Maybe you’re not a Twitter-vixen, posting 200 tweets a day about all the cool places you’ve been and all the cool things you’re doing. Maybe you’re not yet a Facebook poster with 1000 friends who all comment on your photos and posts.
Better yet, maybe you’re leading the charge at a business that has dedicated itself to becoming more ‘social’ but you just haven’t yet gained consumer traction… don’t fret. There are principles and values that social engagement and activation can provide that don’t involve your profile being highly ranked or even require you being actively engaged with your consumers.
Undoubtedly, the shift in the social technology landscape has been a less than obvious change for most enterprise businesses and has offered less than traditional–if any–means of showing value from the onset. Plainly speaking, businesses and their leaders know that social media, social business and overall social design represent bellwether changes to their competitive environment, but few understand the depth of its change. Overarching value in social design is readily apparent, but often the key elements (ecosystem, dynamic signal, metafilter and crowdsourcing — see the Dachis Group’s Social Business Design whitepaper) make its everyday application less than simple. We’re going to attempt to change that.
Let’s discuss a basic premise of social technology and communication: content curation. Curation, by definition, means:
“Curation: The act of curating, of organizing and maintaining a collection of artworks or artifacts.“
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| Originally at websuccessteam.com |
Principally, curation is the act of culling through steams of data and picking out what you like–just as a museum curator does for the art in a museum. The personal skill set and experience of the museum curator entitles them to discern from many avenues of art and only present what he/she feels is important. This action is a foundational building block of what makes social such a powerful, “by the people” medium.
In much the same way, content curation is happening at a personal level, on all social networks. Let’s use Twitter as an example: when we sign on to twitter, we are viewing our curated streams. This can be the twitter universe at-large or it could be our specified streams–either a general search term (i.e. # or hashtags) or, for the sake of this conversation, the people that we follow. Much in the same way we run our personal circles; we look to those we socialize with to offer their wisdom, experience and insight. In turn, their curated opinions affect the way we buy, think and act. Think about our neighbor telling us how fantastic his new leaf blower is to use. If we trust him, then no advertising at the store can affect how much we believe in neighbor guy’s personal testimony.
Our twitter example is exactly the same model. We might believe that @tannerbechtel is an IT genius (I sure do… =). When @tannerbechtel tells us that he used BrandX servers and they saved the mainframe when activity spiked off the chart this weekend, we believe in his word over a magazine ad in eWeek. When he retweets a news article from a source he follows, we read it and hold it in high merit. In fact, we may decide to retweet his opinion to our followers as well. We have, in a quick way, curated content to those who trust our opinions and respect our positions and viewpoints.
In a way, this has disabled the longstanding institutions of brand marketing and in many cases, news institutions as we know them. Brand perception forms around the content that we consume and the viewpoints we encounter–all powered by the curation of content from those we choose to follow. News comes to us through our network, curated for validity and accuracy. Often times, obscure news that affects our life or perception can be distributed widely across a network in real-time–something that could never have happened before content curation through the social network.
There are many elements that make up our social technology experience, but content curation serves as a foundational building block for deriving real, actionable value from the social experience.
