Let’s face it. Creating content for blogs, eblasts, and newsletters is very time-consuming. But, with the wealth of information on the internet, you don’t have to create it all by yourself. Don’t plagiarize and submit it as if you wrote it yourself. You should always cite your sources. And actually, the more you cite sources, the more credible you, your blog, your e-blast, and your newsletter become.
Think of content curation this way. A curator of a museum is the person in charge of overseeing the art collections - how the art is presented, where it is presented, where it is stored, how it is displayed, and how it may be interpreted. A digital curator pulls information together relevant to his or her business audience and displays them across social media platforms. In a small sense, if you retweet or share a status on social media, you are curating content.
But where do you find content to curate? Here are just a few places to start.
Google Alerts
According to Google itself: Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your queries. Enter a search query you wish to monitor. You will see a preview of the type of results you'll receive. Some handy uses of Google Alerts include:
- monitoring a developing news story
- keeping current on a competitor or industry
- getting the latest on a celebrity or event
- keeping tabs on your favorite sports teams
Paper.li
Paper.li is awesome. With Paper.li, you can publish your own virtual newspaper which pulls in information from various social media platforms.
Paper.li is a content curation service that helps you find and share great content in your own visually appealing online newspaper. For example, you could decide that to include a selection of tweets you send in a newspaper. Subscribers and/or twitter users automatically get a copy of this online newspaper.
Flipboard
Flipboard is awesome as well. Millions of people use Flipboard to read and collect the news they care about, curating their favorite stories into their own magazines on any topic imaginable.
Flipboard is a social-network aggregation, magazine-format application software for Android and iOS. It collects the content of social media and other websites and presents it in magazine format and allows users to "flip" through their social-networking feeds and feeds from websites that have partnered with the company.
Want more marketing ideas from Miceli Productions?
Check out In The Studio, the Miceli Productions' blog.