a one-off fashion and also not very SEO friendly.  It uses javascript to embed content, so you lose any SEO juice that would come from the curated portion of your post.

Of course, I want to be able to drag and drop any and all curated pieces right into the editor that I need, not just one.  And I want credit from Google on the content I include.

The new RSS feature of CurationSoft solves this problem nicely.  Below are some things I was able to drag into this post through CurationSoft from the  RSS feed on my Scoop.it page.

 Content Marketing News

Forty-one percent of companies struggle to create content for lead generation

The Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs recently collaborated on a survey that named producing content likely to convert prospects as marketers’ top content marketing challenge.

So you’ve got the greatest product to hit the market in a long time…now what? How do you get people to find out about, let alone buy it? That’s where marketing comes in. You’ve got to make sure you’re selling your products or services in…

Defying conventional wisdom, a quartet of print titles is being launched by GSG World Media, distributed in store and electronically by Office Depot. Naturally, the magazines focus on social media’s big dogs: FB & Business (Facebook), Tweeting & Business (Twitter), LI & Business (LinkedIn) and The Big G & Business (Google).

Some other notes on the resulting curated content above.

I was able to edit the look and resulting content so that it looks the way I want for this particular post and blog setup.  You don’t want to leave that to an outside party to determine.  Some of the links and meta data were able to be deleted to reduce clutter and maintain focus on the news and source curated.

The bottom line:  CurationSoft’s RSS module feature, just added in the latest version (1.0.7), gives you unlimited sources to curate from while giving you the ability to drag-drop and tweak the look and feel of the resulting curated pieces to your desire.

With rich RSS feeds that include images, you also get the benefit of livening up your curation with imagery that goes along with the pieces you curate.

This is a brilliant video depicting the art of data visualization as a curation method.

Data Visualization in Motion from Dataveyes on Vimeo.

Best quote from video:  

“Data Is The New Oil.  Extract Meaning.  Refine Knowledge.”

Image via CrunchBase

This is an amazingly “lost” video on YouTube.  It has a very low view count which is unusual given that it is an interview with Robert Scoble.

The points Robert makes about the joy he gets from curating and disseminating what he curates are infectious.  Sadly, to this day and since this interview, relatively few people understand curation, especially content marketers.  (the ones who should understand and use it the most!)

Curation is about truly being a part of the web in a positive, proactive way.  A way that can be profitable because, done well, it is valued highly by readers.  And it works for marketers.  It works for people who make a living at it.  It’s “kind of a big deal.”

Anyway, this is a worthwhile watch…

Cool articles on curation I’ve found lately…

• 3 ways the pros do real-time news curation
• Who are today’s curators?  And where the hell are the rest of them?

Related stuff…

• Curating The News (curationsoft.com)