Delivered at the 2010 HighEdWeb conference, Cincinnati, OH, Oct. 11, 2010
From the conference abstract:
The fire hose is spouting content nonstop. Somewhere in that stream, serendipitously, content is being created that organically aligns with your school's brand. On top of all the other hats we wear, "volunteer fireman" is now added to the list. Panicked? Don't call 911 just yet. Tthere are several ways that, using a variety of free tools and tricks, we can draw on content from the community to create a dynamic, real-time representation of our brand, powered by authentic, organic content. Web thinkers like Robert Scoble and Steve Rubel have called content curation the "next evolution of digital storytelling" and "the next big thing to shake the Web." It's no longer enough to simply aggregate. We must take the process of how we already read and filter the Web and turn it outward, taming the herd of content and hitching it to our brand. I will demonstrate the success I've had turning content found via social media monitoring into "found art," curated into a blog on the Tufts experience called Jumble (http://blogs.uit.tufts.edu/jumble). I will also offer a variety of take-home ideas that are easy to execute and affordable
71. Content Curation in the Wild TweetMixx "For us, the key to curation is curiosity. The best curators in the world, both online and off, are curious people by nature ... We're constantly wanting to be inspired and wanting to share what's inspiring us with others." http://youtubeaublog.blogspot.com/2009/10/key-to-curation-is-curiosity-meet-our.html
72.
73. Thank you! Any questions? Related links/photo credits: http://bit.ly/hewebcuration @radiofreegeorgy georgycohen.com
Notes de l'éditeur
What I am going to be talking about is not a replacement for or solution to content creation creating original content is still the most important thing you can do.
We’re going to be talking about unearthing Buried content treasure and using it to promote your brand on the web this is about a value-add for your content strategy, for your brand storytelling this is about working with UGC and other web content in a real time context,
thats what i did with jumble 42,358 pageviews 35,744 unique views 8/1/2009 to 7/31/2010 soft launch aug. 2009 (public the next month) i was monitoring the tufts brand via social media and seeing all of this cool content that alums and students were producing and i had nothing to do with it, nowhere to put it, so i built a blog. in a year we got nearly 36,000 visitors to this little blog
so what the heck was i doing? i was just giving good content a home, right? little did i know until relatively recently that what i was doing had a fancy name,
and that name was content curation now, we know the word curation in other contexts
you see it in museums, exhibits that are built to reflect the work fo an artist, or work during a particular time, or work by various artists around a theme. - artist - theme - era
" On the e-commerce end, shopping sites such as Anthropologie and J.Crew have digitized the medium of the store window display by curating clothing collections “ - best, specific, relevant
but i can has cheezburger is a curator of lolcats. the community votes on the best, they're organized by tags i just wanted an excuse to throw out the first lolcat of the conference
boing boing and fark are curators of pop culture and curiosities in the news.
the web didn't used to make this so doable. we started with aggregation. aggregation = hoarding we bring all this content in and collect it, then spit it out and say, here it is! aggregation is automatic. it's not a human process . our rss feeds don';t think about which articles we'd like the most and only give us those to read
aggregation is the old model
content curation is the new model so what is it?>
specificity is key this is not about everything, this is about the best things being topical and relevant - continually - selecting - relevant - specific
voices are out there talking about your brand, your school, they are creating comment and sharing information and reactions. curation helps us take advantage of that, davis says that curation does three things: - creates visibility - builds bridges to content - engages influencers
levels the playing field i mentioned before that content curation is not a content strategy. it's a part of one. it's not a content panacea. but for small groups, groups with limited means to generate original content, it can help.
content is being created in real-time, we have to be timely and reactive and present - we have t have our fingers on the pulse human filter - this is a manual task that takes time - comes from monitoring and then applying editorial criteria - weight it based on context, cuurent events, branding, sentiment - find your sources and go curation is not just UGC - you can curate your own content - archives, hot topica curated content should have a home base - a blog, a topic landing page on a news site, a twitter list, something holding it together and keeping it organized - building bridges to content and creating visibility - while content curation has value in real time, it should live for posterity and you should publish frequently you are curating content created by your community - reach out to the influencers , there are content brand owners out there who love churning out positive content about your institution - active alums, really excited students - find them and get them in your orbit and on your radar i know what you might be thinking
so that's all great, right, but why does it matter for us? don't we have enough to do?
there is a lot of content out there content is chaos, and we need to filter the chaos , and by doing so, Become an authority let's gather the best content out there that aligns with our brand let's do our users a service and show them the best of the best,
Content about your school is already out there, good and bad. we know this. why not take advantage of it?
because stduents want to see this content, so let's give it to them?
who's read groundswell? charlene li, author of groundswell, has crafted something called the engagement pyramid, which she presents as a guide to udnerstanding the social demographics, or the socialgraphics, of your audience. curation, as you can see, is at the top of the pyramid. its the people who are most engaged, the most experienced. it makes sense for us to be there. Curation is the highest level of content engagement
- keeping lists - e-newsletter
news coverage - best press hits
university homepage if you think about it, the idea of curation is something we've always done, from bookmarking sites on our browsers to picking a top story.
What are your goals?
Who is your audience?
what is your message? what is your niche? what story are you telling? what is your tone? should fit your message and goals this is where the value of context comes into play you craft the narrative this is what differentiates from aggregations
Stay human - don't rely just on automated curation services to fill your content needs -
don't be afraid to be selective - highlight feature the best - this is curation, not aggregation you are telling a story, pick the words that suit it best your job is to editorialize, contextualize - provide added value to content - set order, priorities - this applies whether it's user content or our own
needs your context - the value we provide as content curators is to put content in context. link to program sites, event listings, past news coverage, similar types of content.
trustworthiness - as universities, we are trusted entities - with great power comes great responsibility review and validate the content you are curating - do some detective work to attach names if possible one rotten apple spoils the barrel - one red solo cup ruins the whole video
Tweets Videos Blog Posts Images Dept. newsletters student group channels
turn to your community - who are the content producers? - who are the influencers? who can you trust? curation at its highest form means reaching out to the content influencers in our community and building relationships with them we make a point of identifying influential students alums or faculty in other contexts, be it fundraising or expertise. why not content creation? Your community knows stuff you don't - grow bigger ears and listen
be humble Tufts Quidditch story someone may do something better than you think about the story We are but mere muggles
stay original - mix curated content with original content - curated content extends your site's content, but it is an addition not a replacement
Tag and organize and categorize curated content appropriately
How do we find this content? Aggregation can be a platform for curation
social media monitoring google reader netvibes hootsuite chris brogan "grow bigger ears"
bostonist/gothamist/chicagoist
solicitation we have this and are trying to find best application for it
you can solicit ideas, suggestions or questions from the community, and the community votes on the best. this blends automation with curation by the community.
stole idea from Atlantic Monthly online's old Flashbacks feature, reference past articles from Atlantic archives in light of current events value of evergreen content or assessing content as newly relevant - know what you have
once you've curated it, How do you share this content
Curation Station is software which enables brands to gather, select and share the best content on any product, subject or category Living Stories are a new format for presenting and consuming online news. The basic idea of a living story is to combine all of the news coverage on a running story on a single page. ... This makes it easier for readers to get the latest updates on the stories that interest them, as well as to review deeper background materials that are relevant for a story's context. addictomatic lets you create custom pages with the buzz on any topic SwiftRiver is an open source platform that helps users manage realtime data from twitter, email, SMS and the web.
You can also create a custom link to go to a different site also, EMG - educational marketing group - steven biernacki, travis brock those guys - they curate blog posts by us through sharing on google reader and their twitter account
Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web. Steve Rosenbaum - " Robots are your friends. But don’t let visitors smell the metal." like programming a VCR for content
we curate tweets - twitter lsits, hashtags, favorites i've seen one widget that lets you filter by both twitter list and keyword, so say, any student group using the tufts2014 hashtag some people are using twitter accounts as storehouses for sharing articles. chris brogan created a twitter account called broganmedia where all he does is share articles, so right there he's curating the best articles about social media and business on the web for wheoever wants to read them. Educational Marketing Group does this, steven biernacki and travis brock and those guys, curating the best articles and blog posts by us. they also share them on google reader retweeting is even a form of curation
Magnify.net is a video publishing platform that makes it easy for you to integrate user-generated video, video that you produce, or video that you discover into your website. We're powered by the passions of your visitors -- finding relevant user
live, moderated chat pull in tweets by account and by hashtage, automatically or manually
monitor RSS feed for specific accounts or tags
you can create custom playlists around themes or you can use your Favorites as a playlist, and your Favorites are a great way to compile a master list of videos you like one warning is that YouTube, when you embed a playlist, does not allow you to sort by most recent, so you may need to have a developer hack the API a bit to get it to work
concern about handling other people's content
Content on the web can be linked to. Content on sites with open APIs can be embedded Understand DMCA and abide by it Don’t edit, obscure or destroy revenue sources on content Expect that your original content will be aggregated and curated as well Respect others. Play nice. If someone asks you to remove their content, do it.
uses Tumblr - content show as "instrumental, interconnected and intelligent" - ties into IBM brand/theme of "smarter planet"
latest breaking news video
household and interior design
street art showcase
information - Susan Wu - someone in tufts2014 tweeted about how she was interested to learn susan wu went to tufts, i had no idea who susan wu was so i looked her up and she's a web entrepreneur who Fast Company Magazine named one of the “100 Most Creative People in Business” and one of the “Most Influential Women in Technology.” - your community knows stuff you don't your community also creates stuff you don't - they speak with a voice you can never have - Quidditch video is a great example community - you will find out who the digital influencers are in your community, who are your brand advocates, who is creating great content - there are a million and one ways you can leverage that, from intern scouting to going to them for advice, finding ways to encourage and highlight them