The Unlicensed Content Model

The first and most popular option is to use unlicensed content from around the web.  In this model, the curator does not seek explicit permission from the content authors.  Instead the curator, keeping the fair use statute in mind, shares a small excerpt from the original text and clear attribution to the original article.  Readers of the curated content are then required to go back to the original publisher’s site to read the article in full.

The Licensed Content Model

The second model is to actually license the content from the original author and republish the original content in it’s entirety on the curator’s site. There are appealing properties of licensed content: (1) You get to provide a seamless reading experience. (2) You do not risk driving readers off your site. (3) You don’t have to worry about fair-use and how much content you take.

The Downsides of Curating Licensed Content

While the licensed content curation model is attractive on the outset, there are some obvious, and other not so apparent downsides, to building a curation destination on a licensed content model.

• Limited Selection. With licensed content, your sources for third party content are severely constrained.  You can only curate content from sources with whom you either have a direct publishing relationship or with whom your licensed content provider has a relationship.  Most re-sellers of licensed content have relationships only the largest mainstream publishers such as the Associated Presses and the Reuters of the world.

  As a result, for most content marketers focused on specific topics and niches, such as B2B marketers, who rely on specific trade publishers and blogs, licensed content is not an option.

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO). In order to avoid risking their original articles being confused as duplicate content, most publishers who license their content contractually obligate their licensees to include special directives in the syndicated content that forbid search engines from indexing the copies of the licensed content.  As a marketer, this means that if you use licensed content on your site, it will have little to no SEO value.

  For brands looking to simply engage their existing audience and provide a more seamless reading experience, licensed content may be an option. But most marketers are not only looking to engage with their existing audience, but grow their audience and readership through search engine traffic.  For the latter camp, licensed content is not a very compelling option.

• Privacy. Licensed content usually comes with the stipulation that you have to include a provided pixel tracker with any piece of licensed content you re-publish.  In turn, this pixel tracker can cookie your readership, measure the efficacy of the content, and provide analytics back to the original publisher.

  While this is not a salient issue with most marketers, it could be one for marketers in regulated industries with strict privacy policies, or marketers who are sharing licensed content to an internal audience (e.g. competitive intelligence teams).

• Modification & Editorialization. If you re-publish licensed content, you are typically required to republish the original in full with no modifications or edits so that you do not misrepresent or distort the views of the original publisher.

  As a result, some of the content curation best practices with regards to adding your own perspective, annotating content, and re-titling content to add value as a brand curator are difficult, at best, or out of reach, at worst, with licensed content.

• Cost. Lastly, we should not forget cost.  While unlicensed content is free, licensed content carries inexpensive fees that can easily run into the tens of thousands of dollars a year based on your breadth of content.

Which one is right for you?

If you can afford it, don’t have a strong need to attract new visitors via search engines, and tend to find sufficient relevant content from mainstream publishers, then licensed content may be for you. From a reading experience perspective, there’s nothing better than providing the full original content and keeping visitors within your own site.

But for most marketers, unlicensed content is the easiest way for them to feed the content beast.  If you can curate ethically, unlicensed is content is free, ubiquitous, diverse and readily available.

Interested in getting started with content curation?  Download the 5 Simple Steps to Become a Content Curation Rockstar eBook.

I have attempted to put together a map of content marketing tools available to online marketers. My hope is that this will help guide you through the many content marketing technologies and tools alike to the right one that fits your needs. Click to enlarge the graphic above.

Why am I doing this
In the past year, there has been a major growth of content marketing tools available to content marketers. While many of these tools have existed for years prior to the advent of content marketing and would normally be deemed as simply internet marketing tools, many of them are rechristening themselves as content marketing tools.

Yet many of these tools are quite different from each other and serve vastly different purposes within content marketing. Some technologies may help create content, others like our own Curata help create content, some may help distribute your content, yet others may help you simply measure the effectiveness of your content marketing. Based on attending dozens of content marketing conferences over the years, I have seen most marketers, and even analysts, not know where to start or how to make sense of the universe of content marketing tools.

Hasn’t this been done before?
In the past few months, a few dedicated folks have attempted to put together comprehensive collections of content marketing tools. But I have found each of these attempts to have fallen short in one regard or another. Some have been limiting in the amount of tools they covered, while others have been comprehensive but have not grouped the tools together in an intuitive manner.

Regardless here’s a list of honorable mentions of people and organizations who have done this in the past:

• Everything PR. In January of 2013, Everything PR put together a list of 100 Content Marketing tools. While it’s one of the most comprehensive lists, I have seen, it doesn’t strictly list “tools” in the sense of technologies. Many of the entries are resource sites and blogs such as the Content Rules Blog or events such as Content Marketing World 2013. While such resources can be helpful for marketers, they are not strictly tools. The list also makes no attempt to organize and group together tools.

• Eloqua. In December of 2012, Eloqua published an infographic called the Social Business Shift. While it’s a nice graphic, it doesn’t strictly focus on content marketing and instead focuses on tools with a social component such as Kiva and Kickstarter for crowd funding or Taleo for talent sourcing.

• Altimeter. In April of 2013, Rebecca Lieb of Altimeter started a list of 15 content marketing vendors. We were flattered to have Curata included in the initial list. However, since then there have been many comments to the blog post from other tools vendors requesting to be added to the deficient list. While the list currently sits at 27 tools and continues, it’s far from complete. Furthermore, Altimeter is still in the process of compiling a list of tools out there, but has yet to group and organize them in a meaningful manner.

• Content Amp. Also in April of 2013, Content Amp, a UK based content marketing agency created an impressive and visually appealing infographic with a wide variety of content marketing tools with an attempt at groupings as well. While this is perhaps the best map of the content marketing vendor set I have seen, it is still lacking in the number of vendors covered and the categories. For example, it missed content curation tools entirely and has a confusing category called Curated Content & Forums that including technologies such as the commenting system Disqus, which have no relevance to curated content. The infographic is not strictly restricted to “tools” and has a category for content marketing agencies (which also includes Content Amp).

Disclaimer
I have been piecing together this graphic for several months now, but it’s hard to keep up with the rapidly evolving space of content marketing tools. Here are a few disclaimers and areas where things could be better.

• It’s not comprehensive. For every tool you see in the map, there is a long tail many other tools that are similar or performs parts of functions of the tool included in the graphic. I have tried to include the tools that I feel stand out the most of their categories.

• It’s not as clear cut as it seems. There are many tools that fall into multiple categories, but I have placed them in the category that represents them the best. For example, Marketing AI measures analytics for your content, then helps you better optimize your content. In this case, should Marketing AI fall into Analytics or Optimization tools group? In this case, I placed them in the Analytics group. However, Parse.ly is a relatively similar tools, which I decided to place into the Optimization category.

It’s not complete. I am sure there are entire categories missing here. I hope you will recommend and suggest additions to this map.

Click view image larger.

Lead Tracking Tools

Webtrends – This digital marketing company offers tools for measuring and optimizing digital campaigns. Webtrends offers analytic intelligence including customer intelligence and behavioral segmentation, targeting and scoring, and more.

mixpanel – Instead of measuring pageviews, this analytics tool measures actions such as searches or shares to gain greater insights into user behavior.

Woopra – Using real-time stats that can be broken down to an individual-level view, Woopra helps brands tracks visitors across multiple devices and build comprehensive timelines for every user.

Compete – Gain insight into the competition by examining what websites and keywords others are using to drive traffic online, compiling lists of the top websites based on a variety of metrics, and tracking online market share by industry.

Kissmetrics – This ecommerce customer intelligence tool person-centric data in real time and ties anonymous activity to known activity once a visitor becomes a customer.

Marketing.ai – This content marketing and analytics tool is targeted at B2B marketers and displays detailed information about web visitors such as the name of the cmpanies visiting your website, the location and size of the company, and a detailed customer journey of pages viewed on the site.

Google Analytics – Google’s web analytics tool allows companies to customize reports, measure the impact of social media and mobile on website traffic, and measure conversion rates.

Marketing Automation

Pardot – This lead management tool lets marketers and salespeople move prospects through the sales funnel by creating automated targeted messaging that based on prospects’ activity.

Genius – Sales and marketing people can collaborate using this online-sales lead tracking software system to send personalized campaigns, see who’s visiting the website or opening emails, and assess prospect interest for follow up.

Marketo – This marketing automation tool integrates email, social media, offline events, content, and more, helping sales and marketing teams prioritize prospects based on demographic and behavioral criteria, measure performance of marketing campaigns, and more.

Eloqua – The flexible campaign editor offers a whiteboard-like canvas where users can drag and drop elements such as email, segments, actions, and more to create smart marketing campaigns.

Act-on – This cloud-based platform helps marketers organize campaigns, integrate marketing into sales and support systems, and measure results.

Silverpop – Using this digital marketing platform that unifies marketing automation, email, social media, and mobile, marketers can carry conversations across multiple devices and measure return on relationships.

HubSpot – Marketers use this integrated inbound marketing system to create personalizable landing pages, emails, web pages, and more, plus tap into HupSpot’s vast knowledge base around content marketing best practices.

Personalization

Monetate – Turn real-time into relevant digital experiences by taking a snapshot of every visitor, creating multivariate tests and rules-based product recommendations, and more.

Demandbase – Create targeted, relevant conversations with buyers at every stage, personalize the web experience, segment and analyze companies and more using this B2B marketing tool.

40 Nuggets – Harness marketing automation strategies, audience-analytics, and predictive intelligence to personally engage with and tailor content to each customer.

Email Marketing Tools

Constant Contact – Design professional-looking emails, grow and manage your email list, and track results. In addition to email, Constant Contact offers tools for social campaigns, online surveys, and more.

iContact – Create HTML emails and signup forms, send campaigns to customers inboxes, track email campaigns, and more. iContact also offers social social media marketing tools.

Campaign Monitor – Customize your email template, send campaigns, conduct A/B testing, integrate with your blog, and more.

Social Media Management & Listening Tools

Sprinklr – Large global companies use this social media management system to engage with customers, connect with CRM systems, build custom widgets, publish and manage content, and more.

Tweetdeck – Track brand mentions and hashtags, manage multiple Twitter accounts, schedule Tweets, and more all in a single Twitter platform.

Hootsuite – Manage multiple social media accounts, analyze social media traffic, track brand mentions, collaborate with other team members, and schedule messages and tweets through this social media management tool.

Buffer – Add articles, photos, and video, and this social media tool will automatically post the content on your social media accounts throughout the day.

Social Media

Twitter – With over half a billion registered users, Twitter lets users post messages of up to 140 characters, share photos and videos, create custom lists, send direct messages, and more.

Facebook.com – This social media platform has over a billion users and lets users connect with friends, share links, photos, videos, and events, join groups, and more.

Pinterest.com – Pinterest users share and tag images and videos on customizable boards, follow brands and individuals, “repin” images, and more. Pinterest has nearly 50 million users.

LinkedIn – A business-focused online network that includes features such as sharing links, adding connections, joining groups, writing recommendations, searching for connections by company, industry, skills, and more.

Google+ – Google’s social network that allows users to set up hangouts using video chat, create “circles” of people for organizing contacts and targeting messaging, and more.

Blogging & CMS

Percussion – This streamlined CMS offers editable templates, shared assets, versioning, automatic link management, drag and drop editing, and more, enabling content producers to simplify their content editing and publishing process.

Tumblr – Known for its community of content creators and curators and its capabilities for sharing multimedia content, this microblogging platform hosts over 100 million blogs.

WordPress – This popular CMS and blogging software lets users create custom themes, add plugins, publish content, moderate comments, and more.

Livejournal – With over 63 million journals and communities, Livejournal offers a free, open-source platform for blogging and sharing content.

Drupal – This open-source CMS powers millions of websites and applications. Add-on modules and designs let companies or individuals tailor a site to their needs.

Paid Distribution Networks

Brightcove – This provider of cloud content services offers an online video platform for adding custom video players to websites, social media profiles, and mobile destinations.

PR Newswire – Distribute news releases to a global media database of more than 700,000 journalists and blogger contacts, monitor traditional and social media, and engage in real time with journalists, bloggers, and other influencers.

SlideShare – Upload and share slide presentations, gain insight into who’s viewing your presentations, collect business leads, and more.

Cadence9 – This unified solution for managing content marketing lets marketers plan content using an editorial calendar, assign tasks to team members, manage content creation and publishing workflow, and more.

Content Promotion Tools

ContentGain – This widget places links to third-party content on other websites to boost distribution. The original content publisher shares ad revenue with the website sharing the content.

Disqus – This discussion platform helps bloggers and website publisher engage readers through the comment section.

OneSpot - This tool automatically turns owned or earned content into optimized ads, distributes the content across OneSpot’s ad inventory, retargets users, and monitors results.

Gravity – Using algorithms based on users’ reading and sharing history, Gravity enables websites to deliver personalized recommendations.

Outbrain.com – This content discovery tool recommends your content to readers of other premium publishers, offering a personalized reader experience and exposing your content to engaged readers.

Webinar Tools

ReadyTalk – This online conferencing tool offers a single interface for web, audio, and video conferencing, as well as the ability to record and share webinars and integrate with mobile conferencing.

Webex – Using Cisco’s webinar products, users can host or attend meetings using HD video, share files, and more.

BrightTalk – Run interactive live webinars with features including real-time polls, downloads, question and answer, and more.

GoToMeeting - This online meeting platform allows users to host unlimited meetings with up to 25 attendees and is supported for Mac, PC, iPhone, iPad, and Android.

Sources for Content Creation

Scripted – Subcontract writing projects to an online writing team through this online platform, which also offers copyediting and the ability to request pitches from writers.

Textbroker – Assign writing projects including SEO and website localization through this online platform.

Skyword – This content production system allows companies to optimize manage and pay writers, use an SEO scorecard to optimize content, and more.

Brafton – Using its in-house search engine optimization and social media marketing expertise, this online news and content agency creates news content, videos, infographics, and other items for businesses.

Zerys – This project management tool and content marketplace allows businesses to locate professional freelance writers, assign and review content, export or auto-publish content, and more.

Contently – Find and collaborate with high-quality freelance writers, manage payments and assignments, and more using this online platform for content marketing.

Content Curation Tools

Curata – Easily find, organize & share relevant content for your business to position your brand as an industry thought leader, increase brand visibility and generate leads.

Scribit – Search and browse for articles and videos, share content, and track conversions using this content curation platform.

Magnify – This fully customizable platform allows publishers and brands curate and share online videos.

Content Optimization Tools

InboundWriter – Monitor topics, gain insights into what makes readers tick, boost content popularity, and more using this tool designed for writers and content marketers.

Scribe – Created by the people behind Copyblogger Media, Scribe helps content creators identify topics that are relevant to the intended audience, measure social media engagement around content, and more.

Optimizely – Conduct A/B testing about the placement or appearance of text and other elements, set and measure goals, and more to optimize your website in relation to your site’s goals.

Parse.ly – This predictive analytics tool empowers publishers to track the performance of authors or topics, capitalize on web trends, promote in-demand content, and tap into the potential of recommended topics.

SEOmoz – This platform enables users to monitor social media, manage SEO campaigns, and more.

Content Enrichment Tools

Zemanta – This plug-in creates connections between bloggers, content creators, and publishers that publish content on similar topics.

Storify – Collect social media mentions on a chosen topic, trend, or event and curate the best social media elements in one place.

Silk – Use your company’s data to create structured web pages that automatically draw connections between facts, data, and more.

Graphicly – Authors and publishers use this online tool to convert content for digital distribution and collect insights on reader behavior.

Content Collaboration Tools

Compendium – Plan your content using Compendium’s calendar-based tool, create efficiently placed content across multiple channels, and track the effectiveness of each piece of content.

Divvy – This photo-sharing app for the iPhone allows users to view and save photos across social media channels, create and share with groups, and more.

GatherContent - Organize and streamline your website content using drag and drop features, create content guidelines, collaborate with a content team, and export content using this online collaboration tool.

Google Drive – Create, store, and share including spreadsheets, text documents, drawings, forms, and presentations.

Kapost - This content marketing platform allows marketers to collaborate, distribute, and analyze all content types within a single platform.

SocialCast – This collaboration tool organizes workflow into a single location accessible from anywhere on any device.

Content Authoring Tools

Easelly – Using a theme-based approach to creating infographics and visualizations this online tool, lets users drag and drop art into a theme to create shareable graphics.

Visual.ly – Browse infographics and data visualizations and create your own to drive traffic to your brand’s website and amplify your social media presence.

Adobe Creative Cloud – Sync and organize your creative assets across multiple devices, track comments, build and publish websites, apps, and more.

KnowledgeVision – Turn presentations and web content into an integrated, interactive online video experience that doesn’t require special software or app downloads.

Brainshark – Sync up marketing and sales people using a systematic, coordinated approach in this content-centric sales platform.

Prezi – This presentation tool helps users organize and share ideas by creating visualizations.

It’s no secret that Google Reader has been reduced to step-child status from Google’s perspective despite its immense popularity. In the past few years, Google has let Reader languish and in fact tried to killed Google Reader once before back in 2011 leading to the Occupy Reader movement. As a result, Google has not kept up with times with its feed reader offering and has fallen behind.

It’s plausible that Wavii may be Google’s attempt at leap-frogging to the present to replace Reader for a few reasons:

• Mobile first. Google Reader was created initially for desktop devices years before the advent of smart phones and tablets. Since then, Google Reader has built user-friendly interfaces for these devices. These days, most Google Reader users consume content on mobile devices as opposed to the desktop interface. That being said, Google Reader always will have a lot of legacy baggage to carry since they started with the desktop first, and the mobile experience as an add-on.

  What Wavii has to offer: On the other hand, the new generation of news consumption apps such as Wavii were designed for the mobile experience first. Google has a lot to gain be reinventing their news consumption model by building a great mobile experience first, followed by a desktop experience for more involved and complex tasks.

• Topics over Feeds. In Google Reader’s model, a user subscribes to specific feeds from a single source. Similarly, Google Reader’s discover model is also based on feeds to follow which are recommended to you.

  What Wavii has to offer: In comparison, Wavii uses Named Entity Recognition (NER) technology to identify topics such as people, organizations and locations mentioned in the news which you can then follow. Topics are more intuitive and powerful than feeds alone because as humans we naturally think of topics that we are interested in and less about feeds. Topics are very memorable whereas cryptic feed URLs are not. It’s a lot easier to answer the question “What topics are you interested in?” as compared to “What feeds do you subscribe to?” While Google does use entity recognition in Google News, they have not applied that technology for personalized content consumption and Wavii has a lot to offer here.

• Feedback. Google Reader has little or no learning mechanism to incorporate feedback from the user’s preferences to make the reading experience better in the future. At most you can mark as read, star or share times in Google Reader, but this does not make your content consumption experience better going forward.

  What Wavii has to offer: Wavii has feedback mechanisms built in so users can tell the app what content they like and dislike. While some have criticized it, Wavii’s strange smiley icon based feedback mechanism, it at least has one, where as Google Reader has none.

• Social. Google Reader does not have a strong social component. It’s not easy to browse what your friends are following, and what content they like. While many have speculated that the demise of Google Reader was motivated by Google’s desire to incorporate it’s functionality into their social product Google+, at the present Reader has virtually no social story.

  What Wavii has to offer: On the flipside, Wavii has a strong social component where you can browse what topics are users are following, and similarly share what topics you are following as well. Google has a lot to gain from incorporating a similar framework.

While it’s not clear that Wavii is Google’s replacement for their Reader product, it is apparent that there are a number of functionality areas where Wavii far outpaces Google Reader. At the least, we should expect that Google will incorporate some of these concepts into the next evolution of Google Reader.

Disclaimer: As a disclaimer, my company Curata is actively working on a Google Reader replacement that incorporates some of these concepts. We are currently giving only 10,000 early invites at this time. If you are interested, you can sign up for an invite to our Google Reader alternative here.

1.The Inputs – Where does the content curation tool get information from? What type of content will this allow me to curate? Will it help identify and recommend relevant content?

2.The Organization – What does this tool offer in terms of organizing content once it has been identified? What type of data models does this represent content as? In a simple chronological list, or an inter-linked structure? Does it let me annotate and editorialize the curated content?

3.The Venue – How and where can I share the content once I have decided to curate it?

In this blog post, I am primarily going to focus on the decided on a content curation tool based on the venue – the channels to which your content is curated. And just like most things, there’s no one right answer. Here are the different options of where you can share your curated content.

Embedded Widget

What is it? Embedded widgets allow you to display curated content in a small pane on your existing web properties. For example of this see the 3M in the News section on 3M’s career website. A few companies that provided dedicated widget solutions include Curation Station and Meltwater News. Another simple way to achieve this is to create simply embed a twitter widget on your site that only syndicates content from your account.

Sample of embedded curation widget from the Kauffman Foundation

Pro’s: Relatively easy to implement with Javascript code or create an iframe.

Con’s: Content in widgets is almost never indexed by search engines because they are rendered in Javascript which search engines do not consider. That means your keyword rich curated content is not impacting your Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Also, they are only a small part of a larger site, so they require you to keep the rest of the page up-to-date as well. Widgets are also limited in real estate so they do not allow for visitor commenting around the curated content.

Who should use it? Organizations that are looking primarily to touch up their website with some fresh content may want to use a widget. For example, if you already have a corporate blog and are not interested in increasing your traffic, but rather want to provide some context and fresh third party content, without having to write a new blog post – a widget is a great way to do that with minimal effort.

Microsite

What is it? A dedicated microsite or section of a website populated primarily with curated content. For examples, see my blog post entitled “6 Content Curation Examples Illustrated”.

Curation microsite by AllSalesforce about Salesforce.com’s development ecosystem

Pro’s: Microsites really create a full-fledged experience with curated content as the center piece and can easily because the hub for a specific topic or issue. Also, microsites also do well with respect to SEO because they have dozens, or even hundreds or thousands of subpages. If done well, microsites can also seamlessly juxtaposition original created content with curated content.

Con’s: Because the curated content is not tucked away in a widget and is instead front and center, you will need to pay a lot more attention to what you curate. Also, microsites can either be positioned as a section of existing corporate website, or positioned as a more independent vendor-neutral industry resource. If you choose the latter, then you have to think about branding and marketing that new resource.

Who should use it? Organizations that are looking to become an authoritative destination for a topic or issue to position themselves as a key resource or thought leader, or to drive traffic and visibility.

Personalized Page

What is it? A personalized page is a lightweight, single page microsite filled with curated content. Delicious is a great example of a curated personalized page. Here’s an example of one user’s page. Similarly Microsoft’s new tool Montage, Netvibes Universe, Paper.li, Scoop.it let you create more visually appealing and branded pages, but lack sufficient curation controls.

Example of a user’s personal page of curated links on del.icio.us

Pro’s: Easy to get up and running and are indexed by search engines. Usually free.

Con’s: Only one page is indexed by search engines. Furthermore, they are often created as sub-domains or subdirectories on another service rather than on your own domain, which is often insufficient for brands.

Who should use it? Individuals or cost conscious non-profits who want to create an information resource.

Email Newsletters

What is it? An email newsletter or digest containing the latest curated content that is sent out on a regular interval. As an example SmartBrief is a publisher that sends out hundreds of thousands of curated newsletters to various industries. Another curated example shown below is by DPT Labs.

Newsletter of curated content sent by DPT Labs

Pro’s: Email newsletters are a great way to continually educate an audience on a regular basis without fail. Unlike widgets or microsites which people may not come back to everyday, people do check their email every day without fail.

Con’s: Email newsletters have two drawbacks: 1. They are not indexed by search engines. So unless someone is already on your list, they are unlikely to join. 2. They are not real time. Without risking facing a high unsubscribe rate, you can only likely send a email newsletter with a digest of the latest curated content once a day.

Who should use it? Email newsletters are a great medium for curated content for curators with an existing captive audience. Alternatively, email newsletters can be used in conjunction with another means of attracting an audience, such as collecting subscribers from a tradeshow or a corporate site. By doing so, you have can “grab” people through another venue, and “hold” them with your curated email newsletter.

Twitter & Social Media Channels

What is it? Posting curated content on Twitter and other social media channels such as Facebook and LinkedIn through status updates. The curated content could be links to blog articles or other web content, or curated tweets (a.k.a. retweets). Most people on Twitter already are curating whether they know it or not.

Pro’s: Posting curated content is different from other mediums, because it’s a very time sensitive medium. People may be on a microsite or in their inbox to read email newsletters just a few times a day, but they are likely to be following Twitter throughout the day. Therefore, this medium is particularly well-suited for content that is time-sensitive in nature. Secondly, this medium makes it extremely easy for people to virally share content (just press the retweet button). If your curated content has the potential of being shared, then you should consider curating on a social media channel.

Con’s: The drawback of sharing curated content on social media is that if you don’t have a lot of curated content on your topic, then it’s hard to get noticed. Because social media is content is so fleeting, if you are not constantly and consistently posting your curated content, then your impact will be minimal. Also on social media you are not building up a search engine or visitor friendly organized archive of curated content – rather you are simply building up a hard-to-navigate list of links and comments.

Who should use it? Curators who have topics with a sufficient throughput of content. Curators with an existing or potential audience on social media channels. Curators with content that has a likelihood of being shared virally.

Feeds

What is it? Content that’s shared through RSS feeds or other data feeds.

Pro’s: People with RSS readers can subscribe to them – who are usually visitors who return regularly. In addition, some search engines crawl RSS feeds.

Con’s: Social media these days has in many ways taken the place of RSS feeds and provide more room for annotation. Unlike social media, it’s also difficult to annotate your content as a curator and add your own context. Most importantly, a feed is a glimpse at a small window in time and all your older curated content and hard work is lost once it’s no longer in that window.

Who should use it? Curators with an audience that prefers this medium. One example would be curating content on a topic with a large developer audience, who tend to consume content through feeds.

What’s the right answer?

So what’s the right answer? Which venue should you choose as you evaluate content curation tools?

A sound content curation strategy utilizes all of the venues and channels, but drives all visitors back to a single microsite. If you’re using a robust content curation platform then you should be able to easily syndicate your content to all channels with ease. However, when you publish to feeds, social media, widgets, email newsletters (basically everything but the microsite), they should all have excerpts of your curated content with links back to landing pages on your microsite for further context, rather than linking back directly to the original curated content. At your microsite, you can then advertise your calls to action to convert your visitors lower into the marketing funnels. The graphic below depicts how this works.

Further Reading and Examples

There are many examples of brands that are using microsites as their main hub for their curation strategy, who also share their curated content on other channels with links back to the content hub microsite. We’ve put together a whole eBook of real-world examples of content curation in action by marketers.

This has left many scratching their heads as to why so much money all of the sudden has gone into simple apps. Having worked on ultra-summarization at during my Masters at MIT, news summarization is interesting technology, but it’s not at the stage of maturity that’s truly revolutionary. In fact, here’s an app similar to Summly built by a 15 year old who I have been in touch with. In fact, Google and Yahoo could have developed similar technologies themselves with their deep pockets and talent pools. Instead, they raced to buy instead of build, because they saw something worth moving on quickly.

Rise of Mobile News Consumption

Content consumption, particularly news consumption, continues to dramatically shift from desktops to mobile devices with limited screen real estate. According the Pew Journalism Lab, as of October 2012, news consumption on mobile devices is the second most popular activity after email with 62% of American adults reading news on such devices weekly. The report also noted that 50% of American adults owned either a tablet or smartphone. In the past 6 months, we can only expect that these numbers have significantly increased.

News consumption on mobile devices is quite different than desktops in a number of ways:

• Less room for exploration. On desktops, you can afford to open multiple tabs, go from site to site, and discover content on your own. In mobile devices which lack tabbing, and multiple monitors, this is extremely difficult. Content has to be intelligently discovered and presented to you by the app instead within a single window.

• Less time (and patience) for consumption. While it’s possible to easily consume long form content on desktops and tablets, and even books on e-readers such as Kindles and Nooks, it’s frustrating to reader anything longer than single page on on a mobile device. Furthermore, most people use mobile devices in a transient time-strapped situation where they don’t have the time to consume large amounts of content. On mobile interfaces, content has to be presented succinctly in short-form.

• Consumption centric, not manipulation centric. Mobile (and tablet) news consumption is highly effective for consumption of content, not the editing and manipulation of content. On desktop interfaces, it’s not too difficult to copy and paste a feed URL into a feed reader. On mobile and tablet devices, this is nerve wracking at the least. On mobile devices, sourcing of content has to be more like a consuming experience and less like a editing experience. At most, a mobile user can like and tap topics (not sources) they desire versus painstakingly editing and managing sources.

In the context of the new model of news consumption the race to build a compelling mobile news experience by Yahoo and Google is not surprising. After all, both of them own two of the most popular news sites online.

Marketers need to pay Attention

These days marketers are increasingly playing the role of trade publications for their respective industries through news blogs, and content curation. In the medium term, marketers may be impacted by these acquisitions and may need to start considering the implications now. Those who are slow to change, may get left behind. Here’s a few areas to watch for:

• Content consumption destinations are moving to apps. Google, Yahoo and LinkedIn are aggressively working towards taking ownership of the content consumption experience within their own proprietary applications. We have already seen many users flock away from browser based experiences to consuming content within apps such as Flipboard. While custom microsites and blogs maintained by marketing have a role, we will likely see Google, Yahoo and LinkedIn continue to make attempts at encouraging content creators to host, publish and syndicate their content within their own ecosystems instead of outside of it.

• Summarization is key. While Google and Yahoo continue to toy around with summarization technology, it’s important for marketers to succinctly summarize content they curate and publish for mobile audiences who do not have the time, patience or real estate to consume medium or long form content in a single sitting.

• Think about topics and less about feeds. Traditionally the content consumer has been responsible for hand selecting which feeds, sites and newsletters they would like to follow. Apps like Wavii instead encourage users to think about the world in terms of topics which may comprise of content from multiple feeds, sites and sources. Marketers should embrace this model by moving away from solely publishing from a single source (their own blog) to curating content from many sources that all pertain to a single topic.

Lastly it’s interesting to see how this all plays into Google’s decision to kill Google Reader. While there are many contenders for alternatives, the recent acquisition of Wavii may hint at some grander plan of Google’s.

Test and Learn: Find the right combination for your business
Like the majority of marketing initiatives, finding the right mix of subject and frequency involves testing. A great way to start out would be to send industry-curated content to your audience on a daily basis, reaching out to them with a few relevant news items and links to related articles. An additional, weekly email could focus on original content about your industry that you’re publishing (along with curated content highlights). When distributing content on a monthly basis, deliver your company news, along with a round-up of the most popular content you have created throughout the previous month. You could include both curated and original content in that newsletter. In our latest ebook, The Content Curation Look Book, we highlight a number of companies who have successfully implemented curated content into their marketing strategy, including newsletters.

Frequently: Social Media
You audience can pop in and out of your social channels all day long, there may be some trends you spot depending on some of your key influencers are online but that’s probably it. The beauty to social media is that it is a consistent flow of information. Twitter, for example, is an ongoing conversation. At any time of day folks are on there tweeting and sharing. You want to ensure that your content shows up in your prospects’ content streams when they log on. Using publishing software like TweetDeck, Hootsuite or Buffer will help you get organized and schedule your tweets throughout the day or week.

The schedule is important but the content behind the tweet or post is also important as well. When planning your tweets, a good rule of thumb is to have about 10 percent focused on your brands marketing message. Tweeting about your brand with news about your organization is a no-brainer, but why not share a tidbit from a thought leader in your industry? Did you read a great article in the news the other day that talked about your industry? Reported by Convince and Convert Blog, posts that link to third-party sites on average generate 33 percent more clicks than posts linking to owned sites. As with any type of content sharing or curated content, remember attribution can be your best friend. Popping in an @ with the authors handle is a nice shout-out and can get you a retweet a time or two as well.

Weekly (at least): Blog Posts
When planning your original creation needs, keep in mind the following statistics, on average, 87 percent of curated content is from third-party sources, while 13 percent is original content. This data is based on over 1million articles we reviewed in the 2012 Curation Habits (report we published earlier this year).

Knowing good blog content takes time and energy to create, think about re-purposing content you already have. Is there a webinar you conducted a few months ago? Revisit the presentation and pull a few key points to write up and share with the reading audience. Alerting your audience to your new content is the best way to build your readership. After you’ve met your goals for readership and visitors, then you can dedicate more time to posting more frequently.

Ask Your Audience: Email Newsletters
We forget sometimes that the answers can be right under our noses, your own customers and reading audience. Reaching out and asking when they prefer to get their information can get two steps ahead. A great way to gather this information simply and easily is to send your subscribers a quick survey via email, asking them what information they are looking for, and how often they would prefer to hear from you.

To find fresh, relevant content, sign-up for a demo of Curata and learn how curated content can help feed that content need.

As a result, many marketers are turning toward content curation, the practice of finding, organizing, and sharing the best and most relevant content on a specific topic, rather than solely creating all their content themselves. In the past few years, there has been a lot of chatter about content curation, and its applications in content marketing. Yet, despite all the buzz, it’s hard to visualize and understand the best practices for brands that are looking to implement the technique.

Successful examples of content curation

Earlier this month, my company, Curata, released a Content Curation Look Book full of visually compelling, real-world examples of content curation at work. Here’s a quick overview of some of the more interesting applications we’ve found, along with some takeaways that you can use to begin curating content for your brands.

FedEx

Tip: Curation can add credibility to your corporation’s perspective on an issue by demonstrating that others who have no vested interest in your company still share your views. With curation, you are not republishing the content; rather, you’re providing additional sources and commentary on why these other publishers are in agreement with your position.

A few years ago, FedEx established a site called Brown Bailout to advocate against the granting of bailout funds through the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill that was making its way through Congress. During the economic downturn, FedEx competitor UPS was lobbying to get this bill passed.

Rather than creating all its own original content espousing its objections to the bailout, FedEx systematically curated news content from prestigious media publications like The Washington Times and The National Review that agreed with its perspective, which ultimately added more credibility to its position. The website includes editorial content that provides perspective and clarity around some of the concerns regarding the policy. Along with the original content located in the blog, the website captures the flow of information across publications around the topic at hand to provide additional support and perspective to the issue. This type of curation not only provides additional credibility to the political position but also creates a destination for news associated with the topic.

Intel

Tip: Curation responsibilities do not have to solely fall on your content or marketing teams. In fact, crowdsourcing curation can make content marketing more inclusive, participatory, and yield better, more interesting products.

As a branding initiative, earlier this year, Intel launched a digital magazine called iQ (formerly featured here on CMI). Intel employs an intelligent algorithm that is used in a process that collectively crowdsourced (meaning the content was created by a crowd of employees, tagged with a hashtag, and then picked up by the algorithm created by Intel) the curated content — with the help of Intel employees.

Intel’s process scours myriad social channels, delivering the content it discovers to the attention of the site’s editorial staff, which collectively decides what should be featured on the site. The whole process surfaces up content through several layers of filtering — based on freshness, relevancy, shares, clicks, employee interaction, and uniqueness — in order to present content that is grabbing attention across the social web. Lastly, it’s presented in a colorful, mesmerizing touch-optimized interface that allows readers to quickly browse content by category, or view a river of upcoming content.

The Color Association of the United States

Tip: You don’t have to limit curation to just text content. If your audience responds to other forms of media such as images, videos or audio, consider curating that as well.

The Color Association of the United States caters to anyone interested in color, such as colorists, designers, marketers, and product developers who are interfacing with color, as well as other individuals who want to stay current on technology, news, and their competition as it relates to color. CAUSnow’s mission is to discuss current color trends and be known as the destination for color resources. The content curated on this site can be a broad range, but has to include an image with a prominent color theme or use. With a broad audience, The Color Association’s site, CAUSnow, focuses on cutting through the online color clutter, providing a one-stop shop of color-related content — particularly compelling visual images, which can “support making color-conscious decisions.” Through the use of curated content, the Color Association can stay on top of the latest trends.

The Oregon Wine Board

Tip: There is an opportunity for curation for every imaginable topic — even a somewhat obscure interest like enthusiasts of wine made in Oregon. If there’s no single, authoritative destination for your market, it may be a topic that’s ripe for curation (pun intended).

Some sites just need to be savored. The Oregon Wine Board was looking for a way to regularly engage with local wineries and industry professionals through content. By curating content focused on the local wine scene, the Oregon Wine Board was able to build a robust daily newsletter for its members that features articles on everything from tasting events to the region’s wine growing history. The Oregon Wine Board’s mission is to provide their reading audience with industry news related to the burgeoning wine scene in Oregon — they are and will continue to be the premier destination for all things Oregon-wine related. The daily dose keeps readers coming back to drink in more every day, according to Oregon Wine Board Director of Communications, Charles Humble: “Since launching our Oregon Wine Newsroom, we are regularly syndicated by Google as a trusted news source. We have a small staff, and this is something we could never have accomplished without curation. Our members are thrilled with the results.”

These four case studies are some of the many successful examples of content curation. By having content curation involved in your company’s overall marketing plan, your company can save time, money and resources. Without it, your company’s content marketers will be suffering from burnout. Content curation is the only way to go.

Content curation as defined by Rohit Bhargava, is someone “who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online.” Creating original content to fill those programs can be expensive and time consuming but does content curation really work? Here are 5 examples of companies who have and are successfully curating content.

Openview Labs

The OpenView Labs site was created to provide content to growing companies, giving them insight into all areas of growing a business from trusted professionals. The curated content is handpicked by people who have experience and know what works when building a vision. Focused on providing thought leadership on all topics from lead generation to recruiting and Scrum development, OpenView Partners, backed by OpenView Ventures (a venture capitalist firm) has positioned its site as a go-to resource for the entrepreneur. The site’s look and feel helps elevate the firm’s status as a resource of industry influencers.

Everything Tile and Stone

East Coast Tile has created the destination for all things tile and stone, providing its audience with the latest and greatest tools and trends in the tile industry. A consistent flow of fresh content keeps the audience engaged, keeps the company’s distribution channels full of new content, and keeps sites visitors coming back regularly. Everything Tile and Stone has become a news hub for our audience. Prospects looking for tile inspiration regularly come back to see what’s new. This ultimately leads them to East Coast Tile to make their final tile purchase.

United Nations

The UN is one of many organizations using content curation, to better connect with its audience. The UN website features three channels (or stories) covering everything ranging from people on location at the UN Tweeting photos and their thoughts, to events like RIO+20, and stories on human rights questions. The ability to browse through stories and easily comment or repost them is key since the primary mission of the UN is to get the message out.

Oregon Wine Board

Some sites just need to be savored. The Oregon Wine Board was looking for a way to regularly engage with local wineries and industry professionals through content. Curating content focused on the local wine scene, the Oregon Wine Board is able to build a robust daily newsletter for its members featuring articles on everything from tasting events to growing history. The daily dose keeps readers coming back to drink in more every day. “In the first week of launching, we curated two articles in the newsroom that were immediately syndicated and picked up by Google as a news source.”

These examples and more can be found in Curata’s latest eBook, The Content Curation Look Book 2013, with a foreword by Rohit Bhargava.

Increasingly, content marketers are employing content curation, the process of finding, organizing and sharing third-party content, as a part of their content marketing efforts. Earlier this year, my company released a survey with over 400 marketers where we found that 95 percent of marketers these days report that they are curating content in some shape or form.

It makes sense that marketers are adding content curation to the content marketing mix. After all, the Content Marketing Institute’s own 2013 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks report found that 64 percent of marketers reported that producing enough content was their greatest challenge.

After you pick a topic to produce content around, one of the most common questions about getting started with content curation is where do you get your content? After all, your curation efforts can only be as good as the source of your content.

Here are 14 third-party sources to consider if you are planing to curate content:

1. News feeds: RSS feeds are one of the primary ways to receive targeted content from a specific publication. If you find that a publication is too broad, then you may be able to find a feed for a particular category or section.

For example, the New York Times covers a wide variety of subjects, which are likely too broad for your needs. However, the Times also has hundreds of specific topic pages on countries, organizations, people, and subjects. You can always sign up for a feed to receive content on just your topics of interest. Similarly for most blogging systems, such as WordPress, each category usually has its own RSS feed containing only the content within that category.

2. Social media: Using social media channels like Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and Facebook is a great way to discover content from unknown sources — sometimes before anyone else does. Rather than looking for social media posts themselves, the more interesting content often lies within the content linked from the social media post.

For example, in HootSuite, you can subscribe to a Twitter search for a keyword of interest. Instead of paying attention to the tweets in your stream, keep an eye on articles, videos, and images that are linked from the tweets to uncover breaking content. Often you will find content before Google is able to even index it.

3. Archive databases: There are numerous online databases (depending on your topic area and industry) that warehouse archival content that you can leverage. For example, PubMed, run by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has a large index of medical research literature; Cornell University Library’s arXiv.org is a database of non-peer reviewed research papers from a wide variety of science domains; and the U.S. Patent Office’s website contains a large historical archive of patents. If your audience is technical in nature, you may find value in sourcing historical and current content from such sources.

4. Google Alerts: The catch-all method of finding content online is by using Google Alerts. Though traditionally Google Alerts has been delivered through email only, you can now receive these alerts in an RSS feed that can be consumed in a feed reader. While the volume of content from Google Alerts may be overwhelming, you can always filter down your searches using special modifiers such as “site” to restrict your search to a specific site, or “filetype” to restrict your search to a specific file type, such as PDFs.

5. Google Blog Search: While subscribing to feeds from specific blogs is useful, there will always be interesting content published on blogs you may never have heard of. A specific catch-all way of sourcing content by keywords over the blogosphere is through Google Blog Search. Similar to Google Alerts, this content can be delivered through an RSS feed, which can then be consumed in a feed reader. Another alternative blog search engine worth trying is Ice Rocket. Ice Rocket allows you to target your search based on channel; for example, you can search for content on just Twitter or just Facebook. Another unique feature is the ability to search for “big buzz” content — content that is hot right now.

6. Google News: Similar to Google Blog Search, Google News is a good way to source content from thousands of news outlets. Though the line between a blog and news outlet is blurring these days, all sources on Google News are manually vetted by Google, so you are ensured to receive content from a reputable, non-splog (spam-blog) source.

7. AllTop: A few years ago, former Apple Chief Evangelist, Guy Kawasaki, started a site called AllTop, which consists of a directory of pages that displays walls of curated feeds on hundreds of subtopics. To bootstrap your sourcing process, find a page on AllTop that relates to your topic, find the feeds for each source listed on that page, and add them to your feed reader. To accelerate the process, there are browser plugins that will create OPML files from AllTop pages that you can directly import into a feed reader.

8. Crowdsourcing: Aside from different sites and search engines, you can easily source content from within your organization through crowdsourcing. Earlier this year, Intel launched a curated site that contains content that is crowdsourced from its employees via Twitter.

Here are two quick ways facilitate this:

• Option 1: Set up an email alias (such as content@yourcompany.com) and instruct your coworkers to email any interesting articles they find to that alias.
• Option 2: Create a Twitter list of all your trusted workers, then ask them to tweet interesting content they find, along with a specific pre-designated hashtag to help you track the conversation.

On a regular basis, monitor the content that is submitted from your colleagues either in your inbox for the first option, or in your social media tool for option 2, and decide what you want to curate and publish from there.

9. Socially curated sites: Crowdsourcing can extend beyond the walls of your own organization. There are many socially curated sites where thousands of users are constantly finding and sharing interesting content on a specific topic. You can tap into that collective knowledge by finding the right subtopics on such sites and cherry-picking the best content from there.

For example, reddit.com is split into “sub-reddits” designated by an “/r/” in the URL. Find the /r/ that is the most relevant to your topic, and regularly review the best content from there. Similarly, on social bookmarking sites like delicio.us, you can subscribe to feeds for specific tags with which users label their content.

10. Email newsletters: You can also subscribe to email newsletters that cover your industry. IAB’s SmartBrief and FierceMarkets provide industry specific roundup newsletters on a regular basis, and are a good starting point.

11. Forums: Not all of your content has to be articles from sites, blogs, journals, or newsletters. Often there is a lot of interesting content that is surfaced up in forms such as Quora and Google Groups that may be worth curating.

12. Multimedia: Increasingly, curators are incorporating multimedia content in their curation efforts. For video content, you can subscribe to channels in YouTube, or subscribe to feeds from there in an RSS reader. For images, try sourcing content from image repositories, such as Flickr, or Instagram.

13. Feed readers: You may already be sourcing sufficient content in a feed reader, such as Google Reader. Within Google Reader you can also search for additional feeds to follow. This allows you to discover additional content sources you may know about or find other popular terms for the content you’re looking for. Google reader is not only a feed reader; it’s also a recommendation tool for additional content.

14. Your public relations (PR) team: Lastly, unlike the sources above, which are online, there are offline sources that can be useful when curating content. For example, it’s likely that your PR team is performing media monitoring on your behalf, scouring the web every day for discussions about your company, competitors, and overall market. As a curator, you will likely be sourcing content from the same places they are. Ask them for a list of keywords and publications they are researching, and add them to your own list of potential sources of content.

That’s a quick list of some of the best places I have seen curators use to source content. Once you have identified the resources you want to use, the next step is to review the content you find through these sources on a routine basis. You can individually monitor each channel in its own respective environment (e.g., Google Reader for feeds, TweetDeck for tweets, your inbox for email newsletters, etc.) and individually contextualize and share anything worthy with your audience. Or, to make these efforts less cumbersome, you can use specialized content curation tools to bring it all into one place in an easy work flow.

Looking for more guidance on managing content curation or other content marketing processes? Read CMI Books’ “Managing Content Marketing” by Robert Rose and Joe Pulizzi.

Content marketing is the leading marketing strategy. 87% of B2B marketers are using content marketing, outpacing all other marketing strategies including Search Engine Marketing (67%), Events (62%), Publication Relations (56%), and Print/Radio/TV (26%). This closely parallels Content Marketing Institute’s and MarketingProfs’ own 2013 B2B Content Marketing Report where they reported that 91% of B2B Marketers use content marketing. The difference may be explained by the fact that the CMI report includes events, and certain print publications as forms of content marketing, which are not included in our definition of content marketing.

Content marketing is growing as a strategy, while all other forms are on the decline. The adoption of content marketing has increased from 82% of marketers last year to 87% this year.  All other marketing strategies have seen a decline in adoption since last year.

Limited resources continues to be the biggest content marketing challenge. The three biggest challenges marketers cite are limited budget (27%), limited staff (25%), and generating new content (21%). Again this align’s with CMI’s 2013 B2B Marketing report where many of the the top content marketing challenges were content production and resource issues: Producing enough content (29%), Product content that engages (18%), Lack of Budget (14%).

Content Curation is a relatively new but increasingly adopted content marketing approach. B2B marketers are increasingly turning to content curation to help drive their content marketing strategy, as it enables them to accomplish their goals while addressing limited resource challenges. 57% of respondents are currently using content curation.  Although content curation has been adopted by most, it is still in its early stages. 34%of marketers have been curating for less than six months.

This is just a snapshot of a few of the insights revealed in the report.  For pages more of additional analysis, and graphs, download the full Curata B2B Marketing Trends Survey Report 2012 here.

Why organization is important

As more marketers publish more content, organization plays a greater role. Let’s say you curate 10 pieces of content a day. In a year, you may easily publish more than 3,000 pieces of content. Now that you have such a large volume of content, you can surface up that content to your readers in interesting ways, through intelligent organization.

Let’s take a look at a few outstanding ways that marketers are organizing their content online, with real world examples of what it looks like.

1. Tagging

Tags are a common way to create a simple, non-hierarchical taxonomy of your content. Tags are simply keywords and phrases that are associated with each piece of content. For a single piece of content, they let the audience quickly understand the important concepts captured in the content. In aggregate, they provide a powerful way to spot recent trends by viewing the most popular tags.

Below is an example of a tag cloud from MarketComPR’s blog that shows that Marketcom and communications are the two most popular topics on the site in the past week. The audience can then quickly click on a tag to drill down and discover more content associated with that tag:

2. Grouping

Grouping your related content together serves two purposes: First, it helps reduce screen clutter by bringing together similar content. Secondly, grouping helps allows readers to quickly other perspectives about the same issue.

One example of well-organized content that leverages grouping is on Google News. For example, in the image below we can see how Bain Capital is portrayed by Fox News, Huffington Post, and other publications all in a single view.

3. Recommendations

A great way to get people to consume additional content is to offer recommendations based on their previous content consumption patterns. Companies like Netflix and Amazon employ sophisticated collaborative filtering algorithms that deliver personalized recommendations to every user.

In the screenshot below, Netflix recommends that I may like “King of the Hill” based on my interest in several “Futurama” movies.

As a marketer, there are two approaches you can take to provide similar recommendations. The first is to use readily available marketing products, such as Curata (disclosure: Curata is my company’s product) or plug-ins like AdKnowledge that can analyze thousands of documents on your blog or that you have curated or written in the past, and use an algorithm to offer recommendations.

A simpler (but less reliable) approach that you can use if you only have a limited number of content offierings is to monitor content consumption patterns and hard code your recommendations. For example, when you download an eBook from my company’s site, based on our analysis of consumption patterns, you then are presented with the following suggestions to encourage further engagement:

4. Facets

Another technique to better organize content that is commonly employed on eCommerce sites is to provide a faceted navigation that lets readers quickly drill down to just the content in which they are interested.

In the screenshot above, found on newegg.com, you can drill into Electronics > TVs > LCD and continue to drill down by size, price, manufacturer, and so forth.

Similarly, you can use this technique on your own content repository. For example, Verne Global, a customer of ours that curates content on data centers, provides a drill down of organizations found in the news, as seen below. Simply clicking into one of these names leads you to more content about that organization.

5. Trend histograms

Google Trends displays trend histograms with illustrates the search volume and news reference volume of existing content over time.

In addition, it has special algorithms that highlight salient stories that pertain to specific topics. For example, the search volume for “Obama” is shown below, with letters that represent key events, such as his election in 2008.

Highlighting trends through histograms is an easy way to capture a growing phenomenon within the content you have published. It also surfaces up older content, helping readers to quickly rediscover your evergreen material.

6. Topic pages

Topic pages are emerging as an easy way to organize your content by the topics that you have written about. Earlier last month, ReadWriteWeb called Topic Pages the “next big thing”.

Sites like Quora, Pinterest, and the New York Times are built on topic pages, to name just a few examples. With topic pages, readers can quickly view all the content pertaining to a specific topic on a single page. In addition, topic pages are great for long-tail search engine optimization.

As a quick example, the Western Massachusetts Economic Development Council offers topic pages on its curated site, so visitors can quickly view content on any business leader and read their biographies.

7. Topic maps

A fun way to visually organize your content is through topic maps. In the screenshot from Silobreaker below, you can see how content is organized around the topic of fuels cells, which allows viewers to quickly navigate to related concepts and content.

Though there are not many marketing use cases of topic maps, they are a fun way to keep your audience engaged with your content.

The bottom line

As content marketing — and content curation — continues to grow, marketers will be publishing more and more content on behalf of their organizations.

Content curation is a three-part process of finding relevant content, organizing it, and sharing it to a broader audience. Often, most of the emphasis is placed on finding or sharing interesting content, and the organization aspect gets neglected.

However, when done correctly, smart organization strategies can help you get more mileage out of your content, and help you engage and inform your audience more successfully.

Want more content marketing inspiration? Download our ultimate eBook with 100 content marketing examples.

Below are 10 easy and actionable ways to keep your beast fed:

1. Content compilations

Content doesn’t need to be all written words. Try creating a blog post that tells a story through images or cartoons or tweets.

With the constant flow of content out there, take your idea and tell your story through curated images (always ensuring you are providing clear and accurate attribution to the original source of the images). Products like Storify allow you to compile images and tweets to tell your story. For example, as there is a lot of buzz about the 2012 Olympics, this quick blog post discusses the opening ceremonies and the current process host city London is going through to get ready for opening day. The post includes content curated from a variety of sources, including Twitter and online news sites, and provides an overview of what people are talking about regarding the Olympic opening ceremony. With the ability to compile content from more than one outlet, you can create a more robust and dynamic story about your chosen topic.

2. Tweetable facts

A new trick for creating fresh blog posts while giving them legs to go viral is to post interesting facts on your blog that your readers can easily tweet.

For example, you can take statistics from an industry survey and repurpose them into a blog post. You can then create a list of bite-sized, hyperlinked facts from the survey. This can be done using a resource like Clicktotweet. When you post content, ask readers to retweet about their favorite fact. When a user clicks on any of the facts, it opens up a pre-filled tweet and a link back to the blog post. By doing so, you instantly can convert readers of your blog post into viral promoters of your content.

A few months ago, Curata released a B2B Content Marketing Trends survey. We then summarized the data in a blog post, including interesting findings from the survey that readers could tweet and share — all with a link back to our content.

3. Curated content

The content beast doesn’t just feed on original content. He’s an omnivore, and feeding him curated content in addition to your original posts will provide a more balanced diet.

For starters, you can simply tweet links to third-party content you like, or write a small excerpt to a blog post you like and add your own commentary. Keep in mind that you should always curate ethically by linking back to the original source, and you should never share the full text of the original content without permission from the author — part of the benefit of curating content is creating links and connections to relevant content on your topic, in turn allowing the author to provide you with the same benefit for your original content.

4. Ask the audience

Another easy way to create great content is to conduct a poll or give your readers a question to answer. Basically, you author a blog post talking about a controversial topic, and ask your readers for their responses. Not only does this drive greater engagement, but you also get two pieces of content from it — after you receive responses, you can then take the results and craft another blog post about your overall findings.

As an example, Boston.com created a short blog post with a poll question on injuries related to wearing headphones while walking around. They then asked if their readers would decrease the volume of their headphones when outside, prompting the audience to respond.

5. Don’t make one person carry the load

You don’t have to create all of your content yourself — you can solicit content from other sources.

There are two main ways to go about this: First is to ask others to contribute to your content initiatives. Reach out to those within your organization and ask for their unique perspective on a topic. Providing a framework for the content makes the process easier for those who may not be used to it. If they are not the best writers, ask them for simple bullet points, and then flesh out the content on their behalf.

The second way is to look outside your organization for help and outsource your efforts through various content creation services.

An easy way to create content with minimal effort is to publish guest posts. In order to do so, you can invite an expert in your topic area to create a short blog post. Many people are willing to provide content as a guest blogger because it exposes them to a new audience and gives them an opportunity to back-link to their own sites. In turn, you benefit by getting free content without having to create it yourself and by associating your company’s brand with another prominent influencer in your space.

Reaching out to someone within your industry who you perceive as an expert will also provide you with an opportunity to connect and align your brands. It’s an easy win-win, and there is no reason not to do it.

6. Reuse the best of your existing content

Repurposing content is an increasingly common strategy for being more productive at content creation. If you create a 20-page eBook, you can chop that up into 20 blog posts. The opposite process works as well: you can combine 20 blog posts to create a compelling eBook. In fact, some companies and bloggers have created entire print books simply by repurposing a year’s worth of regular blog posts.

7. Interview an expert

Another trick to produce content quickly is to post an interview with an industry expert. In order to do so, you simply email a willing interviewee a short set of questions for them to answer and return to you. After a little editorial cleanup, you can post the resulting interview on your blog. Again, this does not require you to create much original content (aside from the interview questions) and provides a fresh perspective to your audience.

8. Recap a relevant event

Following a trade show or webinar that you’ve attended, it takes only a few minutes to build a coherent summary from the content that others have already shared. You can do this by manually stitching blog posts and articles together with tweets, photos, or videos.

As an example, following a webinar I did with Lee Odden, I quickly created a webinar recap post from the tweets of attendees. Similarly, following last year’s Content Marketing World conference, I created a blog post of various speakers who talked about curation.

These are just a few quick ideas; but my company, Curata, recently released an eBook “How to Feed the Content Beast (without getting eaten alive)” that is full of tips and tricks to feed your content beast. It also has a foreword by Ann Handley, the Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs and author of “Content Rules”. You can download it here.

Want more content marketing inspiration? Download our ultimate eBook with 100 content marketing examples.

To offer relief to this monstrous dilemma, my company, Curata, has recently published an eBook, “How to Feed the Contest Beast (Without Getting Eaten Alive).”  The eBook addresses how marketers can provide a balanced diet to the “content beast” by feeding it the right amount of original, unique content blended with existing, third-party content.

A key takeaway from the eBook is that it’s important to offer a combination of created and curated content.  Although the content beast might want a diet of one hundred percent original, created content, it wouldn’t be the healthiest option – for the beast or for the content marketer. Mixing in curated content to the menu saves the marketer from burn out and provides the beast with a much more balanced diet.

To help marketers get cooking on the creation-curation “sandwich,” our eBook offers tips to keep in mind when both creating and curating content. Some tips for creating include:

1. The audience should always be top of mind: They want to know what’s in it for them
2. Think about what type of persona you want to project: Find the style that fits your brand essence and then deliver it consistently
3. Deliver content that is clear, helpful and engaging: Strong headlines are key to staying organized

When curating, some of these tips include:

1. Be strategic about topic selection: Build content around what the audience needs and the desired brand voice
2. Keep sources varied: Exposure to a broad variety of voices, ideas, and information is key to a strong curation strategy
3. Be selective: Act as a filter for the audience to share the top content

For 34 pages of detailed creation and curation tips, download the full eBook here.

And so the “Sh*t Content Marketers Say” video came to be.  Drawing on comments and conversations frequently overheard at our own office (we all curate content) and repeatedly from our clients, we identified regular concerns to show that everyone has similar content marketing problems, whether it’s generating leads on a limited budget, finding someone to blog, or desperately needing an intern.  Is there anything we missed?  Let us know- we’d love to hear your feedback. Thank you and enjoy!

If 2011 was the year that content marketing caught on – 2012 will be the year that marketers take it to the next level.  More and more marketing programs will not only include content marketing but rely heavily on it to increase leads, generate brand awareness and achieve thought leadership initiatives.  In fact, as you may have seen in a previous article of mine – the 2011 B2B Marketing Trends Survey Report our company, HiveFire, provider of content curation technology Curata, conducted found that twice as many B2B marketers now employ content marketing as they do print, TV and radio advertising.

Content pros that kick off the year right will focus on telling a story, utilizing social channels and participating in industry conversations. For those still shaping up their plan, consider how to implement these hot trends for content marketing in 2012:

Telling a story with your brand

Gone are the days of simply repurposing marketing materials to push content out to potential customers and website visitors.  Companies who connect their brand to relevant current events and industry trends will become seen as thought leaders by their audience keeping them engaged and coming back for more.

Leveraging social channels to improve your SEO

It is no surprise that social media is going to continue growing in the new year.  What will be interesting to see, however, is the role social channels will now have in SEO.  The more marketers integrate their content marketing across multiple channels and increase their “social media footprint,” the better their search results will be. Several technologies and tools exists that aid marketers in this integration and the marketers who figure out how to effectively utilize these will have a leg up on their competitors.

Having conversations with your competitors, your customers and industry luminaries

Brands that position themselves as trusted resources in their space will likely be successful in the new year.  The best way for marketers to achieve that position will be by breaking through the barriers of communications with their competitors, customers and fellow industry thought leaders.  It is vital to position your site as a “go-to” resource for your audience.

Content curation – the process of finding, organizing and sharing content online, is one way that marketers are taking on these goals in the new year.  This process allows marketers to ensure the content they provide their audience is relevant, timely and integrated with social channels.  By curating content of industry leaders, competitors and even customers, marketers can take the next step from being simply a content marketer to being a specialized content marketer in 2012.

The verdict is in: content marketing wins

Eighty two percent of B2B marketers reported using content marketing – the creation and publication of original content, such as blog posts, photos, videos, website resource pages, case studies and white papers to enhance brand’s visibility – in their marketing strategies.  This outpaced search marketing, events, public relations and print, TV and radio ads.   Content marketing is becoming the best way to reach buyers in their decision process, a trend that has been surfacing for quite a while now.   Since most of these conversations are happening real time on the web, it’s no surprise then that 79 percent of marketers share the majority of their content online.

Budgets are low and content marketing is affordable

Perhaps another reason that content marketing is winning the race is because marketers do not need to invest a lot to get a lot in return.  The top two objectives of content marketing programs are to engage customers and prospects (82 percent) and drive sales (55 percent). Content marketing helps marketers achieve these goals but with a small portion of their budget.  In fact, half of content marketers dedicate less than 30 percent of their budgets to content marketing.

Popularity of content marketing provides opportunity for content curation

With so many companies turning to content marketing, it is a bigger challenge than ever to generate interesting, relevant content in a timely manner. This is perhaps why many marketers are going a step further to not only produce original content but also curate relevant third party content to provide their audience with a one-stop site that finds, organizes and shares the information they want to know.  Fifty six percent of B2B marketers said they use content curation in their marketing strategies.   This number is up 17 percent from just six months ago, when HiveFire conducted its Content Curation Adoption Survey 2011.   And it works!  74 percent of curators say that their programs are successful.

What does this mean for the 2012 marketing plan? 

The challenge for marketing in 2012 is going to be maintaining a voice in the ever-growing sea of online content.  Content curation can pave the way to becoming known as a trusted source and industry thought leader.  If you’re new to content curating and are still on the fence about it, check out our new eBook, “The Open and Shut Case for Content Curation,” to learn why it could be right for you.

Download the entire survey report here: http://www.getcurata.com/content_curation_adoption_survey_report.html

I rarely buy these magazines, but I’m always amused and a little intrigued by the premise: the answers always promise to unlock some kind of information that will improve the quiz-taker’s life. This got me thinking: why don’t quizzes like these exist to help people do better in business?

Then it hit me. I love working with busy marketers who are using content curation—the process of finding, organizing and sharing online content—to streamline their content marketing efforts while still building brand awareness, establishing thought leadership and boosting SEO. If there was a quiz marketers could take to determine what kind of content curator they are, they’d be able to make their curation process even more efficient by doing it in a way that matches their work style.

So, here’s your chance to figure it out: What’s your content curator type?  Be sure to write down your answers to check your “type” at the end of the quiz.

1. How much time do you spend curating content on a daily basis?

A.  A lot of time – however long it takes to get the job done, really

B.  About 20 minutes a day – rarely more, rarely less

C.  Until something else comes up—it’s always the first part of my morning routine

D.  I’m not sure – I’m too focused on finding the right material to worry about how long it’s   taking me

E.  My friends, followers and fans do most of the curating—I share whatever they send me and find interesting

F.  I don’t actually do the curation – someone on the team I lead does it

2. What kind of content do you typically curate?

A.  Research reports, survey findings and in-depth features

B.  Short and to-the-point stories my readers can easily draw salient messages from

C.  Whatever is typically in a print publication, with a mix of different coverage areas and types

D.  A mix of text, videos and photos

E.  Anything from social and user-generated channels, such as YouTube

F.  Material that directly relates directly to my business only

3. What kind of original content do you usually use to augment third-party material?

A.  In-depth pieces with a lot of interviews and outside research

B.  Anything than can be developed and approved quickly and easily

C.  I focus primarily on curated content – original material is less critical

D.  Anything and everything – I find original content to be a really important part of my curation

E.  User comments and posts inspired by my audience’s response to curated content

F.  Opinioned, persuasive analysis of industry topics and trends

4. Through what channels do your share your content?

A.  All channels—as long as word gets out, I’m happy

B.  It depends—I adjust my distribution depending on what my analytics find in a given period

C.  A template website with all the functionality, but none of the new “bells and whistles”A basic website

D.  An intricately designed microsite that appeals to and will attract today’s internet-savvy audience

E.  Social media, like LinkedIn and Facebook

F.  Blogs and sites designed around a theme or topic, rather than my company’s branded pages

To determine your type, figure out which letter you answered most of, then look below. If you answered:

Mostly As

You’re investigative—a deep thinker. You spend a lot of time reviewing and determining which curated content to share and your original content reflects the same thoroughness. Keep an eye out for content with in-depth research and loaded with data points to quench your investigative thirst.

Mostly Bs

You’re conventional—a traditionalist. You find, organize and share content in a standard, but my no means boring way, which usually means a healthy mix of original and third party content, though a focus on the latter. To satisfy your analytical side, be sure to find a curation technology with back-end analytics offerings that enable you to see how users interact with your content. This information can be used to inform decisions about what kinds of content to post, which topics to focus on, and where to share material.

Mostly Cs

You’re realistic –a do-er that wants to be part of a team marching toward a goal. You have a straightforward, no-nonsense approach to curation that enables you to be very effective. No matter what, you probably make curation part of your every day routine, and your audience appreciates it. But stick to traditional channels—like a microsite or website feed—for sharing your content; less traditional channels that cannot be tracked or are hard to navigate will only frustrate you.

Mostly Ds

You’re Artistic – creative and imaginative. Your “out of the box” approach to curation means you often incorporate videos, photos, infographics or other graphical content on relevant topics and strive to create a visually appealing curated site that draws in audiences and supports your aesthetic. Develop regular, original content to flex your creative muscles and use your imagination.

Mostly Es

You’re social – the life of the party. You care a lot about your audience and because of that, find content on social and user-generated channels, such as YouTube or Twitter, and share it via social channels, such as LinkedIn and Facebook. To feel fulfilled, leave yourself the time to read and respond to user comments and start an active dialogue among your community.

Mostly Fs

You’re enterprising – the natural leader. Your main curation goal is to establish thought leadership and you do it with a lot of original, provocative content. Look for third-party content that has been developed by the peers and thought leaders that you respect in order to feel like you’re truly delivering value to your audiences and driving business results.