CHAPTER 9

Content Isn’t King, It’s the Kingdom: Creation and Curation

Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, has been quoted as saying, “Every two days we now create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003.”1 That’s a tremendous amount of content, and it represents the overload of information many online citizens experience between social networks, online news, e-mail, and entertainment. But content is what we do online. In fact, 53 percent of time spent on the Internet is directly attributable to content consumption.2 Your prospective clients are consuming content every day. So are journalists, customers, job candidates, industry analysts, investors, and employees. The opportunity to connect with the communities that will help grow your business can be realized with a content marketing strategy that balances both curated and original content.

For an article on content curation, I reached out to a group of my peers who are experts in the content marketing arena and asked for their perspectives on the role of content curation. Here are some of their responses:

Content curation, which can be defined as a highly proactive and selective approach to finding, collecting, presenting, and displaying digital content around predefined sets of criteria and subject matter, has become essential to marketing, branding, journalism, reporting, and social media—often, to mash-ups of all these different and disparate channels.

Rebecca Lieb, Digital Marketing ...

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