Curating Content to Help Create Conversation in Online Communties

BraveNewTalent is an online community destination for enterprise level folks looking to make connections and learn from other within their industry. They are currently using curated content to help keep a healthy stream of relevant content flowing into each of the discussions. I recently sat down with Jean McCormick, Vice President of Content, to discuss how curated content has worked for them.

Jessie: Tell us a little bit about the objectives of your site – what was the ultimate goal? Who is your target audience?

Jean: BraveNewTalent builds talent communities with an enterprise customer around topics of mutual interest to drive deeper engagement with their present, future and past employees. Topics can range from direct marketing, entrepreneurship, content marketing to eCommerce. BraveNewTalent’s open social platform enables organizations to eliminate the noise of most communities by optimizing the information their members want to receive.

Jessie: How come you decided to go with content curation over another marketing strategy or original content?

Jean: Content curation enables us to “prime” the topic areas in our BraveNewTalent communities with high quality, fresh content. Having the ability to curate through a rich, relevant stream of content from a diverse set of sources continually on the dozens of topics of interest to communities allows us to keep on top of the conversation and keep the conversation going with new discussions.

Jessie: Can you walk us through the curation process. How do you pick the content for the site?

Each day, my team browses through curated content on each topic, selects the most meaningful pieces and then publish it to the relevant topic area in our BraveNewTalent communities. It’s hand picking the most relevant content of the moment for that topic.

Jean: Since you’ve launched and have been curating, have there been any benefits that you have already seen from this?

Previously, my team had to spend hours a week researching, reading, vetting and publishing content to our communities. Using a curation tool, (we use Curata), to sort through the content and have it at our fingertips allows us to save hours in our day. While there is still the human element of reading and publishing (which is the essence of curation) we are able to do this in a much shorter amount of time than we were before.

Check out BraveNewTalent and see if you’re industry is sharing information you’re missing.