There's plenty of evidence that business is adopting content
curation, but the practice hasn't been around long enough for
organizations to innovate more targeted, results-focused uses.
Business takes many of its lessons from how everyone else
makes use of social tools. To start applying content curation,
communicators need to pay attention to how others are using the crop of
curation tools that have found acceptance online. There are dozens of
free tools, but Storify is the one that has demonstrated one of curation's emerging strengths:
Curating news that the media isn't covering can lead to media coverage. And, by extension, it can improve and expand on stories the media are covering.
Back in November, college junior Ben Doernberg assmembled a Storify story
chronicling the New York Police Department's eviction of Occupy Wall
Street protesters from Zuccotti Park. The story was made up of tweets,
videos, photos and other content that was posted mostly by people on the
scene. He also included tweets from journalists reporting the NYPD's
suppression of their efforts to cover the story.
In reporting the impact of Doernberg's effort, ReadWriteWeb noted that The Washington Post ran the Storify story,
made easy through Storify's embed feature, something missing from other
free curation options. So the curated story served to inform media
coverage and was itself viewed more than 23,000 times.
Most company opportunities to adopt Doerenberg's approach
don't have the built-in interest of a police raid on a protest
encampment, but that shouldn't stop companies from looking at collecting
social content as a means of creating a resource for the press. After
all, the effort would cost nothing more than time of the curator (or
curation team).
The process would look something like this:
Identify opportunity
Any company news is a potential curated collection. Think
about a product launch. Reaction to the introduction of a new product is
likely to appear all over the web from a variety of sources. Customers
will weigh in, as will industry experts and analysts. People attending
launch events will tweet it, blog it and post videos and photos.
Financial events, like shareholder meetings, will also be
broadly covered. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives also
tend to provide fodder for discussion.
It's not unreasonable to think about curating bad-news
stories. The press tends to cover the most lurid dimensions of a company
crisis. A collection that provides a more balanced overview of the
situation, could conceivably lead to some of the more positive aspects
of the story finding their way into the public consciousness.
Select curators
The mechanics of curating aren't complicated; it shouldn't
take more than 10 minutes to acquire the skills necessary to produce a
story. Since anybody can curate, the criteria for selecting curators
should begin with their familiarity with the topic. The key to a solid
curation effort is the selection of the best, most relevant and
representative posts.
Monitor conversation
With the curator in place, it's time to develop key words
and set up a monitoring plan. This can be as simple as establishing a
few Google Alerts or as sophisticated as tapping into a monitoring
service the organization is already using, like Radian 6.
Storify is designed to let you conduct your keyword searches
from the control panel, but it's equally easy to add an item by simply
entering its URL. Ideally, a curator would do both. Even with a
substantial story, it shouldn't take an unreasonable amount of time.
Select and comment on the best content
The heart of curation is, of course, curating. Curators need
to cull through the many items people have posted in order to find the
right posts to create an accurate overview of the news.
In recounting his development of his Occupy Wall Street
story, Doernberg said, "By the time I decided to make a Storify, I had
already read probably 100 tweets on this issue, so I tried to figure out
what the overarching themes or the story seemed to be to me, and I went
back through my memory of who tweeted what at what time."
This college junior's intuition about how to curate can serve as a corporate blueprint.
Balance is even more vital for businesses than it is for
individuals. A college student can be forgiven if he skews his coverage
to match his point of view, but a company needs to be beyond reproach in
its effort to be objective, lest the collection be shrugged off as
little more than corporate flackery.
Look back to the resource Microsoft maintained when it faced
federal and state antitrust lawsuits. The media tapped it as one of the
most comprehensive archives of documents related to the suits.
Companies curating news should keep that example in mind.
Adding context is one more curation chore. When appropriate,
adding commentary improves the value of the collection. Doernberg, for
example, punctuated the curation with brief labels, such as "Violence by
the NYPD against journalists was widely reported," which is followed
with tweets from a number of journalists.
Announce and promote the collection
Simply producing a collection isn't going to get it noticed,
particularly if an organization is suspected of an ulterior,
self-serving motive. Using the same techniques it would use to draw
attention to anything else. Direct contact with reporters and
influencers, a press release, a blog post and some tweets can all get
people to give the collection a look.
The time to make the announcement is just after the
collection gets rolling, populated with enough content to make it
interesting but with still more to come.
Companies are increasingly focused on content marketing.
Curating company news fits nicely into the content marketing bucket,
where it can both fill a gap in mainstream media reporting and serve as
an impetus to getting that coverage. It's only a matter of time before
some organizations move beyond entry-level curation efforts and start
curating their news.
Taking lessons from how people like Ben Doernberg are curating the news is a good place to start.
A version of this article first appeared on Holtz Communication & Technology.