Content Curation – Simple Definitions

What in the world is ‘content curation’? And why, for example, does my spell checker stubbornly refuse to recognize the validity of the term? Well, give your spell checkers some time; eventually ‘curation’ will slide by without setting off any alarms.

For those that are involved in Content Marketing, you’ve GOT to get a grip on content Curation. For today, let’s just get some nice, simple, clear statements about what content curation is (and sometimes isn’t). From the experts, we’ve a got a few “content creation simple definitions” for you:

“Content curation is not about collecting links or being an information pack rat, it is more about putting them into a context with organization, annotation, and presentation.” – Beth Kanter.

“…a content curator continually seeks, makes sense of, and shares the best and most relevant content on a particular topic online.” – Rohit Bhargava

“At its core, content curation is like a great editor who brings his unique taste and understanding of his target audience to his selection of the best content for his readers. He provides context for the content so that it’s more than collection of information.” –Heidi Cohen

“Content curators are basically people who do the search activity for you and present the results in the form of “Ready To Eat” food packages. If you can’t become a creator, then become a curator. Content curation is about finding the most relevant content about a topic online and listing all the relevant links found on that topic after a thorough research on the web.” – Bharati Ahuja

“You’ve heard the buzz word — curation — being thrown around like it’s a gadget we all know how to work. In reality, good content curation isn’t as simple as pushing a share button. It’s actually a combination of finding great content and following some simple best practices on how to successfully share that content…. Often, people think of themselves as either creators or curators as if these two things are mutually exclusive. What a curator really should do is embrace content as both a maker and an organizer. The most successful curators include sites like The Huffington Post, that embrace the three-legged-stool philosophy of creating some content, inviting visitors to contribute some content, and gathering links and articles from the web…. Take the time to give attribution, links back, and credit.” – Steven Rosenbaum

Starting to get the idea? With a commitment to quality – actually producing an arrangement of content that HELPS your readers get the answers they’re looking for – content curation becomes a huge value-add to your blog or site. We’re all reading curated content every day; we just don’t think about it.

By the way, did you notice that this post is a curation post? Don’t you like the fact that I brought you some great descriptions and definitions into one place? Of course you did! Glad you liked it!