How to introduce content curation into your content marketing initiatives?  Content curation is fun, rewarding, a real time saver and is proving highly effective. Learn this great way to compliment your original content on your Wordpress blog, your audience will thank you for it and you will continue to build yourself as a true thought leader. This is a HOT topic so jump into the conversation now.   

Hi Trudy,

Curation is really explained easily enough. Content curators find, organize, share and give special context to the content they find. We act as like human filters and make content recommendations. People really practice curation everyday, every time they share content on Facebook or Twitter. Curation is a great way to build yourself up as a thought leader and is a great way to add more value to your content marketing strategy. I hope this helps. There are a few great tools to get started with, like Scoop.it and you can create a topic and get started curating. Does that help?  Do you have a wordpress blog?

Tom – thanks for this question about a great topic.

Hi Trudy – I wrote the answer below and posted it, and then realized that Tom had already replied (I had left this thread open in my browser for a couple of hours before responding). Since I cite a specific example (the website my friend and I launched – which I think is a fair example of content curation in action), I thought it might be helpful to still post my reply.

I’m not an authority, but I would say that content curation refers to the gathering and publishing of content around niche topics – filtering the content that is found all over the web about a particular topic so that you present only the best content to your reader.

Aggregation is similar, except that the typical understanding of the word aggregation refers, I think, to more of an automated process where the content to be presented is chosen through technological means. Curation may use technology, but the human factor is involved in the filtering and also in augmenting found content with the curator’s own opinions.
The website a friend and I launched last year – http://www.insurancethoughtleadership.com – uses a form of content curation to present timely information about the business insurance industry. On our website, we present content which is:

1) developed by our curator himself – through articles he has written.

2) commissioned by our curator – through articles written by our growing group of expert authors (we currently have 60); and,

3) gathered by our curator from around the web – through links to articles on external websites.

Does that help?

@iamconsulting I, too, would be interested to hear your review of Curata  

What do you all think of Paper.li? It’s sort of an automated curation engine based upon your social graph (who you follow on Twitter, FB).

@iamconsulting  @mspseudolus

I am glad to see you guys are interested in curation because it is fun, and really going to be an exciting part of the future of the web, with our social graph, really even Google knows this. I have not used Curata yet, but thanks for the insight into it and it sounds good. I know of the CEO and there story and they are based out of Cambridge MA. I think they have a great business model. I do use Paper.li and am amazed the tweets from our page. I have received over 15,000 and I also like how it automatically refreshes everyday. I am building a community of curators over at Internet Billboards and we use Scoop.it, I really recommend you check out Scoop.it because you can create a topic and go niche with it. Let me know what you think?

@mspseudolus

Happy to share my experience! 

I’ve not tried storify.  Just Curata and Paper.li so far.  It seems the more clients I meet the more I find myself playing with new software and services.  I’m sure it will come up eventually. =)

Have any of you tried Scoop.it? It is a great platform, they do have a free version so the price is not an issue. You create your topic and build a following. Let me know? Yes curation is not merely aggregation, it is about establishing yourself as a thought leader, and an excellent tool to build relationships and trust. Unfortunately, like so many other trends and technologies there will always be that exploitative factor. But yes I agree Dave when this passes the companies that remain true should fair well. I hope we are one of those companies. Also I wanted to mention Storify, I have used it, I find it best to embed the story into our site.  

I’ve tried Scoop.it, but it doesn’t seem to work too well for me. I tried it out only as a tool to find content – I don’t quite see the value in having an additional site where content is curated. So we’ve built a simple tool to pull content directly into our content management system (we use Expression Engine) – to evaluate, augment, and approve or discard content from external sources.

Hi Tom. Expression Engine is a very powerful platform – it’s not free, but the cost is nominal given what you receive in terms of functionality. I’ll warn you, though, it’s not for the faint of heart (at least not at first – it takes some getting used to, but after you use it for a short time, it becomes second nature). I’m going to launch a site on WordPress in the near future (it’s a small site and I don’t need a lot of functionality), and I’m wondering if I’m going to have to retrain my thinking because I’m so accustomed to thinking in EE terminology.

What I basically did was set up Expression Engine to populate one of its channels (a channel I use for simple links – so it only pulls in a title, a link, and a summary) with an RSS feed of news items. At any time, I can load 100 news items into the CMS and then quickly process them one at a time – approving the ones I think are interesting and deferring the ones I don’t want.

Does that make sense?

When starting my blogging “career” a few months back I got into a panic about getting enough good quality content and tried quite a number of tools that were in my price-range (free). I tested an earlier version of Storify, Scoop.it, Zemanta and CurationSoft among others. They all had their ups and downs and none of them worked exactly how I wanted. I am keeping my eyes out though as I am sure that they will be adding more capabilities.
Storify – I looked back at this a few days ago and was impressed enough to start using it consistently for testing. I allows me to pull in just enough content and then freely comment on it to build value. It feels like a keeper.

Scoop.it – I create a “channel” of my interest and started to fill it up with content. While I like the concept and it still is in its infancy, it was not what I was looking for. It felt like my personal content aggregator with minimal commenting.

Zemanta – excellent tool but its sources are a bit limited or old, even when I setup the requisite RSS feeds. I can write to my hearts content and all the referral links are at the bottom.

CurationSoft – has a lot of potential but for that, they want real money. I might try this one again in another couple of months.

A super resource for Content Curation in all of its forms is Robin Goods’ site http://www.masternewmedia.org/ also on Scoop.it (http://www.scoop.it/u/RobinGood).