We all want it…that top spot on the search rankings. And the sites that are getting those top spots are sites that publish fresh, relevant content frequently.

In this exclusive interview for Woork Up, Maria Petrescu (Intervistato.com) talks with Brian about the meaning of social influence, use of social media inside companies, the problems caused by the lack of communication between divisions and asked to Brian a prediction on the future of social media. External link: Read the full transcription on Intervistato.

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Done right, it can also help the imitator tap into the zeitgeist and pick up more followers as a result. That looks like it might have been some of the logic behind the relaunch of the website of Easy Living, a UK magazine published by Conde Nast, which relaunched this month with a Pinterest-like grid interface on its home page.

Check it out:&http://www.easyliving.co.uk/

Make conversation better. Together.

A place to have meaningful conversation with the people you know and the communities you care about.

Find communities that share your interests, so you can talk about the things you're passionate about with people who care.

Easily find out who's involved in a conversation, so you can feel relaxed and speak your mind.

Not only should you control what you see and how you're seen, but you should have a say in the direction of the site itself! Ayloo is yours, after all.

If you were someone wondering if curation was going to have any future and was just a hype, this is the perfect example that curation is the future.

This is a big player, and this is going to hurt a lot of small curation services out there...

msnNOW is the only place that looks at the hottest trends from Facebook, Twitter, Bing and Breakingnews.com. We give you the inside scoop so you always know about what's trending, if it's true, and why you should care. And we're constantly checking the latest buzz, so just look for links with the gray speech bubble on MSN.com to make msnNOW part of your daily routine.&

Start your own movement...

Pinterest is popular because it feeds our insatiable appetite to share the things we’re passionate about. It allows us to start movements of our own, pointing others to things we like and enjoy.

People share, curate...

Pinterest is now taking it one step further and allowing us to share anything we come across on the web. Buzzword or not, ‘curation’ is here to stay.

Visual inspiration...

And you tap into a digital world of curation, sharing and visual inspiration. It’s the future and it’s happening right now.

1. Website visitors need a certain degree of serendipity in their online browsing and shopping experience. Give it to them.
2. Content curation should factor in not just volume but quality – one will follow the other.
3. A visually appealing website is more conducive to social sharing, appealing images have become front and center in today’s online experience. It also makes for&a better experience for mobile and tablet users&– typically a more affluent demographic. Invest in an in-house photo studio if resources allow.
4. Design deep social integration throughout your site. Let visitors indicate how much they like the content via love/like buttons and comments and this will spur website engagement.
5. Stay non-invasive. Put the user in the driver’s seat in terms of what and how much they’d like to share with others.

Read more:&http://www.businessinsider.com/fabcom-underscores-a-shift-from-search-to-discovery-2012-2?utm_source=readmeutm_medium=rightrailutm_term=utm_content=6utm_campaign=recirc#ixzz1mIFuKPnk

Publishzer is a tool to create magazines out of content that inspires you.&&Billions of content pieces are created everyday on the internet and no way can I browse through all of them. So we asked to ourselves, wouldn’t it be nice to have a tool to organize and share most of this content. A place to save all the amazing articles, photos and videos that inspires you online. Beside now you do not have to be sticked on feeds to keep up with the news.

Read their story here.

Ah this is something i have thought of but never seen before.

I guess, why not?

That's a good curation policy template you can use.

My wife (and it seems every woman in America) is now addicted to Pinterest. It’s the new magazine. I think it’s replacing time spent on TMZ. It’s graphical, beautiful, simple to consume, and has a wonderful layout. But that product is the perfect example of perfectly suited for the web given the real estate available.

Ah Pinterest, they do it all right...

Try to think about how leveraging the web will do the following:

• Create a differentiated product versus your mobile-only competitors. Use that as a source of competition.
• Have the ability to enable “content creation” and “content curation” in a way that makes all of the mobile consumption by other users a better experience. If you have a fashion-sharing product, wouldn’t viewing collections of outfits on mobile devices be a richer experience if there were more content and deeper content because your web product enabled your power users to more easily create it?
• Conversely allow your mobile products to&shine&on the web. Using the fashion-sharing example, imagine turning your shared fashion photos into beautiful magazine-like collages that can be scrolled through, Pinterest style.
• Build features that make using native-phone apps pointless. Case in point: Text messaging. If you use the native device your messages get purged eventually on most devices. You also lose them if you lose your actual phone. Having a web product abstracts the text message from the device and makes it a truly cloud service. When consumers realize this – who in their right mind would keep their text messages locked on their mobile device?

In creating its digital presence, Kate Spade has managed to convert the je ne sais quoi of its meticulously designed physical visual merchandising (read: eye-catching store windows in SoHo and on Fifth Avenue) and products into a decidedly on-brand experience. Using its blog, which is integrated prominently into its main e-commerce site, as well as varied social media presences, the Kate Spade team has developed and maintained a voice and visual point of view that reinforce the brand while avoiding heavy-handedness.

Branding, and the same theme for every platform they build a presence on: colorfoul collages of products, articles and media curated by their team. A publishing model that works.

When Kate Spade picks a direction, it goes with it, and all its content channels reinforce the same seasonal focus. It utilizes that same collage-like approach for its boards on&Pinterest, which is perhaps the most well-suited platform for fashion brands to share its inspirations, and the pattern du jour, stripes, abounds. The Kate Spade Tumblr&(also&organized as a collage) takes the theme one step further, providing the shareable added bonus of downloadable iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, and computer desktops in –you guessed it – stripes.&And, of course, Kate Spade’s&Twitter page is decked out in a striped background.

Check it out:

@katespadeny on Twitter

KateSpade on Tumblr

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is looking to develop a Web app that can continuously monitor social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace, as well as various news feeds. The organization’s goal is to improve its real-time intelligence when it comes to current and emerging security threats.

They even provided specifications for the web app!

[...] the 12-page Request for Information document (PDF, half the pages are oddly blank) reveals in detail what the organization is interested in.

Are you ready to get your social media activity monitored by the FBI?

My takes...

"push button content generation."

Here's what he means: Clicking Pinterest's "Pin It" button, which can be added to your browser's bookmarks toolbar, will automatically grab the picture you want from the website you are on. What is different is that it immediately adds it to any of your Pinterest boards, allowing you to categorize your content then and there. The boards each have a separate page and can be easily accessed, shared and viewed on a sort of mother board on your Pinterest profile.

"Importantly, it was easy for new users to consume these sets of content visually as structured sets, and to share these sets with others," Gil wrote. "This next wave of social curation will fundamentally change how users find and interact with content over time."

Engagement is becoming important in the online marketing world. It is important not only to create quality content, but find a way to distribute it, build and engage with an audience to build value and sustainable business.

This is one great post i recommend reading if you are an online marketer.

That Independent Web is where you get high engagement and a lot of passion. It is also where a lot of social action like tweets, shares and commenting takes place. Marketers are increasingly seeing those kinds of actions as indications of engagement and that’s what they’re looking for.

At this point, marketers have pivoted: they're not just putting their marketing next to content, but actually creating content themselves – or underwriting the creation of content. And then they encourage the sharing of that content and creating ecosystems where that content circulates. They're starting to see an ecosystem of paid, owned, and earned media that they're very interested in feeding through social interactions and content marketing.

We've found that you need a few things to make social interactions online meaningful and valuable to both marketers and our Federated Media Publishing community of publishers and sites. Number one, you need scale. But number two, you need a platform so that that scale can be gathered into a single place – an efficient place so a marketer doesn’t have to, for example, execute a thousand ad units on a thousand different sites.

Is your content and strategy driving any value?

Marketers have been very interested in understanding how their content is amplified in the past few years. Was it tweeted a lot? Did people comment on it a lot? Did people link to it from other blogs and so on? We started at first by counting all of that by hand and then reporting it back to the marketer. That is now becoming an industry standard earned media metric.

The argument is valid. Some people out there flag "sharing", or their curaton, a form of expression. In a way it is, the content you share defines who you are, what you like, what you are interested in...&

the 3 pillars of a good curation tool:

• accesibility
• fun pleasure
• usability in a daily routine

It's&easy for anyone&to curate, as it takes the best of what TumblR allows you (bookmark a content you like) and optimizes the way it's archived (boards are far more intuitive explicit than scrolling a blog)

The problem is publishing is a lot harder than it looks, or rather it’s a lot harder to do it with the consistency, day after day, that’s needed to build a long-term audience.

Brands are trying to establish themselves as trusted sources of information.

“If a brand is an expert in a certain topic, their reputation might make them a credible source of information,”

Brands aren’t set up to be publishers.

Publishing content in 2012 can be immensely complex or surprisingly simple, depending on your approach. Curation straddles the line. It can be difficult figuring out not only what tools to use, but also what platforms and, of course, what content to share.

Brands need to be careful in not only what, but how much they curate.

Great interview from Beth @kanter and Robin Good (@robingood).&

In preparation for Beth's presentation on Jan. 30th in NY&http://socialmedia4nonprofits.org/nyc/

Don't just recite the first paragraph of the story, actually give them something they can grab onto and make their own.

This is a must read post, reading into the future of curation, newsjacking and business models...

Reblogging, on Tumblr, is so easy that the vast majority of Tumblr sites actually create little or no original content: they just republish content from other people. That’s a wonderful thing, for two reasons.

Firstly, it takes people who are shy about (or just not very good at) creating their own content, and gives them a great way to express themselves online.

And secondly, it acts as a natural amplifier for the people who do create original content — the average post on Tumblr gets reblogged nine times, and therefore reaches vastly more people than if it just sat on its original site waiting to be discovered by people visiting it directly.

...images nearly always do much better than words.

HuffPo is built on the idea that when stories are shared on Twitter or Facebook, that will drive traffic back to huffingtonpost.com, where it can then monetize that traffic by selling it to advertisers. But in future, the most viral stories are going to have a life of their own, being shared across many different platforms and being read by people who will never visit the original site on which they were published.

What is Newsjacking?

It works like this: a news story breaks. Journalists are under pressure to update that story for the next edition or broadcast. So while the core of the story (the first paragraph) doesn’t change all that much, the second paragraph does, with additional details or insights or related quotes. That’s your chance to swoop in with something a reporter can use that’s related — but not necessarily essential — to the main story to freshen it up. Then your part of the story gets repeated as other media outlets pick up the story.

How to do it?

To make this work for you, you have to be fast.

Yes, it is a race for media attention.

Search vs. Social Discovery is the epic war that will define the tech landscape for the next few years.&Search Engines are morphing into Socially Powered Search Engines, discovery sites are booming and small businesses, and craftsmen are able to reach a whole new audience via the internet.

Pinterest’s user growth&is a good indicator of what’s to come for retailers. Smart merchants will look for ways to drive traffic from these types of sites, by working with them directly or partnering with groups like Skimlinks that have discovery sites in their publisher base.

Product disovery engine, visual, interesting, fresh content, lot of trends for e-commerce in 2012.

It’s no longer enough just to blog. Collecting good posts, pictures and information creates value.

Very interesting section about the legal aspect of redistributing content from other sources...

We can publish or post somebody's headline with a link to their published content as often as we want without violating copyright law or acting against the spirit of copyright and intellectual property. (Link to this post with its headline and I’ll thank you.)

"Link to this post with its headline and I’ll thank you." Yes, and everybody should be happy to get a link back.

One more important aspect of curation is that it is not easy...

Initially, your reaction to the art of curation might be, “hooray, now I don’t have to write a new blog post every day. I can just collect and share my collection.” But the novelty of that wears off very quickly. Collecting good relevant content doesn’t happen easily. The best of these curation sites show the same level of work as an excellent blog does, sometimes more.

What’s next for Tumblr, which just&raised a bunch of money

That's $4.5M in 2008, $5M in 2010 and&Sequoia is leading a round that will add “between $25 million and $30 million” in funding at a valuation “in the ballpark of $135 million)&

and&brought in some senior management? Well, monetization, for one thing. Karp said Tumblr is pursuing “novel approaches to revenue,” including selling blog themes.

At 15 billion page views per month across more than&41 million blogs, “with that many page views we could throw AdSense up there tomorrow and be profitable,” Karp said. But that’s not what he wants to do.

Yeah Adsense is defintiely not the way, not something Tumblers will like to see on their blogs.

The most interesting thing here is his feedback about the network effect:

When the site really took off was when the curators — people who primarily respond to other Tumblr users’ content by “reblogging” it on their own pages — came on board.

Tumblr is about 10% content creation 90% content curation - others sharing grouping stuff they like." David Karp, CEO #DLD12

— Bill Gross (@Bill_Gross) January 23, 2012

When it comes to curation, I teach my students and clients that when curating content, there are 5 elements to every curation post;

• Catchy title
• Interesting intro
• Curated content
• Value add
• and strong call to interaction

Spot on.

Cool little tool to aggregate and save files very easily.

Skillshare is a platform for instructor-led, in-person classes. Teaching on Skillshare can help sustain your livelihood. Here's how.

Skillshare is one of those platforms that i think will be there for a long time. Basically it allows you, with your own knowledge, to teach others about what you know. Simple no? Genius i say.

Teach what you know

The issue is that, this tool will work great if you already are an audience. It's like everything else, if you have au audience and launch a new service, website or blog, you know you will get instant traffic.

So how do you fill up your classes?

Skillshare helps you by 'promoting' the classes you teach. People can search the site to find your classes, but that is not enough.

You need to keep your students engaged and sell them the next classes.

In order to fill up the next class, you need to either find new students or teach the students you taught a class to already, something new.

A platform like Shareist is perfect for this. Keep your audience (ie:students) interested in the topic of the classes you taught by curating articles, posts, news relevant to each class. Between classes, or as a follow up, teachers (you) can keep students engaged, listen to their feedback to come up with topics for next courses, and communicate with them directly or indirectly.

Skillshare is a great app, and I can see Shareist fitting perfectly in the mix to help you stay in touch with your students, keep them interested and discover new topics, engage easily with your students by sharing interesting information where they are (twitter, facebook, Google plus, via newsletter), and grow your audience, and your income, even more.

1. What would your customers prospects want to read?

2. What channels will they use? Where do they want to read it?

3. Curate from the curators

4. Set everything up in advance5. Follow a daily process

6. Be consistent

7. Watch metrics for what resonates best

8. Curation does not replace good original content

My takes - must-read:

Go to where your audience is. Another, equally important rule:&create strong and engaging content.

Consider the fact that nearly half of Americans get their news from as many as six media platforms on a typical day.

Good content is the cornerstone&– knowing how to curate it in this day and age? Well that’s when the magic can happen.

This is the best article to data on curation, what is curation and what is not.

I am not a good curator. I can find great content to share, but when it comes to specific aspect of the curation process, i am not so good.

Curation is the wrong answer when the question is:

“How can I fill our sales funnel with cheap content, quicker than quick?”

And it’s the right answer when the question is:

“How can I give people a deeper understanding of what I know and love?”

That’s what I’m thinking every time I suggest content curation.

Yes. This is so right on. Sharing a link is not enough, you need to commit to explain why you are sharing that link pricely, what is so important or valuable that you felt like you HAD to share it.

I will try to apply these curation principles - because i love sharing about what i love doing.

• 1. Keep it 50/50: For every time you curate one story, you should create and publish another. That means your email newsletter would be 50% own content and 50% others’ content (with attribution, of course).
• 2. More than a link: This is the era of frictionless sharing, goddammit. Friction is a demonstration of care. Anyone can send a link. If you’re going to curate and share, add something. Some insight. Commentary. But no more than necessary.
• 3. Slap asses: If you’re going to curate someone’s content, you owe it to yourself and to them to be open about it. Preferably, it’s someone you follow and share comments with. And be sure to give them credit.
• 4. As narrow as possible: If you’re one guy with one hour a week, you can’t curate a good newsletter about cloud technology. The less resources you have at your disposal, the narrower should be your topic, your focus and your audience.
• 5. Give away the reins: To whatever extent possible, allow the people you’re curating for, to influence contents in the future. The likes of Reddit have made this idea their raison d’etre. There’s a reason for that.
• 6. If you doubt, don’t: We’re all overloaded with content. If you have even a moment’s doubt about sharing a piece of content, don’t do it. Better to wait for the right one than more or less spam someone.

&

Vadim Lavrusik, the journalist ambassador at Facebook, today pointed to a well curated media expereience that focuses on the #SOPA fiasco. I think the curation was a great idea, but I have concerns about how Facebook manages curation and how it organizes search to find curation. Right now, Vadim and I are talking this out in a comment thread on his profile, but I want to take my points and put them here. This is what I expect if I am seeking a curated moment in media. Notice that my comments evolve in to ideas about how Facebook could be better at search, what I believe to be a key component to curation. How will you find what you need to find?

Interesting idea:

My other expectation is that I can constantly visit a theme or a curated idea. In FB, I find that hard to do. I can’t — here is search again — go back to a specific point in time easily. I don’t know where to look. If I had a search capability that would allow me to input “theme” and find the themes, rather than the people, being discussed I would have an easier time locating a curated experience. Facebook actually doesn’t have to choose

With information being ubiquitous, I believe that teachers&can&(and&should) take control of their courses by creating their own interactive textbooks. It might seem like a daunting task but the availability of quality materials online and the power of tapping into personal learning networks should make this a worthwhile learning journey.&

Being included on a popular list of credible resources like our own BIGLIST of top Marketing Blogs or one of the many other collections of useful resources posted online can feel pretty satisfying, validating the hard work many are putting in to their business blogs. Great lists get socially shared, linked, and emailed, giving those included quite a bit of valuable exposure. By association, the list publisher also gains value in terms of exposure, links, and a connection with list participants...

Sourcing.&As you understand your community, what are the unmet needs in information that you could satisfy? What unrecognized individuals or companies with powerful networks could be resources for, or included in the list? How will it fit in and complement your content marketing and social media strategy? Incidentally, I have an entire&book&dedicated to this topic coming out in March.

Creation.&Put qualitative effort into creating your collection or list. Make it special, useful, and unique. Make it snarky or funny and by all means, make it shareable! Gimmicks are not nearly as important as quality and relevance to the community you’ll be promoting to. That said, you do need to think of what will make your collection promotable. Great content isn’t great until it’s consumed and shared.

Repurposing.&Lists of things like people, books, reports, quotes, or just about anything can be repurposed as a PowerPoint on SlideShare or made into a video with bumper messages, narration, and music to be promoted on YouTube. If you’re smart about sourcing and making the collection promotable, then don’t just do it once. Plan on making the list annually, quarterly, or monthly

Sharing appropriate information and differentiating communication between businesses and consumers among new rules of engagement companies and Internet users should adhere to, say market watchers.

The Google spokesperson went on to add that "curation" is another online norm that needs to be inculcated among today's users.

Elaborating, she said curation is the offline equivalent of "biting [one's] tongue when there is an urge to say something stupid", and saving such comments for the right audience.

"In real life, your friends don't actually know what you're thinking until you decide to say it [but] we also don't like friends who have diarrhea of the mouth, and I doubt things are different in the online social world," the spokesperson pointed out.

With this in mind, she advised companies not to blast their marketing message to every customer. Rather, they should customize each message according to the customer's interests to avoid oversharing content that the recipient might be loath to receive.

&

As a marketer, your reading, reading, and reading all day long. It’s your job to know what customers what, what they’re interested in, and where they are. If you’ve come across a great article that’s particularly relevant to your industry or organization, don’t hold back when it comes to sharing. Do not, however, just blindly share the words, but add your own take to it. Meaning, before clicking that Share button, or republishing a paragraph and linking to the original article, inform your audience precisely why you’re sharing this piece. Does it directly relate to, or support another piece that you’ve recently published? Does it provide a different take on one of your positions? Good or bad, let your audience know.

Curating content is a relatively quick and easy thing to do, and provides a number of upsides with few downsides. Your audience will get a better view into the way you and your organization think, they’ll appreciate that you’ve exposed them to another voice (and subconsciously praise you for offering another point of view that’s not directly your own), and you’ve given credit where credit is due to this outside author, a door opener that might lead to future collaboration or partnering with individual or organization.

Therefore, Gil sees an evolution of blogging platforms turning into push-button publishing. So there's a move from stream-based consumption to a more organized form.

Read more:&http://www.businessinsider.com/pinterest-is-a-sign-that-we-are-turning-into-social-curators-2012-1?op=1#ixzz1isJfiX5i

Part of the genesis of Aggregage was my experience with "curators" who would take my content, put it on a page with no link or a link that had an anchor tag that said "link" or something similar.& They would change the title and URL for my post on their site.& The goal of that person was to get SEO value from my content.& They also allowed commenting on their sites.& The reason I would write the post is for people to find me and my content and to engage with me in conversation.& These types of curators were definitely taking away from that. Aggregage takes a very different approach.& Our goal is to be THE launching point out to all the great content getting created on particular topics.& We specifically do not have pages that compete with the original source.& We only show snippets.& We provide full links with the original title.& We don't have commenting on our site.& Basically, we are doing everything we can to get readers to go to the original source and engage with the content.& Many of the participating bloggers find that we become the second biggest referral source behind Google search.

But is it not what most large media news site do? They find content, reqrite it, amplifying it and giving credit back to the source. Is that really bad or fair content publishing practice?

• Curating news that the media isn’t covering can lead to media coverage.
• Identify opportunity
• Select curators
• Monitor conversation
• Select and comment on the best content
• Announce and promote the collection

Simply producing a collection isn’t going to get it noticed, particularly if an organization is suspected of an ulterior, self-serving motive. Using the same techniques it would use to draw attention to anything else. Direct contact with reporters and influencers, a press release, a blog post and some tweets can all get people to give the collection a look.

Promoting a collection is something important as part of the process.

Curation is thus changing at its core. It's curating metadata, not primary materials. Multiple curations can exist in the same space. We are losing the sense that there is a right curation for almost anything, and are also losing our sense of mastery of topics.

Digital curation often only brings an item to our attention and reduces the number of clicks to get to it. The items outside the collection are still available on the Web and may show up at the top of a search results page or on someone else's curated list. The cost is in discovering the item; once discovered, items generally are only one click away

An overview of the legal issues pertaining to content curation online, what the US Copyright office says about it, and best practices when it comes to

1. Program Strategy
2. Day-to-Day Content Curation Services
3. Content Development
4. Promotion and Awareness
5. Social and Search Programs

I agree 10% with the following statement:

Curation is not simply about the content that lives on a website. How people find and engage with it is also critical.

Social media, newsletter, maybe offline marketing are part of the engagement strategy.

• Add Your Opinion
• Present a Case Study
• Change the Delivery Method
• Interview an Expert
• Create a Weekly “Round Up”

Maybe this is a new business opportunity for more than writers.

Providing a platform that can enable agencies providing writing services to post for multiple clients on different websites could be part of this new ecosystem.

1. Find the best content
2. Add value
3. Attribute

&

1. Catch the viewers attention
2. Tells a narrative that makes sense to the viewer (e.g., one would not hang a Picasso painting next to seals from Mohenjo Daro)
3. Gives a sense of the bigger scheme of things
4. Makes it easy for viewers to "jump" to the sections that interest them
5. Have enough metadata for viewers to understand the context

This is what any company (angencies, brands, et...) should read. My summurize below.

There are three aspects to the challenge: the discovery process itself; curation, or the sourcing of high-quality, appropriate product solutions; and personalization, which involves accurately matching the right product or service with the right individual, at the right time.

• Discovery, when properly executed, is about helping consumers find stuff they didn’t even know existed. It begins by encouraging customers to offer information about their interests using a variety of techniques that deal in the individual’s self-interest, from games and metaphors to direct feedback. Moreover, discovery is an ongoing process, one that is continually refined over time to generate relevance at deeper levels regardless of how the person’s interests change.

• Curation is about offering a filtered selection of high-quality products and services to consumers. So many e-commerce sites push an overwhelming number of unrelated, mediocre products with the goal of creating as many sale opportunities as possible. Unfortunately, this business model is incongruent with the consumer’s need for a quick, relevant and reliable experience. Creating a conscious effort to select a handful of products that are unique, interesting and high-quality eliminates excessive product sifting on the customer’s end. The result is a highly targeted, meaningful shopping experience.

For the last year, much of the focus has been on curating content from the social web and effectively contextualizing disparate pieces of information to form singular stories.

In 2012, there will be even more emphasis not only on curating that content, but also on amplifying it through increasingly effective distribution mechanisms.

Because anyone can publish content today and report information from a breaking news event, the role journalists can play in amplifying — and verifying —&that content becomes ever more important.

More about curation in 2012...

&

Now it’s the curation and collection functions driving content. Collect all those tweets, those updates, the links you like, the pictures you like. You put them up on your new curated content site.

Curation still a 2012 trendy marketing thing?

We’ve all heard the expression Content is King. After all, content is the fuel behind the social media revolution currently sweeping the Web. Close examination of the art world, however, offers a solid case that curation, not content, may in fact be the ruler online. When it comes to content marketing, developing a content strategy for your company starts by curating your existing content assets, along with researching the assets of the competition. You roll up all research found using competitive research tools and quickly learn how you stack up with the competition in a number of different ways. Through the content curation process, you learn how much content you need, how frequently you need to publish it and which channels of distribution (social especially) are required to capture organic market share. The skill and savvy of a Content Strategist is equally as important as your Director of Marketing these days. Getting the right content to the right prospects at the right time is the key to content marketing success.