SM

This is a great piece by Heidi Cohen on why your marketing needs content curation and 12 attributes of a successful curation strategy.  This is one of the best articles I've seen on this topic in a very long time.

As I said, I've seen many pieces on curation but if you're like me, everytime I read about this, I always find something new or am reminded of ways I can polish what I'm doing.

Here are some of the highlights.........

Intro:

Why Your Marketing Needs Content Curation

At its core, content curation is like a great editor or blogger who brings his unique taste and understanding of his target audience to his selection of the best content for his readers.

**He provides context for the content so that it's more than a collection of information

3 Reasons your content marketing strategy needs content curation:

1. Offering your audience a combination of original and third party content provides a branded context for your work

2. Curating other people's content positions you and/or your organization as a tastemaker in your field

3. Creating sufficient content is a marketing and business challenge

12 Attributes of a successful content curation strategy:

Here are a few things that caught my attention:

 *Has defined measurable goals

As part of your content marketing strategy and by extension

your marketing plan, content curation needs objectives that

are associated with your business.

**Targets a specific audience

. *Content curation like other forms of content marketing requires

understanding your readers' marketing persona

** Involves a community

*As with any social media or content marketing, your

audience should be at the heart of your content efforts.

**Clay Shirky says it best:

"Curation comes up when people

realize that it isn't just about information seeking, it's also

about synchronizing a community"

Selected and reviewed by Jan Gordon covering "Curation, Social Business and Beyond"

Read full article here: [http://bit.ly/SpJEfQ}

The definition from "Content Marketing" is to create and shares useful narrative information to engage prospects, current customers and the public. I think each business owner should be interested to do so. [note mg]

Is your content marketing social media shareworthy? In other words, does your non-promotional content invite readers to participate and extend the conversation by commenting and sharing it with their family, friends and social media colleagues? Further, when your content’s shared, is your brand readily discernable on other platforms or via other channels (such as email)?

To help you develop social media friendly content marketing, here are three examples that use social media to engage prospects and extend their reach along with related content marketing lessons.

Make bad feedback good for business. In their own words, “the Hans Brinker Budget Hotel has been proudly disappointing travellers for forty years.” This hostel is definitely talkworthy. It’s got an amazing 182 colorful reviews on TripAdviors.

Read more: http://heidicohen.com/social-media-friendly-content-marketing/

By Pawan Deshpande, CEO, HiveFire.  "Last year my company, HiveFire Inc., shared the results from our B2B Marketing Trends survey".

Here's what they found and found:

**82 percent are incorporating content curation

Click through to this recent post titled “Content May Be King” for more content curation definitions and trends.)

**The fact that this represents a notable increase (up from 48 percent) from the Content Curation Adoption survey that we issued earlier that year sent a strong message that curation is gaining favor amongst marketers.

For our Curation Habits Report, we analyzed over one million articles curated by our customers to identify:

which curation methods drive the highest engagement rates and identified some interesting trends.

Here are a few things they found:

Original Content vs. Third-Party Content

On average, approximately 87 percent of curated content are third-party articles and 13 percent are original content.

**Additionally, on sites where there is a mix of original and third-party content

**original content receives approximately 17 percent more click-thru activity 

**Curated sites that have between 16-30 percent original generate the most pageviews.

Capturing Reader Attention

Throughout the analysis, it became clear that there are several ways that curators can draw attention to their content.

**For starters, articles that included a picture generated 47 percent more click-thru activity than articles without. 

Medium snippets (between 141 and 1,200 characters) generate 20 percent more click-thru activity than small snippets (140 characters or less) for any given curated site.

Curated by Jan Gordon covering "Content Curation, Social Business and Beyond"

Read full article here: [http://bit.ly/HWl5DO]