Content & Community

For digital storytellers, the world is about to get a whole lot more interesting. For content consumers--which is pretty much all of us--there’s a chance things could actually start to fall into place.

There's a movement underway to shift storage from devices to the cloud. There are a number of reasons for this, but the fundamental driver is the massive growth in both the volume of content we each expect to have at our fingertips and the size of the files that HD videos and RAW photos generate.
So the enthusiasm from both the technical folks and the marketing folks to herald the coming of the cloud is pretty much a lock. 

[read full article http://j.mp/o3j6D3]

Jeff Bullas never disappoints, this article is packed with vital information you need to know no matter if you're curating content to build your personal brand or marketing services.

Here's what caught my attention:

"The survival of the social species is a digital battle that will create opportunities and disrupt traditional business models for decades to come."

The Battle for Social

This small change to Google’s search features reveals an evolution of the web that is an early indicator of the growing battle for social that will over time produce winners and losers but will also create a web that will surprise you with its speed and capabilities. The announcement and launching of Google+ saw Zuckerberg respond with a a Skype feature offering free video calls and promising more to come.

Social is about Sharing

All marketers know that if you can make something so shareable that it goes viral then you will produce results for brands that will sell products, make people famous and maybe even position your agency as part of marketing folklore.

http://www.jeffbullas.com/2011/07/18/is-it-better-to-share-on-google-facebook-or-twitter/

This great piece was written by Joe Pulizzi, founder of Content Marketing Institute 

There is no curation without original content. However, curators can expand the readership and help their niche find meaning and insight in the material as it relates to them. 

He says:

"So many organizations are getting caught up in content curation, but the real power of content marketing lies in original content creation."

Curation is more than a tactic, it is coming to forefront because

**people are overwhelmed with too much information.

If you're going to create content, I say mixing that with curated content might be a better way to go, again this depends on many factors,  but that's only my opinion.

Here are a few things that caught my attention:

Y0ur 2012 Checklist -

He says, yes, you can and should use content curation techniques, but this should be secondary.

I say, Curation is more than a technique and will go beyond a buzz word in 2012 as people learn new techniques.

He says:

"Focus on the true pain points of your customers and start planning content series around answering those pain points".

**I definitely agree but this can be accomplished by curation as well. It's not an either or, a curator can add more vital information, another perspective. provide resources or any number of things beyond the original article.

He says:

"Find the content curators in your industry and form relationships with them. They’ll help you spread the word about your great content".

I say:

I believe content creators will want to seek out good content curators  to curate their work.  I watched a six minute video yesterday, the title was "Is Your Content Good Enough To Be Curated"? Now that's a shift in thinking and a very interesting question to ponder, I say, stay tuned........

I think both are necessary in different proportions for different types of businesses.

What do you think?

Commentary by Jan Gordon "Covering Content Curation, Social Media and Beyond"

Read full article here: [http://bit.ly/w104L6]

Karyn Campbell wrote this piece for Sparksheet - Great Observations and so true!

Intro:

"Before news aggregators, content curators, and Google’s omnipotent algorithm, the world’s information was sorted by real human beings."

Here's what caught my attention:

It comes down to trust

The web has offered us incredible options for how we buy products, talk to our friends, or experience media. Remember that adage “quality over quantity”? We can take that phrase literally online – quantity won’t go away; quality will just sit atop.

Sometimes we want someone to tell us, consistently, what’s true and what’s good. No wonder YouTube just relaunched its music page, enlisting writers for Vice, Spin and other major vloggers to curate its featured content.

**As Steve Jobs more radically put it, “It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.”

It comes down to trust. Because we are all so well trained in the art of branding, arguably at the expense of crafting things worthy of distribution,

**it becomes hard to trust the advice of a Wild West web.

Still, we’ll continue to take the word of our favourite industry insider, celebrity or uncle.

**Likewise, the smartest companies in this space will calibrate expertise with automation, math with emotion.

**Whether she’s a kid writing code or a poet in-the-making, look for the next generation Steve Jobs to carry on building, hiring, and perfecting these filters.

Absolutely!

http://sparksheet.com/return-of-the-editor-why-human-filters-are-the-future-of-the-web/

It may not be as dramatic as Twitter or as ubiquitous as Facebook, but LinkedIn attracts dedicated users who are serious about business. Here's how to connect with them using the fast-growing service's most powerful new tools.

As the avalanche of information coming through social networks and real-time tools like Twitter continues to grow, the need for filters to make sense of that tsunami of data also increases, and it seems as though everyone has a different way of trying to solve that problem. Facebook threw its hat into the ring this week with what it says is an improved “newspaper-style” news feed that highlights important content, while Digg has just launched “newsrooms” aimed at doing the same thing, and online influence-ranking service Klout is rolling out topic pages based on what’s being shared by those with influence. But will any of these be able to solve the filtering problem, or will they just add another source of noise?