Content Curation: Think Museum, Not Warehouse

Understatement of the week: There’s a lot of content on the web.

Another understatement: Sifting through all of it is nearly impossible for the average human being.

The deluge of online information (and misinformation, in some cases) has increased the demand for content curation, or rather, for someone else to sift through all that hay for the important needles.

Aggregation and curation has been around for a while, but some think content curation is the future of information on the web. And some organizations are finding that content curation is a great way to give their audience valuable content on days when producing original content can’t fit on the to-do list.

In other words, content curation can be used to your organization’s advantage. People tend to remember where they were linked from, rather than where they were linked to, and being known as the place who curates only the best content can put your organization’s website on the proverbial map. When you can’t be the resource yourself, why not point people to the resource they may need?

So, how can your organization take advantage of curation? 

Act Like a Museum, Not a Warehouse

The first inclination of a new content curator is to cast a wide net and display everything it brings in. But this approach will only result in shelves of unevaluated content, with no semblance of order.

Quality curation is not a quick way to create content—it takes time and effort. It takes the pain out of the search for your audience by doing it for them. Here are some tips to do it right:

Research: Get to know the landscape, but not just from 30,000 feet high. You want to make sure you’ve read as much as you can on a subject before you start spouting off about what is the best. Are you looking at reputable sources? Is there a hidden agenda you don’t know about? Are you finding the original source or are you quoting a copy of a copy?

Learn who is most influential and trustworthy in your field and keep your eye on them. Down the road, having a handy list of pre-qualified sources will help you be more efficient when you are curating content around future topics.

Collect: Take inventory of all the great sources you’ve marked in your research and see what you have. Do you possess a diversity of opinion? A healthy balance of voices? Ensure that you’ve collected enough angles to truly cover a subject and give merit where merit is due.

Exhibit: This is what people will see as your end product: How did you present it to them? Can they make sense of what is going on? Or is it more of a headache to go through your curated mess than it would be to find it themselves? Provide a logical flow, a clear explanation of what people are viewing, and do it in a presentable format as to not overwhelm or disinterest your reader.

Educate: This is what separates the collectors from the curators. A good curator will give context on every item in their collection. They’ll let the reader know what it means, why it’s important, and what impact it may have on the subject at large. Don’t just share “what,” share “why” and people will come back to your museum … err, website.

And finally …

Create: Building trust via curation can set the stage for displaying your own work in your gallery. As your reputation and credibility are boosted by providing people the crème de la crème on any given subject, your readers will likely want to know more about what you think on a given topic.

Earning a reputation as someone who can tell the difference between hay and needles will afford you the opportunity to share your expertise among a built-in audience of those who have learned to trust the content you provide.

Related articles

• Content Curation: It’s Going to Be HUGE (fastcompany.com)
• A Marketer’s Guide to Content Curation (hubspot.com)
• Curating Information as Content Strategy (conversationagent.com)
• The Creative Plateau and Content Curation (socialmediatoday.com)

[image: adragnes]