Cheers,
Pawan

Marcus, I have seen you speak several times before, and you certainly are a preacher of providing value and not just talking about yourself — so I was surprised to see your blog post proclaiming it as a waste of time. Curation lets you take that a step further by bringing other voices into the mix, not just your own.

Jay, I am with you that my headline is sensationalist, but no more so than the title of Marcus’s original post.

Curation is certainly abused online as you describe, borderlining on aggregation rather than curation. Along those lines, I have published a 30+ page eBook on just this topic on how to do it right (and ethically) so you are curating, and not regurgitating: /resources/ebooks/content-marketing-done-right/

You lost all credibility with me when you wrote “Sheridan comes from the world view that your marketing must be all about me, me, me.” and I had to stop reading. You clearly know NOTHING about the teachings of The Sales Lion, therefor anything else you had to say I really wasn’t listening.

It is great that you are being controversial yourself though.

Marcus is such a great teacher, that I was actually goggling to reference one of his blogs for a fellow colleague when I saw your article come up. Clever title, horrible arguments against a man who gets noticed from the NY Times for his ability, and asked to speak all over the world to share his knowledge.

Bad move on your part.

Pawan and Curata Team,

I’m not sure this totally captures the way Marcus has historically done and continues to do marketing, and I think if pressed, you’d agree a lot of the stuff above was pulled out of context or interpreted in ways that create a well-executed sensational post with a sensational headline to draw views to your blog. (Hey, I’m in this game too – I get it, we’ve all done it.)

For example, I disagree with your assessment that Marcus is taking a stance to be ego-centric or company-centric by creating helpful content. Biased? Definitely. But company or product or ego-centric? Not a chance. The goal is to be helpful and use your worldview to offer advice. The advice always ties to the product, because you believe your product (like your content) solves a problem.

Also, anyone who’s ever produced content is me-first. Including Curata. Including HubSpot. Including Mom’s Basement Blogger with 10 viewers. FOX News, CNN, ESPN, etc. etc. But biased isn’t evil – you want to align your “why” and your beliefs with your buyers (and, yes, to get found first over competitors). We believe in inbound marketing, and that’s our bias. But we by no means want to put our product or brand first – we want to help educate and entertain with our content.

Now, I’m Italian American, so everything comes back to food: curation is like fast food. It’s fine sometimes, home cooked meals are better, you wouldn’t want to gorge on the stuff, and most people would probably admit that, yeah, it’s not THAT great. They’re doing it as an alternative, because it’s quicker and easier than cooking from scratch. (Or maybe microwavable dinners is better and aggregation is fast food? I haven’t heard anyone try to draw the line like that, and I think a lot of marketers lump the two together — maybe that’s the issue leading to so much lazy curation?)

Is curation a bad strategy? No, can’t be that black and white with an answer. Can you do it well? Sure. (noshon.it comes to mind as a good example – they curate awesome, unique recipes from around the web and put it into a really great newsletter for you). But mostly, curation is abused and executed in lazy, redundant, low-value ways for an audience.

Everything in moderation, friends. Including fast food.