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Beth Kanter

Beth Kanter is a consultant, author, influencer. virtual trainer & nonprofit innovator in digital transformation & workplace wellbeing.

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Content Curation: The Art and Science of Spotting Awesome

April 22, 2014 Filed Under: Content Curation

Flickr Photo by Soyignatius

Content curation – the process of finding, organizing, and  sharing topical, relevant content for your audience that supports your nonprofit’s engagement or campaign goals (or your professional learning) begins with “Spotting the Awesome.”   I love that phrase coined by my friends at Upwell.   Do you or your organization have formal guidelines for “spotting the awesome”  like Upwell (see below) or is it more of  “we know it when we see it?”
UpWell Content Curation Guidelines - The Mobilisation Lab

Effective content curation can help your nonprofit engage your audiences and help spread your organization’s content beyond current supporters because it can trigger sharing and conversation.   Content curation is not about spewing out links on Twitter or Facebook as you find them.   It is about discovering great stuff amid the noise, annotating it, organizing it, and adding your wisdom or perspective and sharing a collection of curated links in a context or time that adds value.
If you are finding yourself looking through a lot of unrelated or useless stuff or the content you are sharing is not resonating with your audience,  news discovery tools can help.   News discovery tools help you spend less time looking at a bunch of junk as master curator Robin Good points out.    Also, it lets you step away from the echo chamber and find useful and unique gems that have not been over shared all over the place.   This is what builds thought leadership and attention.
To  support your curation efforts,  you need two different tools – news discovery to help you find content and curation tools to organize and share it.  News discovery tools select and aggregate content based on keyword searches, but give a higher signal to noise ratio than general keywords searches or general news sites.   Take Crowdtangle as an example.  It is a content discovery tool that helps tune your Facebook newsfeed based on keywords.  (It is in beta now) Discovery tools help you find relevant content in your interest area.
Robin Good has assembled a curated collection of news discovery tools over at ZEEF, a curation platform.    But remember, good curation is not about the tools, but how you use them along with your curation skills.
Awesome finding is about scanning what’s happening internally and externally, what people are talking about or sharing online related to your goals (or what they should be talking about) — then decide which of those things to share and add to your curated collection.  But how do you build your  radar and hone your discovery skills?  Here’s some advice based on the content curation skills identified by Robin Good.
1.   Trusted Sources:     You will be spending half hour or more a day a personally selected circle of trusted sources in related, complementary, or similar topics.     You will need a newsreader where you organize the feeds of different blogs, websites, and resources organized by folders and topics.    You will also find sources and follow sources through social media, but be sure to keep them tuned and uncluttered and use the list features.   Depending on your niche area, you may also be following curated general news sites or a news site devoted to a specific topic area, for example business, education, technology, or more specific to your nonprofit’s program area.
It good to take the time to think thoughtfully about your sources and organize a way to follow them systematically.   It is also a good idea to take some time every few months to review and organize.     The number of feeds in your reader can grow like weeds and new sources come along that are worth following.
2.  Vet: This is the process of verifying original source for quality and integrity (by reading all of the original content) and exercising a critical role in deciding what to share or publish and what to leave out.    Part of the verification process of  reviewing similar sites or articles, reviewing expert curated lists, and using your critical thinking skills.
3.  Filter: Most of the time you spend “spotting the awesome” will be vetting and filtering out most of the incoming content stream.  That means you won’t be sharing or vetting most of the incoming stuff.    Here’s where having a formal criteria of what and why you share is important.
4.  Searches: When you spot the awesome, spend time looking for more content and context to add to it.  This can help enrich and make the original resource more valuable.  Look for additional references, quotes, reviews, citations or stories that can help complement the existing view.
5.  Scouts: Is always look for new, credible and interesting content sources.   Always looks to discover new ways, tools and networks where useful sources can be found including images, videos, or documentaries.
6.  Hacks Filters/Searches:  Use filters and specific persistent searches to help find  highly relevant and useful content to curate.
How do you spot the awesome in your content curation activities?  What content discovery tools do you use?

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. De Gaspe Beaubien Foundation says

    April 22, 2014 at 11:00 am

    Content curation is something we started doing this year and it is very rewarding to us and our followers. It is very time consuming though, so not the best idea if you are time constrained.
    Wel, if you are, follow Beth, and follow us 😉
    https://www.facebook.com/fondationdegaspebeaubien
    https://twitter.com/DeGaspeBeaubien

  2. Bethany Little says

    April 23, 2014 at 10:40 am

    Beth,
    I’d love to see non-profits using content curation and content marketing strategies more and more. They are behind the commericial sector and of course the cause space is ripe for this kind of technique! Thanks for writing this great blog. Bethany

  3. FAURE says

    May 6, 2014 at 8:24 am

    thanks for formalizing what is content curation and what any researcher and teacher should do in his specialty field to keep abreast of scientific information… in other words nurturing curiosity, but is not equally shared in humans and in students

  4. Cynthia Coleman says

    May 26, 2014 at 6:13 pm

    Excellent advice for nonprofits or anyone who blogs or uses social media!

  5. Nathan Graham says

    June 18, 2014 at 3:43 am

    I hardly ever comment on these articles, but I assumed this on deserved
    a big thankyou

Trackbacks

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