Curation Revolution

What Is QDF
Google has a favorite core concept - Quality Deserves Freshness. The concept changes content marketing in many ways such as:

* Content is publish & done.
* Content that sparks comments is prized.

* Content that promotes links and shares is good.

* Static Content is bad.

On Monday I made an editorial mistake. @Cendrine Marrouat - https://www.cendrinemedia.comwrote a great guest blog post for Curagami about content curation. My mistake was building a reference into an embedded slide deck in the title.

That editorial decision assumes too much. Any post MUST live up to its title and this one DID if a reader looked at Cendrine's great slides. If you didn't it was confusing. I added to the confusion by using a numbered list in the title and then NOT numbering the tips contained in Cendrine's slides.

We received a comment noting the dissonance my editorial decisions made. NOW WHAT DO YOU DO? Change the title back to Cendrine's better title and destroy the ripples the post earned. Change the blog title without changing the URL and Google sees and punishes the dispariety.

Better to ADD CONTENT IN because of QDF. I wrote in a couple of hundred words and re-shared the post on social as an object lesson in my need to become a better editor and QDF. NEVER take something away from Google they've indexed, has been shared or is inside your website's modeled evaluation.

Taking things away creates suspicion. Adding in new content helps with QDF and provides a new hook to share on social. QDF can be helped by:

* Comments.
* Feeds (if structured and embedded properly).
* Curation (of comments or other material).
* User Generated Content (UGC) such as social shares, comments, reviews and forms.

* Questions - great because "new to them" evergreen content promotes UGC for years.

* Polls - voting brings customers back and creates new social share hooks too.

If this information sounds like you really can't "fix" an editorial mistake as much as you create, curate and surf you way out of it you understand implications of QDF. Content in Google land is forever, but content in the new QDF world isn't static, unchanging and inviolate either.

Promise to write a post on QDF and how Google's search for the latest greatest and most relevant content means your content marketing needs to shift from "publish and done" to "publish, curate and publish again".

From Entertainment to Collaboration outlines the second transition that a company must engage in when moving from advertising to engagement as a core marketing strategy.

Marty Note
This is a MUST READ brilliant post my friend Mark Traphagen (@MarkTraphagen) alerted me to because I've been writing about how brands don't get social (Social Media: It's The Conversation Stupid http://sco.lt/7iZVUP ).

I love the ditch digging details Ted shares in this great post. He all but maps the process of creating successful social collaboration with:

Collaboration can take a number of forms: example archetypes are:

1) commentary on content

2) co-creation of content

3) user-generated content

4) collective action or problem solving

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That is BRILLIANT work. I've been focused on the conversation, but Ted is right. The conversation is the medium, the currency. The payoff for being present and engaged with customers is collaboration. Great stuff and a must read for any brand or Internet marketer (and there are 2 more installments coming).