This is the story of how a solid content curation strategy led to books, awards, columns, recognition, traffic and a whole new career.
It's also the story of how anyone can do it, and make it work for their business.
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The true value of content curation (Or: Why links are not enough)
1. The true value of content
curation.
(Or: Why links are not enough.)
@CraigSilverman
Director of Content, Spundge
2. It’s 2004
•Content marketing does not exist as a term.
•Curation is something for people in the arts.
•Blogs are relatively nascent. Gawker covers mostly
the media in NY.
•Twitter doesn’t exist.
•The Huffington Post doesn’t exist.
•Mark Zuckerberg is working on Facebook at Harvard.
3. I’m a freelance journalist living in a cheap Montreal apartment
my friends would later refer to as a dark hovel.
I want to start a blog like Gawker. Something that will help
establish me in the media community, and hopefully lead to
more writing work.
But how do I create a site that can achieve my goals, while still
enabling me to pay the rent with my other writing work?
It had to be easy for me to keep up to date without a huge
amount of writing work.
Meanwhile...
5. Regret the Error
I picked something that was supposedly very important to
journalism, but that no one talked about: accuracy and corrections.
I also picked it because corrections were perfect content: bite-sized
bits of text, often hidden away by publications, that could be
hilarious, shocking, puzzling. And that no one really paid much
attention to.
I dedicated myself to finding the best of those and publishing them.
I called the site Regret the Error, in honor of the phrase “we regret
the error,” which often accompanied corrections.
7. It was curation before that
word was bastardized to
mean what it does today.
And by golly it worked.
8. The content: Corrections
It has come to the editor’s attention that the Herald-Leader neglected
to cover the civil rights movement. We regret the omission. - Herald-
Leader
An Oct. 19 article on songwriter John Bucchino incorrectly stated that
he doesn’t read. The sentence should have said he doesn’t read
music. - Dallas Morning News
The Denver Daily News would like to offer a sincere apology for a
typo in Wednesday’s Town Talk regarding New Jersey’s proposal to
ban smoking in automobiles. It was not the author’s intention to call
New Jersey ‘Jew Jersey.’ - Denver News
9. The content: Errors
A very bad headline on the left. A paper misspelling its own name on the right.
10.
11. I was referred to as an expert in errors, corrections and accuracy. By
doing the site, the curation, every day and owning this area, I built
credibility.
People began calling to interview me. The site was recognized by PC
Magazine, Time magazine, Editor & Publisher etc.
So I dove further into the work, researching the history of corrections,
of errors. I looked into error prevention and the Japanese practice of
mistake-proofing.
The curation led to other kinds of content creation.
Amazing things happened
13. All because I spent an hour a
day finding the best stuff within a
niche, packaging it & pushing it
out. Easy!
YOU GUYS, let’s all start link
blogs!
15. I used curation as the foundation upon which to
build out my expertise, knowledge and brand to
enable me to take it to the next stage: original
content creation.
I could have done a book that was just the best
corrections. But that’s not a career. That’s not the
real value.
The real takeaway
16. That’s why I’m helping build a product and company at
Spundge that offers content discovery and curation and
enables those aspects to power original content creation.
That’s where the lasting value is for individuals and
organizations. I know from experience.
How to do it
18. Curation’s value: The obvious
• Relevant content available at frequency demanded
today.
• Supplements your work with related content.
• Builds community by offering love.
• Communicates knowledge by selecting well.
• Provides outside support for key messages.
19. Curation’s value: Less obvious
•Curation provides the raw material necessary to collect
research, build knowledge and expertise, spark ideas.
•As such, curation feeds original creation, which is the most
valuable kind of content.
•Curation’s biggest value is as part of a larger content
strategy with original content at the top of the pyramid.
20. Don’t just stream out links and excerpts and think
that makes you interesting.
Take those links and create something
interesting.
21. Thank you!
Let’s Connect:
•@CraigSilverman | @Spundge
•http://ca.linkedin.com/in/craigjsilverman
•craig@spundge.com
•http://blog.spundge.com
•http://www.regrettheerror.com
Give Spundge a try:
•Free account: http://www.spundge.com/
•Free 30-day trial of Pro: http://www.spundge.com/pro
I’d love to hear your feedback on this presentation, and about Spundge.
Notes de l'éditeur
This presentation is about using content curation to its full potential, and ending the link-barfing-short-excerpt-pushing madness.
Here’s some of the content I managed to discover and curate on my site. This stuff was funny, shocking, head scratching. I found it because almost no one else was looking for it on a daily basis. I found my niche and I worked it like a madman. I wrote year-end posts naming the best errors and corrections of the year. They got linked like crazy, and I did tons of radio interviews.
I used TypePad and put it together in one Sunday night. My friend did the logo. I emailed a private version of it to a few journalist friends. They gave me some feedback. I practiced blogging the site for about two weeks, and then launched, in October 2004. I sent out a press release to the media blogs I loved and emailed friends. I got about 10,000 visitors. I realized I was going to have to do this every day. This was what the blog looked like in 2006. See the posts? They’re really short, and I have several of them per day, five days a week. That’s because the bread and butter of the site was that I would find a highlight the most notable, amusing, awful, interesting corrections and errors from publications. Mostly, I just needed a system to find them. Then I needed a good headline, and a link back. I spent about an hour a day on the site, and it was working. No one else was doing this, and there were at least a few good, if not great, corrections each week.
Here’s some of the content I managed to discover and curate on my site. This stuff was funny, shocking, head scratching. I found it because almost no one else was looking for it on a daily basis. I found my niche and I worked it like a madman. I wrote year-end posts naming the best errors and corrections of the year. They got linked like crazy, and I did tons of radio interviews.
An NHL team oushit its opponent on the left. Thanks to a spellchecker gone awry, Reuters reports that “Queen Elizabeth has 10 times the lifespan of workers and lays up to 2,000 eggs a day” (It was supposed to say “queen bee”.)
Yes, it started with a curation blog. But when I launched I knew I need to buttress my curated corrections with something more substantial. So I wrote a post for the first day outlining research about corrections. Looking back, it was woefully inadequate and incomplete. Still, I knew even then that ultimately curation is not enough. But I had to get there, to that next phase. And curation was perfect for that.