Following a rant against some forms of noisy automated publishing that he calls content curation (and that I wouldn't even call that), Barry Feldman provides a great guide to value-adding content curation.

The truth is that content curation has been associated by some to automation. And yes there are tools that will automatically build some content feeds for you. From early on, I've always thought that curation was fundamentally human and that while technology could empower people, replacing them is going a step too far in many domains as this post brilliantly explains. When it comes to content publishing, algorithms are useful to discover content, but deciding on what to publish, how to publish and how to editorialize it are not things a robot could do well. 

Which is why on Scoop.it, we automate content discovery and facilitate distribution but let our users in full control of the publishing stage.

So don't be a robot and to make the most of your content curation, read the great tips Barry that he develops in this article: focus on a topic, add value (“Be meaningful. Add your insight or opinion when sharing the content."), target, condense, etc... And of course here's also our own top 10 best practices on SlideShare to understand how to concretely do that on Scoop.it in a very visual way.

Parece-me aquela velha história de humanos versus máquinas.  Ou, em outras palavras, a diferença entre informações e conhecimento.

Agregação de conteúdo pura e simples pode ser feita tanto por humanos quanto por máquinas. Mas edição de conteúdo é gerenciamento autoral de conhecimentos, e esta tarefa talvez seja melhor realizada por humanos. Isto porque editar conteúdos e contextualizá-los, direcionando-os para um público-alvo específico, requer habilidades que dependem essencialmente do background sociocultural do seu curador.

The Content Marketing landscape is maturing: still fragmented within many vendors, there's now a consensus from analysts on how to look at the various fields of content marketing. From creation, to curation & aggregation, to optimization, analytics, audience targeting and distribution, workflow, etc... Altimeter's Rebecca Lieb defines layers of what she says will become the future major stack of enterprise software.

Her typology is not very different from the one in this infographic by Scripted: in both cases, content creation and content curation are seen as the core pillars of the ecosystem showing how major content curation has become for content marketers.

Content is king.

Yes this is coming, but as pointed out in Rebecca's piece, all of the current offerings are disconnected pieces with different UIs and immature focus yet at this point.

What tools do you use to keep your marketing lean?

There are a lot of useful tools to help your content marketing efforts. Here's a selection that is specifically aligned with the principles of lean content.

woohoo more tools

Add this to your holiday to do list: review each link and bookmark when necessary! Excellent compendium.

Great resource from HubSpot.