Content Curation as a PR service?

January 14, 2010 | Posted by: Shahed Ahmed

As we continue to seek opportunities for our clients in an evolving media and PR world, I want to bring up the topic of content curation and how we can help clients who publish their own content become good curators. Curation is an evolution of content aggregation. In short, it is about finding the nuggets of good and relevant content – whether video, blogs, articles, or short messages on Twitter – around a core topic and presenting that information through a single source whether that is a newsletter, RSS feed or micro-site. For a more detailed definition of content curation, please read this Business Insider piece.

We have had conversations about this with a few of our clients. And some have taken steps to create such properties. See a curation Web site on data analytics called the Smart Data Collective.

Content curation is not a new concept, but for organizations that publish their own content online it can be the next evolutionary step. But naturally it does require those organizations to loosen their reigns on the source of the content presented. In other words, organizations shouldn’t hesitate to mix branded, client-generated content with third-party content or perhaps even user generated content.

In an era when self-publishing is thriving alongside traditional media, organizations can create valuable brand awareness and attract relevant eyeballs, including potential customers, to their own content platform by presenting a Web’s worth of content in a meaningful way to readers interested in a particular trend, topic, technology, vertical, etc. Content curation isn’t about being all things to all people, but rather about owning your little corner of the "long tail" of information.

Smart B2B organizations are already successful at adding to the deluge of content that grows exponentially on the Web, but content curation allows them to moderate the broader conversation and make sense of the terabytes of content for current and potential customers.

I will leave you today with more reading material. A good article in Fast Company on the topic.