Share This Too: More Social Media Solutions for PR Professionals

Chapter 10

Curation

Michael Litman

Content curation is billed by some as the future for brands in remaining relevant in an environment that changes daily. This chapter looks at the importance of content curation for brands, media, agencies and individuals: who's doing a great job of it and what can be learnt as a result.

“It's not information overload, it's filter failure”⁶² a wise man once said. Digital culture is now a filter culture. We spend our daily online lives swamped with more information than we will ever have the time to digest. Whether we know we're doing it or not, we are filtering the haystack of information to get to the needle. We are all content curators.

But what does content curation really mean? It is defined as “the process of analysing and sorting Web content and presenting it in a meaningful and organized way around a specific theme”.⁶³

The job of a content curator sees them firstly deciding on a relevant niche or subject and then seeking out all available information which is then refined and arranged in a structured order. This is an order of importance and relevance, displayed in a hierarchy of resourcefulness.

However, content curation isn't just about collecting links and saving them, it is about providing context to the reasoning as to why one article is of higher importance than another. A content curator as a result becomes the knowledge source and the go-to person on that particular subject.

The news now finds you

When it comes to news, social networks ...