Chapter 10
Curation
Content curation is billed by some as the future for brands in remaining relevant in an environment that changes daily. This chapter looks at the importance of content curation for brands, media, agencies and individuals: who's doing a great job of it and what can be learnt as a result.
“It's not information overload, it's filter failure”62 a wise man once said. Digital culture is now a filter culture. We spend our daily online lives swamped with more information than we will ever have the time to digest. Whether we know we're doing it or not, we are filtering the haystack of information to get to the needle. We are all content curators.
But what does content curation really mean? It is defined as “the process of analysing and sorting Web content and presenting it in a meaningful and organized way around a specific theme”.63
The job of a content curator sees them firstly deciding on a relevant niche or subject and then seeking out all available information which is then refined and arranged in a structured order. This is an order of importance and relevance, displayed in a hierarchy of resourcefulness.
However, content curation isn't just about collecting links and saving them, it is about providing context to the reasoning as to why one article is of higher importance than another. A content curator as a result becomes the knowledge source and the go-to person on that particular subject.
The news now finds you
When it comes to news, social networks are the new front pages for breaking news. Do you remember how you first heard about Michael Jackson's sudden death? This world news event crashed Twitter, Google News, AOL, CBS, CNN, MSNBC and Yahoo, all at the same time.64 When Twitter did come back up, nine out of the ten trending topics worldwide were related to Michael Jackson.65
Welcome to the era of Big Data
Because of the advent of high-speed broadband around the world, the barrier to people curating their lives online is considerably lower than it has been in the past. According to IBM, we are firmly in the era of “Big Data”. Ninety percent of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years.66 Take a moment to think about that and wonder how we ever find anything we're looking for on the web.
Searching for gold
Search engines increasingly help us to do just that. Google went on record in 2012 to say they are now answering 100 billion search results a month.67 In a 2009 study on “Students use of researching content in teaching and learning” by The Centre for Research-Informed Teaching at University of Central Lancashire, they found that “a lot of students use Google but are bewildered by the amount of responses and will rarely look beyond the first couple of pages of search terms”.68
Why an organization would curate
Content curation is also an emerging trend for brands. They want to be part of culture, to be part of a broader message, which is not purely focused on their products, but also what value they are providing to the world.
“We need to stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in” says Craig Davis, Chief Creative Officer, JWT.69
In January 2012, Josh Sternberg wrote how “Brands Want Content Curator Jobs”70 for Digiday:
“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. That's leading some brands to hook onto the idea that their role lies more in the curation of content.”
Neil Chase, SVP of Editing and Publishing at Federated Media, agrees:
“If a brand is an expert in a certain topic, their reputation might make them a credible source of information. But if a company that makes toasters gives health advice, they might not be credible. If they're sending out recipes, that's a reason to trust them.”
In 2013, curation of content by brands will move towards being the norm rather than a niche activity and it's getting easier to do. The web is also morphing into a much more visual landscape which supports the move to a more curation-led approach to content. In November 2012, blogging platform Tumblr had over 170 million monthly unique visitors and is one of the top 10 most visited sites in the US.71 Some of the world's biggest brands are also on Pinterest, a rapidly exploding visual curation platform which helps brands engage with consumers in new ways.
What are the benefits?
- It helps with content discovery and drives traffic to your website (Pinterest for example now drives more referral traffic than Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn combined).72
- It helps build positive engagement around the brand, often without the consumer even knowing it because of the strength of the content.
- It helps create a competitive advantage and drives brand awareness. American Express is a leader in this space with the OPEN Forum platform, a hot-bed of content and experiences to help small businesses.
- It will never replace original branded content. Don't just do it for the sake of it. It will only magnify inadequacies. If there is no story to tell, share great ideas and find inspiration.
How to curate
There are a number of tools that make the curating of quality content a much more enjoyable experience than in previous years. The earliest example of this would be the advent of RSS, which dates back to 1995.73 Google Alerts in 200374 allowed you to create, on a small scale, your own search engine. This was followed soon after by directory sites like Alltop.com which curated feeds on hundreds of interest areas. There are a vast number of social news curation apps today like Flipboard, Pulse and Google Currents.
Flipboard, probably one of the most well-known content curation apps, is a magazine-style social network and online news aggregator for Android and iOS. It became so popular and widely used that it was blocked in China on 15 May 2011 until Flipboard came out with a fully localized version on 6 December 2011 in collaboration with popular local social networks Sina Weibo and Ren Ren. As a result, the Chinese edition no longer includes Twitter or Facebook as social network options.75
Some of the most popular applications used in content creation include:
- Buffer
- Delicious
- Storify.
Individuals who are leading the way in curation include:
A whole industry is effectively being created through brands that want to be part of a cultural, greater good. Red Bull didn't spend years developing the hugely ambitious Stratos project with the sole objective of selling more energy drinks; it was about the brand effectively creating the news itself. Brands are now media channels in their own right.
In April 2012, Pepsi created Pepsi Pulse76 – an interactive, social media-driven dashboard for all things related to popular culture. Again, this was not purely about shifting soft drinks, but about becoming the destination for content. Pepsi Pulse consists of a mixture of original content (e.g. live streams of Pepsi sponsored events), crowd-sourced fan tweets and photos and articles from content partners like Hollywood.com and the Associated Press. They present the top 10 trending news items in real time on Pepsi Pulse through data collected by SocialFlow,77 a social media optimization company.
Shiv Singh, global head of digital for PepsiCo Beverages, explained: “It's not enough anymore to have phenomenal TV ads – brands have to do more. Brand wars are being fought in news feeds and streams.”78 Users have the ability to share Pulse content easily on platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest to help Pepsi compete in a crowded market.
Does Pepsi now see itself as a credible source of news for people to keep coming back to? Singh answers: “In the last few years we've seen people in general care less about the source of an experience or who's creating the content, and more about the experience itself. People care less whether it's a TV network that's creating a really funny piece of video or whether a brand is.”79
It can sometimes seem like there's a hot new start-up that's going to change the world sprouting up every minute and in-vogue companies like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest get all the attention. Traditional and established brands often get overlooked.
Intel, the $54 billion semiconductor chip company, sought to reverse this trend with the launch of iQ by Intel in 2012. It is a publishing platform curated by company researchers and engineers where Intel hopes to “connect with a younger audience and tell them the bigger story of who we are as a brand,” according to editor-in-chief Bryan Rhoads. Beyond PCs and processors, Intel is seeking to be a more intrinsic part of popular culture.
The site, which looks similar to a Flipboard-style magazine, includes original content along with aggregated news from other sources like The Guardian paidContent and Mashable. Where iQ by Intel is ahead of many of its competitors and counterparts is in its approach to curation. It puts curatorial content in the hands of its 100,000+ employees, giving them ownership of the company voice and telling impassioned stories from behind the scenes, by the people for the people.
It is worth mentioning a number of global brands using branded content at the core of their marketing strategies. Coca-Cola (Coca-Cola Journey), American Express (OPEN Forum), Qualcomm (Spark), Cisco (The Network), HSBC (Business Without Borders) and BCG (Perspectives) all do this. Coca-Cola in particular has a “Content 2020” strategy where the company is looking to “move from creative excellence to content excellence and gain a disproportional share of popular culture”.80
On the flip side there are a number of start-ups like Percolate, Mass Relevance, CurationStation, Curata, PublishThis and Curalate who have created social curation products and services to help make it easier for marketers to make it part of their routine.
Summary
There is an old rule that in publishing, 90% of people will simply consume content, 9% will curate the content and 1% will create it.81 We're getting to a point now where we are outgrowing the model. The Future Media department at the BBC agrees, in its “Online Briefing: The Participation Choice” where in 2012 it notes:
“The model which has guided many people's thinking in this area, the 1/9/90 rule, is outmoded. The number of people participating online is significantly higher than 10%. Participation is now the rule rather than the exception: 77% of the UK online population is now active in some way. This has been driven by the rise of ‘easy participation’: activities which may have once required great effort but now are relatively easy, expected and every day. 60% of the UK online population now participates in this way, from sharing photos to starting a discussion.”82
Curation is growing up, fast, and in 2013 you will see significant investment from global brands putting it at the heart of their marketing strategies along with a multitude of tools and services that will take curation to the next level in terms of ease of use, processing and tracking. Are you going to join the curation nation?
Biography
Michael Litman (@mlitman) is a Senior Social Strategist at AnalogFolk, an independent global digital agency which uses digital to make the analog world better. BRANDSONVINE.COM. He has worked for some of the leading agencies in advertising and formerly PR, working for a wide range of global and start-up brands. Michael has spoken at numerous conferences and in his spare time enjoys writing for industry leading websites and magazines on trends in social media, technology and advertising. He was formerly the UK editor for Adverblog.com and in 2012, Advertising Age recognized him as one of most influential marketing bloggers in the world.
Notes
62Clay Shirky quote: http://cipr.co/XiEdR2
63Content Curation: Definition: http://cipr.co/14RArU5
64Michael Jackson's death grinds the internet to a halt: http://cipr.co/UXhdIL
65Michael Jackson Twitter Trending Topics: http://cipr.co/11Khm6G
66Big Data, IBM: http://cipr.co/VU0R2N
67Google Search Results, Search Engine Land: http://cipr.co/VI6418
68Research paper, University of Central Lancashire: http://cipr.co/XiFbNc
69Purpose Made Everything: http://cipr.co/VU1sSc
70Brands Want Content Curator Jobs: http://cipr.co/VU1GsA
71Usage data on Tumblr; http://cipr.co/TJn0T1
72Pinterest driving referral traffic: http://cipr.co/TJnbxy
73History of RSS: http://cipr.co/WwG8C4
74History of Google Alerts: http://cipr.co/14DE6E1
75Flipboard China: http://cipr.co/11pg5CY
76Pepsi Pulse: http://cipr.co/11UuPo2
77Social Flow: http://cipr.co/Y9Srmq
78Mashable: http://cipr.co/14DEiTK
79Shiv Singh, Pepsi Pulse: http://cipr.co/TJnRD2
80Marketing Week, 2011: cipr.co/VU2Q7j
8190/9/1 rule: http://cipr.co/YT3FS8
82BBC Briefing: http://cipr.co/11UvohA