Content Curation Takes Time
Is it really true that by aggregating many content sources and picking and republishing the best of those news and stories is really going to benefit you and your readers in the long run?
Is the road to easy and effortless publishing via curation tools a true value creation business strategy, or just a risky fad? How can one tell?
Notwithstanding the viral content-marketing tam-tam keeps selling the idea of content curation as a miracle-shortcut to work less, produce more content and get all of the benefits that an online publisher would want to have, reality has quite a different shade.
To gain readers’ attention and trust it is evidently not enough to create a top 10 tools list by searching on Google and then picking the best items from existing lists, or to pull together a few interesting article titles on a topic with their introductory paragraphs.
Unless your readers are not very interested themselves into the topic you cover, why would they take recommendations from someone who has not even had the time to fully vet and verify his own suggested resources?
Picking what superficially appears to be interesting content just by reading titles or curating and suggesting content to your readers by leveraging tools that do this automatically is like recommending movies or music records based on how much you like their trailers or their cover layouts.
By using this approach how many times are you going to recommend truly valuable resources versus how many times is your recommendation going to lower your credibility and authority just because the content you have recommended is actually quite shallow, provides no new insight, or it is even copied from somewhere else?
How can one become a trusted information source if one does not thoroughly look, question and verify what he is about to recommend?
Why Curation Takes More Time Than Writing
Content curation takes serious time. A lot more than the one needed to create normal original content.
Why?
To write a typical article, the one you would publish on your website, blog or for that matter on most news and newspaper sites (excluding news reporting), requires for you to:
- Identify a specific topic / issue to cover
- Write a tentative title
- Outline key points you are going to cover (this if you are good. Many just start writing as it comes.)
- Draft text
- Revise, finalize title and content
- Publish
Only a few expert journalists, bloggers and writers go out of the simple set of steps outlined above to:
- do serious research about the topic
- integrate quotes, mentions from other authors that are relevant
- gather and link complementary valuable resources (images, videos, maps, etc.)
- fully credit and attribute their information sources
Compare the above, with the steps a professional content curator would take before publishing something:
- Research: it starts all from here. The curator is a sophisticated researcher and continuously monitors and tracks his interest areas for relevant news and information. His strength is in searching where everyone else is not looking. That takes time.
- Gather and collect, relevant content, resources and references. This is an ongoing process that allows the curator to have tons of valuable resources, data and info always available at his fingertips.
- Verify and vet each potential resource, tool, article, source by taking the time needed to check, text, explore and validate it thoroughly.
- Make sense of what each resource collected represents (what is its value) and synthesize it for non-experts who will read about it.
- Extract, excerpt, pick and distill small parts of original resource to illustrate, showcase, explain.
- Synthesize and highlight the value of each chosen resource within the context of your interest area.
- Add value to the resource by adding a personal viewpoint, commentary, opinion, review or a guided introduction to it.
- Enrich the resource with relevant references, and related links for those that will want to find out more about it.
- Credit and attribute sources and contributors.
- Preserve, classify and archive what you want to curate.
- Share, distribute, promote the curated work you have produced across relevant channels.
- Sign curated work, by publishing your full name and a link to reference information that allows readers to find out more about who you are and why you do what you do.
As you can see there are many more tasks involved in curating content than the ones required to write an original piece of content.
(While it is certainly possible to do a good curation job without doing exactly all of the tasks I have outlined above, I believe that it is ideal to try to do as many as these as possible, as each adds more value to the end result you will create.)
“Just like piecing together Legos or adapting an IKEA hack, using openly licensed educational resources in place of static, inflexible, off-the shelf learning materials takes time, capacity, and patience to sift through and curate the many resources available on the internet.”
Office of Ed Tech
https://medium.com/@OfficeofEdTech/the-lego-bin-9191295fe1f5#.fij5ctn2a
Why Content Curation Is Promoted as a Time and Money Saver
The truth of why, notwithstanding the above, curation is sold as a big, time and money saver, is quite simple:
a) there are quite a few companies out there who want to sell you a technology service that facilitates finding content and republishing it.
b) the owners and spokespersons of these companies are entrepreneurs, not curators. (That is they have little or no experience in the field for which they have built a service/tool for).
c) to promote and market their automated content marketing firehoses they remix existing but unrelated concepts and ideas to bend them to fit their technology key strengths, while promising to prospective customers benefits and opportunities that require experience, skills and time they often don’t have.
d) they peddle this mantra of curation as a time and money-saver endlessly. They support it with their own stats and reports, spread it via their blogs, videos, public speeches, and by paying blogs and content writers to further support it while linking back to them.
e) inexperienced journalists and bloggers take up these story ideas and expand on them, giving greater support and visibility to ideas that, in my experience, mislead users in confusing the tool with the skill.
To curate is an art.
To illustrate is an art. But if you buy and use Photoshop you don’t instantly become an artist.
To photograph is an art. But if you buy and use a digital DSLR camera you don’t instantly become a photographer.
This is why those who start to use curation tools do indeed find an easy way to create content with the minimum time and effort, without realizing that what they output is just regurgitation of other people content. There is zero curation taking place.
So yes, there can be content that is produced with such curation tools, such content may produce some apparent beneficial effects for some, but, for what I can see, the output is often shallower than original content and nobody (outside mr. Noise) really benefits from this.
“I still have to do all the searching for new and good content sources and filtering the content I get. Separating the crap from the awesome. All by myself. This is hard work and very time consuming.”
If you are into content curation for the long run, do not make this mistake.
Nuno Figueroa, who shared, in an interesting and informative article on Business2Community, his deep frustration with content curation tools and with the incredible amount of work one has to do to find, vet, add value and share truly valuable content online, wrote:
“I still have to do all the searching for new and good content sources and filtering the content I get. Separating the crap from the awesome. All by myself. This is hard work and very time consuming”.
- Nuno Figueroa
But wait a minute! What you describe here is the key, absolute value a curator can provide: his time.
The more we try to bypass this in favor of tools that can automate this time-consuming and difficult work the more we give up the opportunity to truly add unique value to our curated content.
Yes, tools can be of great help, but the real value to curation is your own time to sift, evaluate and truly add relevant commentary to your selections.
Put it like this: There will never be any tool that can do better search than you (unless you know nothing about what you are curating). No tool that can tell whether an article is a rehash of another one or a true original, or that can evaluate the insight and ideas a new perspective from a new unknown author can bring.
Would a painter or a sculptor want to automate or speed up parts of his artistic creation process?
Unless the artist’s goal was exclusively one of producing “more” and he had no enjoyment whatsoever in the creation process, there would be no need or desire to speed up or automate it, as this is what the artist, by definition, has chosen to do.
Similarly, the content curator, who provides value to other people by utilizing his many skills and experiences to gather, find, collect, organize, add value and present information artifacts covering a specific topic, interest, issue or event, realizes his goal in spending time doing such things, not in bypassing or speeding up this process.
The desire to speed things up, and to “do more with less” are sad consequences of those selling content curation as a content marketing “device” that promises to save you time and make you look good.
But it’s ok. I can empathize with these entrepreneurs. I can see why they say what they say, and why they promote and market their technologies as miracle time-saving machines.
They are just trying to achieve what they see as their key goal: making their technology and startup successful (profitable).
To market their curation tools, entrepreneurs in this sector have identified in the need for finding and creating new valuable content without spending tons of times and costly human resources, a fantastic set of problems to intercept and solve with their technologies.
Fair enough.
Thus, after having assembled complex engines that search, report, discover new content and allow you to repost, schedule and distribute it endlessly across the many available Internet channels, these companies needed to find a storyline that would persuade readers of the true value that their new tools could provide them.
And “curation” for content marketing purposes offered almost the perfect one.
Almost, because whether you look at classical art or museum curators, data scientists, passionate collectors, researchers or investigative reporters, they are all characterized by subject-matter expertise, and by a time-consuming approach that requires lots of analysis, research, vetting and skill in identifying patterns, trends and common characteristics among sometimes apparently wildly unrelated things.
Certainly something that you can’t do in your spare breaks, by clicking and looking through some apparent interesting article titles and descriptions.
But if we could just gloss over such aspects and their relevance, and focus only on the fact that with a few clicks we can gather tons of content on our topic of interest (let alone its quality and originality) and on the ease with which we can capture and republish links or posts about any issue, the problem would be rapidly solved.
And so the idea of content curation to save time and money is born.
By skipping over the fact that to successfully curate anything one has to be well-versed with the matter at hand (subject-matter expertise), and invest serious time to research, evaluate and vet potential interesting resources it is easy to paint an almost miraculous aurea around curation and its benefits. If one does not communicate the relevance of contextualizing, synthesizing and adding a personal viewpoint to what is being curated, then curation becomes in essence the ability to find interesting content and re-share it with your readers.
That is exactly how a time-consuming activity like curation gets hi-jacked to serve the content marketing dream.
And given that most of the publishers using these tools have no curation experience or education, and have little propensity to question, verify and be skeptical about miracle cures (all key traits of valuable curators), it is only normal that they dive into this promised curation-content marketing paradise with their full suit on.
But while they have been promised and expect to become highly visible
go-to trusted authorities in their niche field of interest, the result they get from doing curation as a time and resource-saving activity, in most cases, is only marginally productive.
Why?
Because effort, expertise and value can’t be faked. To create true value you need to put in some real effort.
And so, while it is true, that by curating an information space consistently one can gain greater visibility, build a community of followers, become the go-to resource for information, it does take some real, time-consuming effort, to produce something you can truly call “curation” and benefit from the associated results.
Proof is in the pudding.
Ask yourself: Why is there such a lack of true examples, showcases, showcases of valuable curation done by the customers of these very curation technologies?
Look around: outside of a few exceptions, great examples of content curation are created by those who have the expertise, experience and time to create great value, independently of what tools they use to do so.
Conclusion
In the end the greatest risk in buying into the idea that curation can save you time and money is not that it will simply not produce such results, but, far more important, that whoever does curation with such expectations will quite certainly lose much of its credibility and authority over time.
The logic behind this claim is that while for some, this type of light content curation may work in attracting some extra visibility in the short-term, it may be very counterproductive in the long run, as serious, passionate readers, discover gradually that content being suggested has often not even been read, let alone contextualized, synthesized or added with a unique and valuable viewpoint from the curator.
1. Curation can be effective only as much as it effectively provides a quality filtering mechanism that can replace my need to consult multiple sources. When such need is forgotten and a curation channel becomes another broad aggregation and republishing venue, the end result is more content to go through and little or no insight gained.
2. Shallow curation efforts, where the main goal is to republish selected content with the minimum effort and time, are going to be effective only for the very short term. As soon as quality, value-creation creators start to emerge and gain authority, the gap between them and the others will be very hard to fill.
3. Curation is an effective means to build a strong relationship with a niche audience of passionate people to engage, not a marketing strategy that caters to gain a broad audience of readers by virtue of quantity and breadth.
4. The key element that makes curation work is the competence and focus of the curator and of the topic he has selected. Repeated efforts to create curated channels that mix and match broad and highly competitive topics are bound to see a very short life.
Curation is all about quality, insight and attention to details. It is not about quantity, speed, saving time and about producing more with less.
