Connor Brooke
How can you use content curation in real life? Today I’ll show you 5 examples of tools and content to curate to inspire you in your marketing.
1. An educational B2B magazine on Scoop.it:
Just Story It
Just Story It is curated by Karen Dietz, a storytelling specialist. Karen collates the best articles from across the web on her topic.
The magazine has had more than 40,000 views due to the high-quality of the content and the curation. One feature I particularly like is Karen’s introduction, where she explains her mission to curate pieces that “make a contribution to our knowledge and wisdom about stories, show us how to apply stories to growing our businesses, or give valuable how-to tips”.
She also gives a couple of essential best practices for curators –
- weed out all the junk
- write a review of each article.
This is a high-quality curation on a hot topic, and I’m sure it drives traffic to her website.
Scoop.it resources
If you’re new to Scoop.it see my earlier post.
If you want more advanced info follow Martin Smith on Scoop.it and his Scent Trail blog. Start by reading Why Scoop.it Rocks II.
2. A Pinterest board that engages community and drives traffic: Daily Grommet
Daily Grommet is “a daily product discovery site featuring unique products of great utility, style or invention that haven’t hit the bigtime yet”.
Their Pinterest board is a place for their community to pin products they’d like Daily Grommet to feature. This is an example of social curation fostering customer engagement: the community can highlight what products they want to buy, and the business gets a continuing fresh stream of product ideas. A win-win example of how smaller businesses can leverage Pinterest.
Pinterest resources
Read How 4 Small Businesses Are Winning on Pinterest
Pinterest itself has little functionality. For some advanced plug-ins see Pinterest: Why You Need These 6 Add-ons
3. Curating a theme around an intensely human story:
Facebook Stories
Facebook recently launched its curated stories site to “celebrate great user stories”. In the introduction, they say it’s “a new site dedicated to sharing the extraordinary, quirky and thought-provoking stories and ideas from the more than 950 million people around the world who make up Facebook’s community”.
Each month has a theme – August was “Remembering”. The centrepiece is a compelling human user-generated story: this time it was about a young Indian man who lost his memory through illness and used Facebook’s People You May Know feature to piece together part of his past. The main story is complemented with intelligently curated material on the same theme.
Any user can submit a story about an extraordinary way they’ve used Facebook. But if you have a human story about your business or nonprofit, you could take inspiration and create a similar curation on your own website or within a free app.
Here’s what The Verge wrote about it.
4. Curating an event with Storify:
#MyBlogGuest Twitter chat
Storify is a free app that lends itself to curating snippets from social media, particularly in chronological order.
You grab any content from social networks, like videos or tweets, using a bookmarklet, as is common with most curation apps. Add your own comments and easily embed the finished Storify wherever you like using a snippet of code. Take the tour if it’s new to you.
I’ll use one of my favourite Twitter chats as an example. The #MyBlogGuest chat takes place every Thursday. When I can’t attend live I read the Storify afterwards. Here are all #MyBlogGuest’s stories on Storify.
Most of the content is tweets and Ann Smarty, #MyBlogGuest’s founder, usually adds a summary of the chat at the beginning.
Storify is good for more than events. You can use it to curate lists of links, as communications speaker and consultant Shel Holtz does with his Social Media Research and Studies Storify.
Storify resources
News organisations are fond of using it – check out The Guardian’s social stories.
Storify’s own stories including lots of how-tos.
5. Social lists that you can embed on your website or blog: Listly
I owe the discovery of Listly to my blogger, journalist and social media specialist friend Cendrine Marrouat.
Listly “helps bloggers and publishers engage readers with continuously evolving viral lists”.
It cites a ton of advantages for bloggers. Nick Kellett, co-founder, says in an interview with Cendrine: “Listly is all about community, about connecting people with a shared passion. Listly is about people helping people curate great content. We focus on embedding live content inside your posts and on cultivating community, aggregating opinion and building engagement. Listly blends utility, fun and passion.”
Here are Cendrine’s lists on List.ly to give you an idea of how it works. I’ll be trying it out shortly so stay tuned for a review.
Listly resource
Cendrine’s interview with Nick Kellett in Digital Journal.
Are you curating using any of these apps? Do you have any challenges in curating content? Did you find this article useful or not? Tell me what you think! And if you need any more information on any aspect of curation contact me.
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Connor Brooke.
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Wow Liz! Many thanks for I ncluding me and the Just Story It Scoops in your article! I am flatted and honored. I much appreciate the shoutout. Love the rest of the post also. Enjoy the day and be well!