Often it seems that there are only two things the world tells you about ideas: you should have more of them and they should be more creative.

We dedicate entire conferences to better ideas and read best-selling books to inspire more of them. Yet over time, the sad truth is that the only thing most of us do better than coming up with ideas is routinely squandering them, with bad or no execution.

Why do we fail to execute well on our best ideas so often? More importantly, what would it take to change that pattern?

The Mini Bottle Gallery

An unexpected clue to answering this question can be found at one of the world’s quirkiest museum destinations nestled in a corner of Oslo, Norway. The brainchild of renowned art collector and billionaire Christian Ringnes, it is called The Mini Bottle Gallery. It boasts the largest collection of mini liquor bottles in the world.

The collection goes far beyond those iconic Dutch house liquor bottles given out by KLM to air travelers for decades. The Mini Bottle Gallery includes everything from macabre bottles with unique objects floating in them to a “room of sin” with bottles collected from the Red Light District in Amsterdam.

What is most interesting about this odd collection is not the bottles themselves. It’s that only a fifth of the entire 50,000 bottle collection is on display at any given time. It is a masterpiece of curation.

Putting every bottle on display at once would be noise. Selecting the best and grouping them into interesting themes is what makes the story the Gallery tells meaningful. Like all great museum destinations, the Gallery uses curation to add meaning to isolated interesting things.

What does a quirky museum and its use of curation have to do with getting better about holding onto and executing on your best ideas?

Curation in the Museum of Your Mind

Imagine if you were the curator of a museum of your own ideas. You have limited physical space to share the very best of them. The way to ensure your best ideas come to life is by integrating them into bigger themes to add meaning.

This is exactly what visionary entrepreneurs and leaders do.

They take disparate ideas from multiple industries and put them together into something unique and valuable for the world. This type of “intersection thinking” requires us all to learn to become better curators of our own ideas.

To learn to do it, here are five habits that can help:

1 Being Curious

We as people are naturally curious. The challenge is to allow yourself to explore your curiosity without it feeling like an ongoing distraction. Noted chef and food pioneer Ferran Adrià was once asked what he likes to have for breakfast. His reply was simple: “I like to eat a different fruit every day of the month.” Imagine if you could do that with ideas. Being more curious means asking questions about why things work the way they do, and embracing unfamiliar situations or topics with a sense of wonder.

2 Being Observant

Famous ex-FBI agent Joe Navarro now teaches people how to read body language. He once wrote, “the problem is that most people spend their lives looking but not truly seeing.” Learning to be more observant isn’t about seeing the big things. It is about training yourself to pay more attention to the little things. Being more observant means training yourself to see the details most others miss. When you learn to do it, what you observe can offer new insights about people, processes, and companies you didn’t know or see before.

3 Being Fickle

Being fickle may seem like a bad thing, but this isn’t always true. We tend to associate it with negative situations where we act inconsistently, or abandon people or ideas too quickly. But there is an upside to learning how to be purposefully fickle. Being fickle means capturing ideas without needing to fully understand or analyze them in that same moment. On the surface, this may seem counterintuitive. After all, when you find a great idea, why wouldn’t you take the time to analyze it and develop a point of view? Yet freeing yourself from this as a necessity can enable you to see and collect more ideas. A key part of becoming an idea curator is learning to save ideas for later digestion.

4 Being Thoughtful

In 2014 after 10 years of writing my personal blog, I decided to stop allowing comments. The reason I stopped was simple. I had noticed a steady decline in the quality of comments. What was once a robust discussion with thoughtfully worded responses had devolved into thumbs-up style comments and spam. Unfortunately, comments had become thoughtless instead of thoughtful. Being thoughtful means taking the time to reflect on a point of view and share it in a considered way. Thanks to anonymous commenting and the ease of sharing knee-jerk responses, thoughtfulness matters more than ever.

5 Being Elegant

We love to read or see elegant solutions. We delight in their ability to help us get the big picture with ease, but they aren’t often simple to develop or write. If you’ve ever sat down with paper or a computer screen and tried to tell a simple story, you know it can be harder than it seems. But we all have the power to simplify our ideas and share them in more elegant ways. Being elegant means developing your ability to describe a concept in a beautiful and simple way for easy understanding.

Curation was once seen as a skill largely confined to the world of art and museums. Today it has grown dramatically. It now encompass everything from the growing use of content as part of marketing, to the increasingly widespread belief that well rounded employees with divergent interests (like Steve Jobs’ famous fascination with calligraphy and fonts) can yield unexpected business benefits.

The most effective brands and leaders today are focusing on becoming active curators of ideas.

Examples Are All Around Us

Pioneering brands like Red Bull and Coca-Cola have created entirely new categories for themselves by using active storytelling to fuel spin-off media businesses. Both Zappos and Disney have started consulting groups to help other brands emulate their approach in their own businesses.

The growing shift toward the collaborative economy is leading businesses into unexpected adjacent spaces. For example, BMW operating its DriveNow program to rent electric vehicles directly to consumers in the US and Germany. Or GE partnering with invention community website Quirky to approve, manufacture, and sell new products invented by everyday people in the market.

The common thread is a method of thinking that is more than linear. It is circuitous, uncertain, and entrepreneurial. This method brings ideas from multiple categories or even industries together. It is a method I have often described as non-obvious.

Non-Obvious Thinking

Non-Obvious thinking requires embracing the art of curation as a skill that isn’t just useful for museums. It can help connect the dots between isolated practices, divisions, or product groups and break down silos to encourage collaboration.

So how do you get started? Imagine you’re participating in yet another brainstorm at work designed to come up with a basket of ideas. The next time you’re faced with an overflowing whiteboard, step back and encourage everyone to see the bigger picture.

Want to know the key to transforming how much value you get from your ideas? Stop focusing on having more of them. The leaders and teams who manage to execute on their best thinking and act have mastered the art of finding meaning and value in the connections between ideas they already have.

Curation can turn good ideas into great execution. Become a master of curation—download Curata’s eBook Curate Content Like a Boss: The Hands On Guide.

Earlier this month, we released our third annual industry study, Content Marketing Tactics Planner 2014. We surveyed over 500 marketers on their current content marketing practices and where they’re taking their strategy in 2014. The results revealed a focus on three major marketing strategy components: people, technology and the content mix. With 71 percent of marketers increasing their content marketing spend, we expect to see these organizations driving more high quality leads and building more brand awareness.

People

The Content Marketing Tactics Planner reported that 43 percent of organizations already have a content marketing lead in place. These executives dedicate their time solely to the development and management of content. Top-notch marketing organizations are also starting to grow their content teams. These teams are taking authority on creating and curating high quality, consistent content for their audiences. This type of in-house content production and distribution gets more relevant, valuable content out the door – driving leads and increasing customer engagement.

Technology

Most marketers find it difficult to feed the content beast a steady stream of content with a limited staff and budget. However, many are turning to content marketing specific technology to help them manage their content workflow, find reliable sources and create enough content on a regular basis – 56 percent to be exact! These best-in-class marketers using technology are better able to produce more content (using curation tools) and manage content production more efficiently (using content management tools). Technology allows content marketers to become thought leaders on their topics, engage more buyers and stay afloat in the flood of online content.

Content

Many content marketers are realizing that it’s nearly impossible to create 100 percent original content with limited resources. Curation and syndication are proving to be life savers when it comes to getting content out on time without overworking your writers or stretching your marketing budget with outsourcing. The Content Marketing Tactics Planner revealed that first-class content marketers are only creating 65 percent of content, with 25% being curated from reliable sources and 10 percent being syndicated from topic-related sources. This mix is perfect for supporting a limited staff and budget, publishing consistent content and becoming a go-to source of information for potential customers.

Want to learn more about what’s next for content marketing, where your strategy should be headed and what content tactics to implement? Download our latest eBook Content Marketing Tactics Planner 2014. 

2014 has lots of great things in store for your content marketing strategy, but like all good things, these rewards will take some elbow grease. (But not TOO much. Here’s how to work smarter; not harder.)

A few weeks ago, Content Marketing Institute (CMI) published their 2014 Content Marketing Predictions eBook, featuring 50 predictions from content thought leaders on what they think is next in 2014. Many of these thought leaders were right on par with where Curata sees content marketing going in the new year!

We have three New Year’s Resolutions for those of you hoping to whip your content marketing strategy into shape this year: (1) hire a team dedicated to content (2) integrate technology into your content workflow and (3) improve the quality of your content.

Resolution #1: Hire a Content Team

Joe Pulizzi, Founder at CMI, predicts that in 2014 “at least three Fortune 500 brands will hire a Chief Content Officer.” This is where we think content is headed. With the increasing significance of content marketing and the positive impact it’s having on businesses, it’s becoming more and more important to hire a content executive to manage your company’s editorial. The next step is to build a sustainable content team.

Content marketing is not a part-time job. It requires a team dedicated to creating and managing content that helps to boost brand awareness and thought leadership; ultimately driving qualified and sales ready leads. Hire a content marketing team that understands the editorial process AND your brand values to better drive team organization, content quality and leads.

Joakim Arhammar’s, Content Strategist at KW Digital, prediction aligns with this resolution as well. He predicts that in 2014, “More companies will hire a cross functional editor-in-chief

in charge of all editorial content produced by the company.” Decide what type of content leadership your organization your benefit from and build your team from there.

Robert Rose, Chief Strategist at CMI, predicts, “…2014 is the year that companies finally start to proactively and formally create internal organizations for the management of content marketing strategies.” The formation and development of a content marketing team will further the credibility of your organization’s content through a stable strategy and management process.

Resolution #2: Content Marketing Technology

Content marketing technology is becoming more and more critical as organizations try to differentiate themselves and stay ahead of their competitors. Without it, you may fall behind in 2014. (For a full list of content marketing technologies out there today, check out Content Marketing Tools: The Ultimate List by our CEO, Pawan Deshpande.)

Content software designed to help users distribute their content will become a necessity for organizations looking to stay ahead of the curve. Getting your content out to multiple channels with one-click can be a life saver when it comes to saving time. Publishing real-time content will keep the conversations going on your topic, position you as in-the-know and make your content a dependable source for your audience. Distribution is key when it comes to content. How can you get all your information to the right audience, in real-time AND in an organized fashion? By implementing content marketing technology, of course!

Joe Chernov, VP of Content at HubSpot predicts, “As brands begin to create a surfeit of content, the meritocracy (if one even exists) will shift from the “best” content to the smartest distribution.”

Jon Miller, VP of Product Marketing at Marketo, gave his predictions in his article, “When it Comes to Marketing in 2014, the Only Thing You Can Predict Is Yourself,” originally posted on Inc. “Today marketing is about conversations instead of campaigns, and that means being able to communicate with prospects and customers where they are and when they want to hear from you. Consumers today are better at filtering out noise than ever before, and your business relies on your having the right tools.” Having the right content marketing technology helps your business distribute to the right audience at the right time.

Making a resolution to put technology into action this year will also help you stay organized. Using a platform that allows you to find sources, organize and publish content in one place keeps your content developers coordinated and on schedule. The ability to crowd-source in a content marketing solution (like Curata’s bookmarklet, for example, which allows your team to add articles on the fly with one click from any page) can lead to more diversity and innovation in content as well.

Resolution #3: Quality Content

Now you have the people and the technology – great! Next it’s time for the most important content marketing resolution of 2014 – quality.

Quality doesn’t always mean quantity. In fact, best-in-class content marketers use the Content Marketing Pyramid to get the most mileage out of one piece of great content. Start with an eBook.

…Then turn that eBook into a webinar.

     …Create an infographic based on the same content.

        …Write a series of blog posts to break down the eBook content.

              …Curate articles on related information.

Get it? You can re-purpose content into more digestible forms to reach a wider audience and increase the buzz surrounding your topic.

Melissa Chang, President and CEO at PureB2B, has the same idea. Her prediction was that  “Marketers will begin to be smarter about creating one body of content and distributing it in a variety of short, easily digestible formats.”

You spent a lot of time working on that piece of long form content and there’s a lot of information in there. Don’t immediately move on to the next piece. Keep pumping out shorter, more digestible assets to accompany the research that you put a lot of time into. Besides, not everyone is going to read your eBook the same month it’s published. Promote it with short form content until you’ve saturated the market your audience is looking for information in. Think about your editorial calendar, if you launch the eBook this month, maybe launch a blog series next month. (Content marketing technology can also help you manage this as well.)

Best-in-class marketers are also upping the quality of their original content by supporting it with curated content. Curation of information from third party sources (i.e. thought leaders) adds credibility, variety and further establishes your organization as in-the-know. The ability to annotate curated pieces and add your own insights still allows you to display your expertise on your topic. It’s a great way to save time and resources with the need to publish fresh content every day.

Pawan Deshpande’s 2014 prediction is aligned with the quality aspect of your content marketing strategy. As content gains more attention, there is going to be a growing need for marketers to stay ahead of their competitors. “As a result, we will see a heavier emphasis on being unique, adding value, annotating, and ultimately the convergence of curated and created content.”

Ready to kick these New Year’s resolutions into gear? Download our latest eBook, Stop Egocentric Marketing for more information on how to publish a higher quality of content.

To see the full list of content marketing predictions for 2014, check out CMI’s eBook.

Content marketing is proving to be the MVP in today’s inbound marketing world, with 87 percent of today’s marketers implementing a content strategy to drive sales, establish thought leadership or increase brand engagement.

Journalism techniques and automation platforms that are processing and mining content are now fused together in this type of digital marketing. Because of this, marketers are exposed to content technology and intensive tasks such as content curation.

Tying these all together can get confusing, especially with complex terms such as semantic search, machine learning and natural language processing. However, the importance of learning these terms is growing tremendously for content marketers. Here’s why.

People want fresh, purposeful content and they want it in one convenient place. Let’s say that place is your website. Now, if they aren’t getting the content they want every day on your site, they’re going to look elsewhere – potentially disregarding you as a dependable source and giving a leg up to your competition. So, how can you get them to stick around? Upload original and curated content, fast.

Content marketers don’t always have the time, or resources, to call in an IT team. If you haven’t mastered the technology behind today’s digital marketing world, and can’t get to that IT resource in time, it can be a recipe for disaster. It’s imperative to understand what’s going on in these behind the scenes technologies to be the go-to source in your field.

Here are nine introductions to these intelligent technologies and how they can be implemented to advance your content marketing strategy and make you a better digital marketer.

Artificial Intelligence

Let’s start with the basics. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a broad term that describes intelligent software and computing, allowing a machine to “think” through programming specifications. Although the term is popularly relatable to robots or video games, AI stands as the backbone to many fields, such as natural language processing and sentiment analysis.  These technologies allow content marketers and their constituents to search for and discover relevant content, collect consumer data and explore predictive analytics, to name a few.

Machine Learning

Machine learning is a branch of AI where machines can learn from data and predict potential outcomes. For example, machine learning utilizes predictive analytics to score leads, much like Infer or Lattice Engines, or to learn what content is the most relevant, like Curata. This leverages the potential of big data and allows marketers to focus on the information, or leads, that best match their service.

Natural Language Processing

The science of intelligently understanding or generating “natural language”, the language that humans write, is known as natural language processing (NLP). When a user searches “How much is a cup of joe?” their search results will include coffee prices. Even though “Joe” is also a common name, it doesn’t fit within the context of the sentence. NLP aims to understand the structure of human linguistics, not just the words themselves.

This is useful for content marketers looking to dive into the world of mobile marketing as part of their online marketing plan. NLP can be used to help generate content through automatic summarization, like Summly, on mobile so that the information presented is intelligently discovered, purposeful and presented on one page. Users seeking content on mobile devices don’t have the leisure, or space, to click from tab to tab.

NLP can also be used to help marketers understand customer inquiries and better educate their users, leading to improved buyer satisfaction and content congruence. The NLP experts at Q-go have engineered a new FAQ practice, by matching all of the same versions of a searched question with the same answer, i.e. “I need to change the address on my account,” yields the same result as “How do I update my address?” Information can be more easily found and buyer frustrations, and company costs, are kept to a minimum.

Curata’s ability to surface and analyze content within specific user guidelines, as well as our software’s ability to “learn” to improve search performance can be attributed to NLP.

Machine Translation

This is automated content translation. You’ve most likely used the free translation resources offered by Google Translate or Systran. These machine translation tools can cost-effectively transfer content into new markets, international and domestic, reaching a larger audience and increasing potential for improved brand awareness.

Sentiment Analysis

Just as the name implies, sentiment analysis is an automated NLP task used to determine the feeling or “sentiment” of a piece of content. By understanding the sentiment of content posted by potential consumers on social media, marketers have the opportunity to adjust and present targeted information to those users. Crimson Hexagon has the ball rolling on this application by offering social data analytics to discover how people think by analyzing what they’re saying on the Internet.

Information Retrieval

In order to avoid an information overload, search results must be tapered and precise. Information retrieval is the field of retrieving the correct information given a query.  This is the science that Google and other search engines use to return the right content to the inquirer.

Without understanding how Google works, marketers can have a more difficult time optimizing content. A solid understanding of Google’s PageRank algorithm and search algorithm, most recent being Hummingbird, gives content marketers an exponentially better shot at reaching a wider audience. Content curation technologies, like Curata, use information retrieval to identify relevant content for consumers.

Document Clustering

The task behind document clustering includes the automatic grouping together of related content.

Document clustering proves itself useful for marketers because it often powers content recommendation engines to suggest other similar content for the searcher to read, improving the reach of content and usefulness for the user. This automation can also be used to suggest call to actions. BrightInfo modifies original content recommendations for individual site visitors, grouping your related information together to keep them around longer.

Collaborative Filtering

In short, collaborative filtering is a technique used to recommend content based on the content consumption habits of similar users. It filters through large amounts of data to obtain the most useful information available to the user. This technique is used by Netflix and Amazon – consumers who watched X also watched Y. Sound familiar?

This is helpful for marketers to understand how to optimize their content for sites that use collaborative filtering. It also proves as a great example of how content marketing and technology can be used to increase product awareness and drive sales.

Semantic Web/Semantic Search

Semantic web is a common data format for adding metadata to concepts and interpreting their relationship. This automation takes the intent of a query and polishes it to provide more customized search results. When a user searches “Veteran’s Day” on Google, not only does the date pop up at the top of the page in bold letters, but it is followed with a stream of history and news stories on the topic.

Semantic search is a beneficial tool for marketers because it can be used to find extended content related to the initial search, giving that associated content an expanded reach. However, the amount of human annotation required for semantic search is causing user interest to decline, as it cannot comprehensively “learn” from existing preferences to make the search process more efficient.

Now more than ever, it’s important to leverage the potential content marketing has for your business. Including content in your marketing strategy is essential to establishing thought leadership and staying ahead of the competition. In order to do this effectively, marketers must understand the technology behind the digital content they’re producing. This knowledge will make your content, and content curation, strategy more effective.

Ready to take the step towards content creation and technology integration? Download Curata’s 2013 Content Curation Look Book and see how these companies are using curation technology to enhance their content and take on the digital marketing world.

With all the content curation tools available to today’s marketers, it can be hard to decipher what makes one platform more valuable than another. This can vary depending on the field you want to share your expertise in, but having a curation strategy to compliment your original content can enhance your site traffic, improve SEO and reduce costs, among other benefits.

Ask yourself, are you marketing to consumers or other businesses? What does your marketing budget look like? Where do you want to share information? Curators have varying topics and audiences, but the backbone of every good content curation platform is formed by identifying, organizing, annotating, sharing and analyzing relevant content.

In order to understand which tool can give you the biggest lead over your competitors, make sure these four requirements are met.

1. Identify: Good Content Curation Means Finding and Discovering Relevant Content

 24×7

The content your curation platform is gathering should be relevant to your brand, or to the topic you wish to publish, and be collected automatically. In a B2B strategy, it’s a must have that this process is continuous – relevant content should be circulated into your platform 24 x 7, as rapidly as it is being published by the original source online. This drastically reduces the amount of time you spend searching for, and reading through, appropriate content.

 Variety

Diversity and relevance are the keys to engagement. An intelligent content curation platform pulls from a variety of sources (e.g., RSS feeds, social media sites, news sites without RSS feeds) with various content types. B2B brands may require a platform that acquires and processes text content, while User Generated Content (UGC) curators might prefer images, video and social content. Variety also means you should be able to input additional content outside of the platform. For example, using a bookmarklet provided as part of the content curation software.

 Relevant Content

Relevance ensures that the content matches the interests and needs of your target audience. A good content curation platform can discover purposeful content based upon information that you provide to it. A great content curation platform will learn from the content that you like and use, and bring even better content right to your dashboard, sorted by relevancy. (e.g., a self-learning, relevance engine)

If you’re curating 15 pieces of content a day, look for a platform with this ability to absorb your preferences and recommend articles. A business grade content curation platform will begin to realize your preferred topics and better populate your curated feed automatically, cutting back on time taken out of your day. On top of this, a business grade platform should allow you to choose what gets published on your site as well as how those articles are presented. This process just becomes aggregation if you aren’t able to handpick from the curated content you’re provided with.

2. Organize and Annotate: Become a Thought Leader, Ethically.

 Automatic Tagging

As your amount of curated content grows, it’s pertinent that your platform is helping to tag and organize content into relevant and easy to find categories, perhaps by date, or whichever structure is most helpful to your readers. The ability to quickly search through hundreds of indexed articles on your subject not only improves the longevity of your content, but makes you a thought leader and go-to source for readers. This process should be automatically built in with a business grade system along with the ability to archive old content.

 Contextualize

The best curation systems will enable you to easily, and ethically, add your own insights. (For more on ethical curation, check out Pawan Deshpande’s post, “What Marketer’s Need to Know About Ethical Curation.”)Incorporate your brand, and add value, into curated content by annotating and expanding upon various pieces. This is important for a B2B content strategy and can be done by writing your own original content or just simply commenting on existing curated content.

Providing your perspective with this additional context further explains to your audience that the article is important. The more influence your context provides, the more prone users will be to share your content or start conversations. Smart systems easily allow you to change titles and create thumbnails as well. If you’re using a content curation platform that doesn’t allow you to do this, it will be much harder to represent the voice of your brand.

 Attribution

If you want to become a respected curator, your content needs to provide clear attribution to the original author. Some platforms unethically duplicate entire articles with no credit given to the original source. This type of system leans more on the side of piracy and content scraping. An ethical platform shares content by reproducing a compelling sample and accrediting the source of the original content. Business grade platforms with built-in fair use features have automatic attribution, including clearly visible links and auto-fill of an author’s Twitter handle. This motivates readers to visit the original source and strengthens the credibility of the content. To learn more about ethical content curation, check out our latest eBook.

3. Share: Reach the Right Readers.

 Sharing

Although the first place you look in the morning may be your inbox, your co-worker next to you may be going straight to social media sites. Because digital consumption varies for everyone, curators have to make sure that content is distributed to each of these channels so that no matter how they’re consuming content, the right readers are reached. An intelligent curation platform with have a one touch publish to multiple destinations feature. This allows the user to share anywhere, anytime from the curation platform without the hassle of copy and pasting each piece of content to social feeds, blogs and websites. Time and money are saved, and marketing content effectively reaches the right audience. Also look for scheduling capabilities in a business grade platform – similar to a set and forget it approach where a marketer can curate and know that content is set to her specifications, where she wants it and when she wants it promoted.

Smart content curation platforms should also have an API that can allow you to expand your curating abilities to mobile or other mediums.

4. Analyze: Is it Working?

 Measure

In any part of content marketing, analyzing results is one of the most important steps. What works and what doesn’t? An intelligent content curation platform should measure and provide insight on what content is the most informative for users and which articles are getting the most hits. With this information, you will be able to adjust and provide the most beneficial content for users, bringing them back for more.

A platform without these must-haves won’t be giving you the full advantage that content curation can provide to marketers. Choosing the right curation platform can save your marketing team hours each day and make you a go-to source for readers. Stay of ahead of the competition and sign up for a quick Curata demo.

With all the hype around inbound marketing, you’d think that we are near the pinnacle of its acceptance and leverage.  However, we need to be cautious about letting hype outpace reality.  “Though inbound marketing is not as radical as it was 5 years ago, I still think we are in the early stages of the movement,” Shah says. “One of the interesting charts I like to look at is the Google Trends chart which shows interest in a term or phrase over time. If you compare inbound marketing to marketing automation (which has been around longer, and has had more companies pushing it), you notice that marketing automation has essentially been flat whereas inbound marketing has been taking off.” Refer to the following Google Trends chart: (blue=“marketing automation”; red=”inbound marketing”)

However, we are far from being in an inbound marketing bubble. “A bubble happens when people irrationally value something, thereby continuing to drive that value up,” Shah says. “In the case of inbound marketing, it is trackable and measurable. So, unlike traditional methods like billboards and print, businesses can actually know whether their inbound marketing efforts are working or not. As such, there’s little room for irrational values that make for a bubble.”

Who’s doing well at inbound marketing? Shah points to Moz.com as an example of a company that excels in this area. “They produce some of the industry’s best content, and are constantly innovating in terms of how they think about building their brand and community,” he says. “They’re one of the most ‘inbound-y’ companies I know.”

Boston-based cloud back-up service Kinvey is another (non-marketing) company whose content stands out. “They’re really good at creating content and tools for their target community (mobile developers),” Shah explains. “And, they have one of the best inbound marketers in the business in Joe Chernov.”

Like all good content marketers, Shah believes “the core of inbound marketing is creating value for your audience — before you to try to extract value from them.” This audience value can come from content creation, curation or syndication. However, what role does content curation really have in driving the success of content marketing?  “Given the increasing volumes of content that are out there, there’s value to really good curation, helping people find the content that will help them,” Shah says. “Search engines are great for finding things you’re looking for, but not great at discovering things that you should be looking for, but aren’t. That’s where curation can help.”

Check out Curata’s resources to learn more about the basics of content curation, more advanced techniques for curating content, or examples of best-in-class companies using curation today to complement their created, original content.

What does this have to do with content marketing? Well, as marketers, we are constantly struggling to keep up with the demands of creating new content for our content marketing initiatives; and sometimes it feels just like that fight to bike up a steep hill. . . or hitting Heartbreak Hill along the Boston Marathon route.  In fact, Curata’s research indicates that fueling our content marketing engine with enough content is the #1 challenge for content marketers. There’s got to be a better way to boost your content marketing efforts than simply hiring more content creators or outsourcing your blog writing, right? The good news is that there is a better way – content curation; and the better news is that only the best-in-class organizations have begun to take full advantage of content curation in addition to their content creation efforts.  This means that you have an opportunity to tap into the power of curation to differentiate your organization and better engage with your audience.

Curata’s definition of content curation is as follows:

Content curation is when a person consistently finds, curates and shares the most relevant and highest quality digital content on a specific topic for their target market.

There are a few key parts of this definition worth highlighting.

• A content curator is a “person” (or team).  Content curation cannot be performed solely by an algorithm.  It involves a person who is extremely knowledgeable in the specific domain, and can be selective and add value by creating content as part of the curation process.
• Content curation is something that needs to done “consistently”.  Other forms of offline curation can be performed once (such as curating an art gallery).  When it comes to online curation, a good content curator is continually and consistently staying on top of a topic area as a trusted resource for their audience.
• A curator is not simply regurgitating any content that they come across, but they are very discerning, discriminative, and selective in only sharing the “most relevant and highest quality” content. (e.g., text, images, video, etc.)
• A curator focuses on the needs of their “target market”.  They do not curate on all topics under the sun, or solely on the trendiest topics.  Instead, they specialize on a “specific topic” of importance to their audience, and over time the content marketer becomes an authority and perhaps even a thought leader and expert on that topic.

Now if we’re able to ” power up” our content marketing effort with curated content, then we can get to our destination more easily and quicker. (i.e., resulting in better engagement with buyers and more sales ready leads). And unlike using an electric bike which would lessen the positive health gains of your exercise routine, using content curation correctly can only improve the impact of your content marketing initiatives.

Here are a couple of resources to get you started on your content curation journey, and certainly don’t hesitate to contact us to learn how to boost your content marketing efforts even more with business grade curation software:

• How to Feed the Content Beast:  A nice and easy read about all of the different ways that you can, and should, curate content. (i.e,. for your blog, eBooks, videos, social media, etc.)
• Content Curation LookBook 2013:  A collection of some of the best content curators in action, including Adobe, IBM, the Oregon Wine Board, and others.

Without a clear call to action, readers won’t know what to do next, so they’ll often click over to another article and forget all about your content, however brilliant it might have been. Calls to action are often (but not always) placed at the bottom of a piece of content.

Here are some examples of calls to action on blogs and websites:

• Copyblogger’s curated roundup of writing and productivity links encourages the reader to follow @copyblogger on Twitter for more links.
• A post on Content Marketing Institute’s blog invites readers to download an ebook for more examples.
• This blog includes a CTA for Curata’s demo on the right hand side (as shown in the screenshot below):

When thinking about CTAs and how they work with curated content, the key is to focus on the annotation. You don’t want to touch the original writers content at all, since you’re linking and providing clear attribution. But when annotating, you have the ability to ask your readers to do something. Ask your readers opinion on the curated content, do they agree? Do they disagree?

Now that I’ve explained what a call to action is, and how to think about it in conjunction with curated content, here are some best practices for creating strong CTAs:

• Define your goal. Is it to get email signups, ebook downloads, social media shares, something else? Base your CTA on your goal and include a link so that the reader can take that next step without hunting around.

• Make it clear. Don’t make your customers guess what they should do next. Tell them! Most people understand that a hyperlink is intended for them to click, so it’s not necessary to say “Click here to download our ebook.” Instead, a simpler call action stating “Download our ebook” has more impact.

• Keep it short and actionable. Long calls to action can confuse readers or simply get ignored, while multiple calls to action can lower conversion rates. Also, if you’re putting a CTA in a button, long strings of text won’t have the same visual impact as a short CTA.

• Consider context and where the prospect is in the sales cycle. It doesn’t make sense for someone coming to your homepage for the first time to get a CTA about buying an expensive product. CTAs like “request a demo” or “learn more” might be more appropriate. CTAs for curated content on your own blog might assume more familiarity with your brand than CTAs in guest blogs or other content you place on third-party websites.

• Place your CTA strategically. If you’re writing a short snippet of content, it’s not recommended to include a CTA in the first initial view of that content because it takes away from the content itself. If the reader clicks to view a longer annotation on why the content is relevant, that might be a more appropriate place for a call to action. Share bars are another way to incorporate calls to action into your curated content and encourage readers to spread your content through social media or email.

• Test the placement and wording of calls to action. Consider doing A/B testing to pinpoint what works best for your audience.

And now, to follow our own advice … For more tips on curating content, download our ebook on How to Feed the Content Beast (without getting eaten alive).  

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.