(Thanks to Giuseppe Mauriello for finding this deck)
Dilbert characters are talking about content curation.. Scoop.It one of the premiere content creation tools is now out beta. In my own curation of content, I’m discovering many more content curators out there. Everyone can be a content curator!
That prompted Robin Good, a master curator, to ask “How do we distinguish good curation from bad?” As someone who is leading workshops on the topic of content curation for nonprofits, this is a very important question. Robin gives us a great checklist of skills. If you follow his content curation activity, you’ll know that he practices what he preaches.
• Optimizes
• Edits
• Formats
• Selects
• Excerpts
• Writes
• Classifies
• Links
• Personalizes
• Vets
• Credits
• Filters
• Taps
• Suggests
• Searches
• Scouts
• Hacks Filters and Searches
• Is Transparent
• Recommends
• Crowdsources
One best practice of good curators that Robin identifies and that I find very useful in my own curation practice, is to have a small group of trusted curators on your topic that you follow. Both Robin Good, Giuseppe Mauriello, and Janl Gordon are two of a handful curators in my “curated circle of the wise.” Janl adds her thoughts to what makes good curation, riffing off of Robin’s post.
I think a great curator is a good listener and a keen observer who selects content that “speaks to the audience’s listening”. Paying attention to this and fine tuning your approach takes a lot of work but it’s worth it. I’m inserting a direct quote from Robin:
“One point: I believe that curators, as I see them, should rarely if ever be driven by analytics data or statistics but to their personal experience and viewpoint. Their goal is not in fact to go after the broadest and most numerous audience but have the humbleness and vision to serve a very specific need and tribe.” If you’re passionate and knowledgable about the topic you’re curating, and you are committed to serving your readers, you will be great.
I’m not sure that I agree that data or analytics are not important, but I don’t think curation decisions should be 100% powered by your gut if your curation is being done to support nonprofit goals. I feel that intelligent use of data can be used to measure one’s effectiveness. There is a distinction between being data-driven and data-informed.
Robin also defines what bad curation is or as he terms it – “shallow” where the main goal is to republish selected content with the minimum effort and time, are going to be effective only for the very short term. As soon as quality, value-creation creators start to emerge and gain authority, the gap between them and the others will be very hard to fill.
Robin curated this YouTube Video a few weeks ago on his content curation scoopit collection. In eight minutes, it explains what quality curation is. If you’re looking to improve your content curation skills, here’s my curated instructional collection.
Does your nonprofit use content curation? How?