Content marketing is high on digital marketers’ agendas, and content marketing strategies form an important part of what we do here at 8MS. However content creation is not always easy for companies as resources are often limited and projects require the collaboration of many different teams. If content creation is difficult, content curation and repurposing techniques can come to the rescue.
Existing content can be presented in a new format, thereby adding value for the target audience. This style of curation involves finding, collecting and organising the most relevant information about a topic (often niche topics work best) and presenting it to visitors in a new way – wrapping brand personality, comments and opinions around it to establish thought leadership. The Guardian Blog hosts a great selection of content curated in this way. The second content curation approach involves creating an environment that allows customers, employees and partners to tell stories. This approach doesn’t comprise branded content as such. Instead, it enables the curation of personal stories or points of view on a selection of topics. A good example of this can be found at M&S Stories.
Original content creation is important, but often value can be driven by curating and repurposing existing content. With this in mind, we spotted a few interesting content curation stories in the news recently.
Good story
Last week, The Guardian released an app which calls for readers’ contributions in the form of videos, photos and stories. GuardianWitness is a great example of user-generated content curation allowing users to provide input and upload content around news and features. We love the idea and think it’s a great way of encouraging audience participation and engaging users.
In similar news, Newsana launched on the 9th of April. Newsana is a community-driven social news website that uses expert-driven curation to increase the quality of the site’s output. Curator-status can be achieved by invitation only and allows contributors to vote content up or down and write a pitch explaining why a particular post is interesting or significant. The site’s founders believe this curated approach to news will filter out the noise, delivering meaningful content. We look forward to seeing it excel!.
Jackanory
On the other end of the spectrum, we have seen the social blogging platform tumblr shut down its content curation experiment ‘Storyboard’. The multimedia news blog Storyboard was tumblr’s attempt at raising the quality of content available on the platform via its own editorial team. The editorial unit was tasked with curating content from within the platform and, according to CEO David Karp “telling the stories of Tumblr creators in a truly thoughtful way.” Editorial posts highlighted and promoted premium-quality contributors and aggregated popular posts. The reason for closing Storyboard appears to be connected to the platform’s profitability push. It’s sad to see a high-quality content curation experiment being decommissioned and we hope it wasn’t a short-sighted move for tumblr.