One of the best social media lessons I ever learned came from my good friend Laura Petrolino. Laura taught me that by becoming a content curator (i.e. regularly gathering and sharing links to useful articles and posts) for my social media followers and fans, I would be able to steadily grow my social media presence.

Curation in today’s multi-channel world is also a matter of being a ‘transmedia’ storyteller and being equally comfortable in each channel or outlet.

Content curation is more than just a Google search of your company name, though. Curating good content takes time and good editorial judgment. Here are 4 things to think about when curating content.

Whether you are competing in a business-to-consumer or business-to-business segment, one of the most important assets that you possess is your brand image. Years and millions of dollars are spent by organizations to promote and enhance their image with the hope of forming a bond with consumers/clients to prompt them to buy on a consistent basis.

There are several ways to use social tools to advance your business. You can show your thought leadership though blogs, podcasts, videos and other content marketing methods. You can find potential customers that have questions or problems and offer assistance. You can build communities around your subject matter with LinkedIn groups. You can curate content from multiple sources and become a trusted source for information in your field. And that’s just the beginning.

Particularly a fan of content curation:

You don’t have to always create your own content. Another way to become a trusted source for information in your field is to curate existing content. There is just so much stuff out there on the web to choose from. Helping others find the best of what’s there is another way to be helpful.

LiveWorld Curator enables brands to aggregate the social web, then select or “curate” content relevant to their customers. This provides their customers a one-stop location to see user generated content about the brand and themes of interest to those customers. Powerful curation, moderation, and insight tools, combined with LiveWorld human moderation services, ensure the content is curated for customer relevance, moderated to be spam free, and tagged for actionable insight.

An interesting aspect of the culture of sharing on social networks is that of content curation. This is the act of pointing your followers to content from other people. Anyone who sometimes uses Twitter to send people to an interesting...

In regard to choosing topic ownership areas wisely, identifying premium content areas is crucial for getting more eyes on your site. By allocating the majority of your resourcing efforts on the content you can "own" in the marketplace, you'll create more authoritative and focused content that will result in higher traffic and will ultimately be more sellable—which is a return on investment any way you look at it.

A discussion on curation. What is it, and why is it important?

People are engaged in social curation and see content publishing, linking, and re-tweeting as a key part of their digital identity. Individuals managing and sharing content no longer consider it a hobby but rather part of how they define themselves in the digital and social online world.

EXACTLY how I feel.

This is the best part below... many news agencies will adopt more and more curation systems that can help them stay ahead of the curve.

“If I was starting The Village Voice today, I would not print anything. I would not hire a ton of writers. I would build a website and a mobile app (or two or three). I would hire a Publisher and a few salespeople. I would hire an editor and a few journalists. And then I’d go out and find every blog, twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube, and other social media feed out there that is related to downtown NYC and I would pull it all into an aggregation system where my editor and journalists could cull through the posts coming in, curate them, and then publish them.”

“What we’re trying to do with XYDO is build a social network around news,” explains co-founder Cameron Brain. “We want to take what Digg and Reddit started and bring the idea into the modern generation.”

"XYDO gathers news from tens of thousands of online sources, matches articles against what users are sharing and talking about on Facebook and Twitter, and then sorts pages by vote counts. Total vote count includes onsite upvotes as well as Facebook or Twitter shares. The user can view news made by popular by the entire XYDO network, see stories popular in their social graph or view trending news items by topic."

Dedicated to helping good journalism and good journalists thrive in the Digital Now. A partnership between USC Annenberg and UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism funded by the Knight Foundation.

A good point here:

The key is to start experimenting NOW with digital curation, using whichever tools are available to you. Newsrooms should foster this skill with a eye not just toward storytelling, but engagement.

Content curation tools to get great content without spending tons of time and build strong online communities.

Trunk.ly automagically collects the links you share online ... and makes them searchable.

A tool that makes it easy to manage all of your social media from a single interface

This tool was recommended by Michael Brito, VP for Edelman Digital and has worked for HP, Yahoo! and Intel. “My favorite tool is Storify which is fantastic to aggregate and curate content from around the web. It’s great for events, product launches, etc.”

"2011 is the Year of CURATION."

70% of all the people on social web JUST consume. Curation will get that 70% to start creating and sharing content.

Brands have been anti-social for decades, feeding the masses what they thought they wanted or needed (top-down). Now, it's all about transparency and be more interactive with their customers. Every department of a brand will have to get involved in social media.

Yahoo has finally found a buyer for long suffering Delicious. YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen have acquired the company, says Yahoo, via a “new Internet company, AVOS.”

Curation platform BumpZee is built on.

How to use RSS Readers to organize content curation. Using Google Reader is one way to start building a library of articles that are related to your niche. Here are some basic steps to content curation.

Aggregation and Curation Tag Line: Are you down with OPC? (Other People's Content) Yeah you know me!

If you are responsible for adding high-value content to your website, you are constantly being challenged to find page or post topics which are new, shareable, helpful and original.

Content curations tools can help you stay on top of the latest in your niche, making it easier to share relevant content with your audience and making you an authority on a specific topic.

Depuis son lancement comme plateforme de widget sur mobile, Goojet a évolué vers la gestion de flux d'informations sur 12 thématiques. La société lance

Micro sites... yes!

So don’t rewrite or re-purpose the report from one of your marketing gurus, policy wonks, or another peer. Instead, provide the link or document and then add a short summary, some color commentary, and maybe some graphics that will appeal to the stakeholders who will find the information of value.

Perfect summary.

A preview of the upcoming MavenFeed product for online community managers. Social Content Curation startup. Makers of Buzzworthy app on Webs.com - dazzle your site visitors with fresh content shared by experts in your field.

The time it takes to follow and go through multiple web sites and blogs takes tangible time, and since most sources publish or give coverage to more than one topic, one gets to browse and scan through lots of useless content just

You can't get a better article about curation today i think. This covers it all. A complete guide.

If you’ve thought about creating a blog but suffer from writer’s block, this concept is great news for you.

Yes.

As a content curator, you don’t just share what seems interesting; you prune through the overload, find what’s most valuable to your audience, and share it – branded with your perspective

The branded aspect is huge and undertaken right now by curation platform.

The idea is to share the right information at the right time, to the right people.

Niche aspect is a big factor there.

A content curator will aggregate your company’s best digital assets for display, much like a museum curator creates a thoughtful exhibit to display historical or artistic artifacts. The criteria for displaying content on your website should be all about what drives traffic and conversions – and you can back that up with web analytics to show you what works..

Ultimately the website benefits from the curating work: links, more traffic, and conversions.

Primary for brands.

Chronology - One of the most interesting ways of looking at the evolution of information is over time - and how concepts or our understanding of topics has changed over time. Creating a Chronology is a form of curation that brings together historical information organized based on time to show an evolving understanding of a particular topic. Most useful when it comes to topics where understanding has shifted over time, this can be a powerful way of retelling history through informational artifacts that exist over time to prove how experiences and understandings have changed.

I really like the idea, this is something to think about.

The successful curation startups will be the ones that provide context and are able to deal with everything that you can find on the web, not just tweets blog posts, or video.

Agreed.

But as in all of these markets, there is a lot to be said for the first mover advantage especially if you have built a large user community. Building communities is tough, it takes time. There are no shortcuts.

You need to jump as quickly as you can into the pond.

And that’s the biggest challenge facing new curation startups: users. Yes, you might get great exposure when you launch and snag thousands of sign ups but next week you are old news — what do you do then? How do you keep users coming back to your service?

By giving them something that they are attached to and motivated to maintain because it has rewards?

You need to invest in targeting the right users in the hopes that they will spread the word organically. You need evangelists, and you need a marketing strategy that moves beyond the early adopter techies because that’s a frighteningly small and a frighteningly fickle group — always ready to move onto the next trendy service.

Totally agree. You need to go after targeted users for the service, not the mainstream users, not at that early stage.

Your curation service has to be relevant to a broad, non-geek crowd otherwise it will fail.

I agree, but i personally think you can spin your product to attract different crowds of users as you go.

You could argue that we need this emerging class of finders and choosers now more than ever, because we're living in a world where everyone has become a creator. Consider the 24 hours of video uploaded to YouTube each minute or the endless supply of niche products available to consumers.

We definitely need more places for people to curate all kind of content, make it available within topic oriented place.

Actively sharing content on social media doesn’t mean that it always has to be yours. And rather than always being a Social Content Creator, you can also be a Social Content Curator. Who is someone who finds and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific topic online.

Now that you have all of this great content representing you on the internet or your intranet, what do you do with it? This is probably one of the biggest challenges faced by organizations in the area of knowledge management and in the corporate world in regard to technology and operational processes.

1. aggregate the existing digital elements
   1. bring the subject matter experts together
   2. communicate its existence and availability

very good example about curation being used at a company level, with a strategy, processes and needed tools.

Owners, collaborators, curators, aggregators; part of the new lexicon that will increasingly define what it means to be in the agency business.

I like these privileges.

• owners: we know
• collaborators: can curate, add to any page, create new pages
• curators: can curate, add to their pages, create new pages
• aggregators

They make sense to me.

Good read.

Curation will do for search what search did for the web -- made it usable and useful to millions of people.

We now have the tools and services that make digital curation easy and accessible by any Internet user. The amount of curation is increasing tremendously and that means the user experience of the Internet improves tremendously because people are finding and pointing to great content.

Mass Relevance provides social curation, social streaming, Twitter curation and more.

Scoble offers solid advice to folks just getting into the game: “Pick some niche that you’re passionate about that you can totally own. If somebody says something about that niche, you should be able to see it in real time and be able to explain it to other people. If you do that and do that well, then you’re going to be able to build up for that.”

Mr. Scoble, right on yet again.

"Yes, that sounds mad. If we couldn't index 100,000 websites in 1996 by hand, how do we propose to do 234-million by hand today?

The answer, of course, is that we won't -- do them all by hand, that is. Instead, the re-rise of curation is partly about crowd curation -- not one people, but lots of people, whether consciously (lists, etc.) or unconsciously (tweets, etc) -- and partly about hand curation (JetSetter, etc.). We are going to increasingly see nichey services that sell curation as a primary feature, with the primary advantage of being mostly unsullied by content farms, SEO spam, and nonsensical QA sites intended to create low-rent versions of Borges' Library of Babylon. The result will be a subset of curated sites that will re-seed a new generation of algorithmic search sites, and the cycle will continue, over and over.

In short, curation is the new search. It's also the old search. And it's happening again, and again."

Interesting interview. In the 20-30 minute range he talks a lot about curation. The whole thing is worth a watch though.

This is a good listen.

very good, and current, interview with Rober Scoble on curation, how he does it and why.

Understanding and utilizing content curation is important for brands. How do you improve your chances of getting seen, and of engaging with your fans?

Authoring and curation are even more fundamental skills. Curation has traditionally meant just making sure assets are safe, uncorrupted, and ready for use, but it has broadened (particularly in the keynote by Steve Rosenbaum) to include gathering information, filtering and tagging it, and generally understanding what's useful to different audiences. This has always been a publisher's role. In the age of abundant digital content, the gathering and filtering functions can dwarf the editorial side of publishing. Thus, although Thomson Reuters has enormous resources of their own, they also generate value by tracking the assets of many other organizations.

When working with other people's material, curation, authoring, and editing all start to merge. Perhaps organizing other people's work into a meaningful sequence is as valuable as authoring one's own. In short, curation adds value in ways that are different from authoring but increasingly valid.

I watched Steve Rosenbaum's talk on the live stream, and it was of course very compelling. I need to look for that to see if it's archived somewhere.

I just purchased this book to read on my Kindle. Knowing Steve personally AND being the developer of a niche curation publishing platform, I've been looking forward to reading this book for a while now.

Just in time for a very short ski vacation.