Content Curation Is Not Content Marketing
Content Curation has been hijacked and has been sold as a cheap and easy solution for content marketers plagued by the growing problem of how to produce more quality content within tighter and tighter time constraints.
But, just like the fact that you can’t really build a world athlete by starting with the food complements, amino-acids, special shoes, or sunglasses, you can’t build world-class content, become the go-to-person or organization in a specific niche, or be recognized as a little authority in your field if you have forgotten what sports competition you are into.
For organizations and individuals publishing content online, the sport competition they are in is the one of helping their readers solve a problem they have: by informing, educating, or entertaining your audience, you support and guide them to learn, discover and master the topic, issue or problem they are after.
Educating and informing them effectively is your marketing strategy. In other words, what you really are in the business of doing is to make sense, explain, illustrate, and point to information that can help them effectively resolve their issue and to realize their goals.
To do this in an effective way, you need not ever forget what these people are looking for and what they really expect from anyone providing them with an answer, or you risk to be singing and applauding your song all by yourself.
That’s why I wrote this article.
Content Curation Is Not a Marketing Technique
The purpose of this article is indeed one of helping those truly interested in creating value (by making sense, illustrating, contextualizing, and explaining what they discover and find, within a certain area of interest, to anyone searching for greater depth and info on that specific topic) to realize their goal by becoming more aware of the differences that distinguish a truly curatorial approach from a purely content-marketing driven one.
To achieve this, I have decided to highlight what I personally see as being the traits, method, and approach that characterize and define a genuine curatorial approach, in contrast with those borrowing a sub-set of content curation techniques to their publishing strategy with the expectation of gaining greater visibility, following and reputation.
Yes, what I am attempting to claim is that, like SEO is not a content strategy, content curation is not a content marketing technique. Those who fail to understand this difference are bound to be proven wrong by history itself.
In fact, the big risk for those who do not understand this crucial point is that by buying into a vision that prizes immediate and superficial visibility, time-savings, and increased quantity over in-depth research, vetting, painstakingly detailed curation and a cult of ethics, their credibility and reputation will not likely be able to withstand any serious competitor eventually adopting these traits.
In fact, the content curator, as I see him, can’t be a skilled editor or a classic journalist as we know him today.
The true, value-adding content curator is rather a subject-matter expert researcher, evaluator, and reporter, capable of distilling, illustrating, and contextualizing existing relevant information and artifacts in a specific
field of interest and for a specific objective/application/need.
Content Curator vs. Content Marketer: Characterizing Traits
What differentiates the content curator from the content marketer are a number of very distinctive traits and a few starkly different objectives.
The content curator’s characterizing traits:
1. He is not after quantity. Quality is his key measure.
2. Does not ever curate something without having thoroughly looked at it multiple times.
3. Always provides insight as to why something is relevant and where the item fits in its larger collection (stream, catalog, list, etc.)
4. Adds personal evaluation, judgment, critique, or praise.
5. Integrates a personal touch in the way it presents the curated object.
6. Provides useful information about other related, connected, or similar objects of interest.
7. Credits and thanks to anyone who has helped in the discovery, identification, and analysis of any curated item and links relevant names of people present in the content.
8. Does not ever republish content “as is” without adding extra value to it.
9. Does not curate, select, personalize, or republish his own content in an automated way.
10. Discloses bias, affiliation, and other otherwise non-self-evident contextual clues.
The content marketer’s characterizing traits:
1. He is after quantity. “The more content published, the better,” is his mantra.
2. Curates, republish and retweets content without having fully read it.
3. Reposts and shares without providing or adding any insight.
4. Adds no evaluation, judgment, or personal critique.
5. Provides no personalization.
6. Does not include additional useful info, references, or links.
7. Does not add credit or attribution.
8. Republishes content “as is.”
9. Uses automation tools heavily.
10, Does not disclose bias, prejudice, affiliation, and partnerships that may influence his writing.
Content Curator vs. Content Marketer: Key Differences in Objectives
The content curator’s objectives:
1. To add new pieces of valuable information to the infinite puzzle, he is trying to solve.
2. To find, discover and report about new helpful tools, resources, and ideas that hold value for his community.
3. To curate something that he is personally very passionate about.
4. To uncover, locate and identify extra details and not-easy-to-find info about the object/topic being curated
5. To vet and verify accurately any story or info before including it.
6. To identify the best, what counts, not just the latest and the breaking.
7. To help, inform others discover, and learn about valuable stuff. Driven by personal interest and curiosity.
8. To be a new kind of journalist who focuses exclusively on areas that he is strongly competent with and discloses prejudices, relationships, interests, and personal bias in order to tell a much more personal and engaging story. Credibility is more important than objectivity.
9. To learn new things (in his area of interest) and to share and illustrate them in the simplest and clearest way to others.
10. To make sense of the world, he lives in by curating and exploring in a sustained fashion, one or more specific areas of interest.
The content marketer objectives:
1. To have more content ready to be published.
2. To rapidly create content that is viral and that gets lots of likes.
3. To write something on the topic he’s identified, or that has been assigned to him.
4. To make the story glamorous and unheard of and to spectacularize it.
5. To select and publish online by using as a criterion what will drive the most traffic.
6. To bring you the latest, the breaking, the “yet-unheard-of.”
7. To get more traffic. Driven by a hunger for numbers.
8. To make more money.
9. To outrun others by doing more.
10. To save time, produce more content, and obtain more results with less effort.
Risks and Consequences
The mixing up and confusing content marketing with content curation presents lots of risks for publishers who take on “content curation” as a “technique” to achieve greater visibility, authority, and reputation while spending less time and resources in creating valuable content.
The key risk is that by realizing too late the differences between true content curation and content marketing that utilizes content curation techniques, content marketers may actually be digging a reputation grave for themselves while inebriated by the superficial traffic and visibility gains that adopting this strategy may initially afford them.
The problem is, in fact, much more tangible over the long term, when the extra traffic and visibility afforded by adopting light content curation techniques gently start to fade away as quality readers start to discover how little vetting, adding value, and insight is provided and silently move on to other, higher quality sources.
As a matter of fact, content marketers, in general, are unconsciously doing a gigantic unorchestrated favor to content curators by polluting the web with so much content that has little or no value that those who are willing to put the extra time and attention into it, are going to be much more easily recognized from the rest.
Conclusions
You can’t “adopt” content curation techniques to obtain the long-term positive consequences that great curators enjoy unless you fully embrace also their peculiar objectives and attitudes.
Using content curation techniques as an add-on or as a quick solution to the need to produce high-quality content can only provide short-lived results, as there will be, sooner or later, someone taking the information needs of your niche seriously who will start to curate it in a professional fashion.
In addition, the untold risk and negative consequence of jumping on the content curation train by adopting too many of the content marketers' traits and too few of the content curator ones is the unheralded loss of trust, reputation, and credibility that anyone republishing other’s people content without adding true value will inevitably suffer.
Using content curation to save time and to post more quality content with a smaller effort leads to producing shallow content that offers the perfect ground for those truly passionate about that topic to jump in and establish themselves as the new trusted points of reference.
For these reasons, the only strategy that makes deep sense when it comes to integrating content curation in an online publishing strategy is the one of taking this path, not for the promised benefits of time-savings and reduced efforts, but because it is only by creating real value that deep trust, credibility, and lasting relationships can be built.
See also: Content Curation Guide.
Originally written and curated by Robin Good and first published on MasterNewMedia on Tuesday, 18th March 2014 as “Content Curation Is Not Content Marketing.”
Robin Good
