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Content curation

I write about strategies to turn fans into customers and customers into fans. I also share ways to use real-time strategies to spread ideas, influence minds, and build business.

Brand Journalism  |  Best Practices

An interesting aspect of the culture of sharing on social networks is that of content curation. This is the act of pointing your followers to content from other people.

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Anyone who sometimes uses Twitter to send people to an interesting blog post or news article or video that they did not create is curating content. A retweet is a form of content curation too.

Essentially the idea is that you find things that interest you and share them. If you become known as "always finding the good stuff" people will eagerly follow you even if you don't do much in the way of original content.

This human approach to content selection is very different than an algorithmic approach than used in a search engine like Google.

If you do online book or music reviews, you're curating content. When you blog about other people’s work you're curating content.

SXSW Future 15

Content curation happens offline too. At the South-by-Southwest Interactive Festival in a few weeks, I'm curating a panel discussion on social business. SXSW calls this a Future 15 because each of ten panelists gets just 15 minutes to present. I curated the ten panelists from among the thousands of panel submissions to create a unified two and a half hour session that fits together under the theme "social business".

The SAY 100

Say 100 The SAY 100, launching today from SAY Media, highlights "100 of the most interesting and influential voices online today" and is a great example of content curation. SAY Media worked with ten experts in ten categories, to discover interesting content and communities - the people that are driving discussion and influencing opinion online.

Michael Sippey, VP of Artist Development at SAY Media says: "We built Say 100 to highlight the power shift that's happening in media from brand name sites, newspapers, magazines, etc. to individual voices."

Here are a few:

Seth Godin curated the Say 100 business channel. You'll recognize some familiar voices there.

Jane Pratt curated the Style channel, and picked great people like Tavi Gevinson and Scott Schuman of The Sartorialist

Clay Shirky curated the Thought Leaders channel, and picked some big brains like danah boyd, Sady Doyle and Richard Lipton.

Tina Roth Eisenberg curated the Design channel, and picked some fantastic bloggers like Will Hudson and Daniel Howells.

This is really cool stuff because now I have a bunch of hand selected blogs that are new to me to check out.

How are you curating content as a way of building an audience?