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Robin Good: Many content curation tools promise to make your content publishing job easier, faster and better. But is it really so? Does less work and more automated aggregation/filtering guarantee a higher quality result?

 

Christa Carone writes on Fast Company: "New content curation tools make automating the job easier--but easy may not always be as effective.

 

It would be a mistake to let algorithms do the entire job for you. No one knows your audience like you do.

 

And, keeping the human touch in the process is more real, which is really important to today's info-overloaded consumer."

 

Yes, the human touch. Not the human click to rapidly share, repost or reblog. The human touch as in the act of adding value in ways that go beyond being someone who passes on interesting items.

 

And to achieve that, someone needs to manually stop, research, read, check and contribute something of value. it doesn't happen automatically.

 

"The companies that are truly winning over audiences and driving consumers are the ones that are experimenting with a balance of automated aggregation and human-directed curation.

 

It's a process of out-sourcing and in-sourcing.

 

I've been following Intel's approach. It recently launched iQ, an employee-curated digital magazine created to connect with a younger audience and share with them the bigger, living brand story.

 

Not only does the site provide original stories about tech, it also aggregates top tech stories from other sites that Intel's audience will find interesting... all closely watched by editor-in-chief Bryan Rhoades, who spurs conversations by judiciously placing some stories on the iQ homepage.

NASCAR, too, is experimenting in this space. A partnership with Twitter includes a site that compiles #NASCAR-related tweets from popular drivers, who send 140-character blasts from the track or wherever they may be-- along with those from sports writers and other industry folks.

 

They pull it off by using a search algorithm and human editors who understand narrative---and appropriate content."

 

Rightful. 7/10

 

Full article: http://www.fastcompany.com/1841964/the-content-conundrum-to-create-or-automate ;

 

Via Robin Good