Content curation or not?

Content curation has become a very “hot” subject over the last couple of months. I remain to be convinced of the value of content curation though. In many cases content curation seems to be a way to avoid having to put a little more thought and effort into writing a proper article (or p”post”). A bit like a glorified and re-branded twitter feed.This is accentuated by the “fake curation” tools that simply creates what is supposed to look like a curated contents from an automatic feed, e.g. from a twitter stream.

In most cases I prefer when someone has taken the trouble to write a post / article and am not very interested in what someone might have “curated”. (In addition, it sounds a bit like museum pieces, doesn’t it?)

But it is very popular.

Someone who is more enthusiastic than me about content curation is Therese Torris, a long-time Lunch at the Circle participant and frequent guest and the author of the interesting blog Return on Clicks.

Therese has just written a rather substantial article on her views on contents curation: Content Curation Tools for Brands.

Here are Therese’s conclusions on the subject:

Here is what I concluded from this research:

  • Content curation does help content discovery. Curation helped me discover and share content on my favorite topics. Numerous reports show that social content curation à la Pinterest brings traffic to brand sites. Curated content embeds brand content into a rich inbound context of external content.
  • Social content curation fosters customer engagement. Consumers who curate a brand’s content not only send it traffic, they also bring to the brand and its product a much needed validation. Brands like Whole Foods that participate in social curation on Pinterest increase their customers’ engagement.
  • Corporate curation tools help create a competitive advantage. In addition to public social curation platforms, brands should use scoop.it or corporate collaborative content curation tools like Curata, CurationSoft or Zemanta to listen to their market, optimize their content and collaborate on their content strategy.
  • But content curation is no panacea for failing content creation. Curated content supplements original brand content, it cannot replace it. If a brand has no story to tell, no original content, no topics to share with its audience and no Social Media strategy, content curation will only increase the overall online noise level.

Do read the full article, on the link above. It is full of useful information!

What’s your view? Is contents curation useful or not?

L@C member H-J Jeanrond exposes "The perversions of the stock market: Posing tough challenges to SAP’s next product cycle"

L@C member Hans-Josef Jeanrond, strategic analyst and consultant, exposes the dysfunctions of financial markets being unduly focussed on short term financial results. This short-sightedness forces software companies with sometimes incompressible development cycles to make decisions that run against their best interests – and hence against the best interests of long term investors. Reconciling the different time and expectation horizons of customers, engineers and investors is a challenging task for the new company management.

Here’s the intro in French:

SAP a pu développer R/3 pendant plusieurs années et investir un montant substantiel, sans être perturbée par des analystes financiers et des investisseurs à la bourse insistant sur des gains à court terme. C’est une des raisons pour lesquelles SAP avait un produit pour les nouvelles plateformes client serveur quand aucun autre éditeur n’était à un stade comparable de maturation. Aujourd’hui, étant cotée à la bourse de New York (NYSE) et les fondateurs étant devenus minoritaires, SAP n’est plus dans une telle situation privilégiée. Deux informations apparemment anodines dans la publication de ses résultats pour le premier trimestre 2008 font apparaître la pression et les effets potentiellement néfastes des exigences de la “communauté financière” auprès de l’industrie du logiciel. R/3 : le succès d’un projet R&D de long terme, affranchi de pressions financières à court terme

Read the full article, “Les aberrations de la bourse : un défi important pour SAP et sa prochaine génération de produits”, on CIO-Online .com