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The Difference Between Content Curation and Content Creation

A few weeks ago, I was participating on the #prwebchat when someone posed the question, “what’s the difference between content creation and content curation.”

I responded, “Creators write, curators collect & aggregate. Anyone can curate, not everyone can create.” Apparently this struck a chord, because a lot of people were responding and retweeting to what was just a throwaway line which made me realize there’s a lot more to this idea than I originally thought.

That's my friend Tania (R). She's a curator at the Ball State Museum of Art. She's the only curator I know.

Thanks to the blog tools and plug-ins (like Zemanta, which lets you link to related articles), Twitter lists, and RSS readers, anyone can compile a list of the interesting stuff. It’s a matter of identifying the most interesting articles from very popular or esoteric sources, and sharing them with your network.

But I don’t think content curation is that valuable. It’s important, to be sure. With a semi-decent RSS reader, anyone can be a content curator. But it’s not that valuable. Think of what the curators are actually collecting: content that someone else created.

Truman Capote once said of Jack Kerouac’s literary efforts, “That’s not writing. That’s typing.”

A stinging rebuttal to be sure, but it’s one that explains the difference between creation and curation.

Think of the effort that goes into creating a single blog post. There’s research to be read, surveys to be compiled, and opinions to be formed. And then you have to be able to present it in a way that not only flows logically, but is compelling to readers.

Still, curators cannot exist without creators to provide them with material to share; creators rely on curators to make sure their stuff is shared. So I can’t entirely bag on the curators, since 1) I rely on them, and 2) I’m trying to be one myself too.

Occasionally you’ll get creators who can handle their own curation — and that’s what social media has done for us — but we always get a boost when other people do some curation for us. For example, I always see a huge traffic spike whenever Jason Falls shares my blog posts with his readers. And Jason is a great example of someone who both curates and creates in order to provide value to his network.

So which are you? Are you creating, curating, or doing both? Is one more important than the other, or are they equally necessary? Can content creation actually live without curation? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available on Amazon.com, as well as at Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy.

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PR & Marketing Agencies, Know Your Stuff Before You Offer Social Media

I’m both heartened and worried by the number of PR and marketing agencies that are offering social media.

I’m heartened, because it means the business world is that much closer to accepting social media as a real form of communication. It means they know it’s going to be around for the long haul.

I’m worried, because a lot of these agencies don’t even understand it They just threw their new junior account exec at it because she has a Facebook page and they think that means she knows enough to run a large-scale campaign for them.

A lot of social media professionals just come off as snake oil salesmen, like this guy.
Make sure you know your stuff, AND that it works.

Social media is not an entry-level position, people. It’s not something you turn over to the brand new employee who has never even run a traditional campaign. And it’s definitely not something an agency should try to learn on a client’s dime.

NOTE: This is not to say that entry-level people shouldn’t do social or that PR or marketing agencies shouldn’t get into it at all They absolutely should. But, your experience needs to be more than resuscitating the nearly-dead Twitter account you started six months ago with the “Still trying to figure this twitter thing out. Does this make me a twit?” tweet.

I’ve seen a number of agencies now that are starting to offer social media as part of their service offerings, but I think they’re out of their element, and are only going to screw it up.. For one thing, their Twitter accounts are less than six months old. The agency accounts have fewer than 500 followers, and the employee accounts are all hovering around 100, and are filled with retweets from the agency account.

That is not social media experience. Not enough to start providing services for clients.

Strong social media experience means running campaigns where you can measure the ROI and show how much money you made. Strong social media experience means having more than 2,000 followers, because you know the ethical way to break past Twitter’s 2,000 following cap. Strong social media experience means you have a blog that’s more than a year old, and it’s filled with new social media knowledge and opinions, because you publish 2 – 5 times per week, not per quarter.

Look, I know how to write a press release, and I know how to pick up the phone and individually pitch journalists and bloggers. (Jason Falls would say that puts me ahead of the game for knowing that.) I even know how to do good TV and radio interviews. But that doesn’t make me a PR expert.

If I wanted to open a PR agency, I could probably do a passable job. I could fool a couple of small clients, and learn on their dime. But I wouldn’t be giving them the best I could be (or, if I was, the best I could be wouldn’t be good enough).

If you’re in PR or marketing, and you want to offer social media to your clients, you need to do a few things before you ever you’re ready to start:

  1. Put together a team of people who are responsible for social media, not just one person. You at least need someone who can write and someone who knows how to read analytics and research. You also need one person who will be responsible for it all. This is not a time for committees and democracy. You need a social media account executive to take charge.
  2. Understand that social media is as much about sales and customer service as it is about marketing and PR. If you’re going to manage social media for a client, you need someone who can sell and deal with problems.
  3. You need to invest heavily in the ongoing education of your social media team. Require them to read industry blogs, read or listen to social media books, attend social media networking meetings, and pay for any learning they can get their hands on. I met an advertising agency that pays its staff to read books and give book reports to the rest of the agency at a monthly meeting. They pay $25 per book read (they even have a copy of Branding Yourself (affiliate link) in their library).
  4. Send your social media team to at least one conference a year, if not two or three. Better yet, have them learn enough so they can present at those conferences. The great thing about being a presenter is you have to know more than your audience, which means they have to stay on the cutting edge.

If you’re going to do social media, do it right. You can’t sign up for a new Facebook account and pronounce yourself a social media consultant any more than you can record a video on your mobile phone and call yourself a video production house. Take the time to learn as much as you can before you offer it. Don’t feel like you have to rush. There are plenty of clients available, and they’ll still be there in a year or two when today’s agencies are being fired by their clients for bad social media execution.

My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available on Amazon.com, as well as at Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy.

Photo credit: Inky (Flickr)

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Shut Up and Ship It!

My friend, Keith, is pulling his hair out.

Keith works at a university, in a particular department, that wants to try social media. So they’ve created a committee to look at what they should do on social media. They’ve been working for about six months, and they haven’t decided a single thing.

They’re still wrestling with all the ‘what if’ questions. What if someone says something bad about us? What if we say something wrong? What if, what if, what if?

Real artists ship.

Six months.

I loved Seth Godin’s statement in Linchpin (affiliate link), “Real Artists Ship.”

That means you don’t worry about perfect, you worry about done. You don’t worry about 100%, you ship at 80%, and then fix it.

I know people who are waiting on projects, and won’t launch them until everything is done just right. One friend waited nearly 9 months before he launched a blog, because everything had to be just right, and now he’s not doing very much with it.

Shipping doesn’t mean you can do something half-assed or incomplete, but it means you can be a little less than finished and get your product or service out in front of your customers. It means you can create your Twitter account and start tweeting before you fully understand how to use it.

Real artists ship because they understand that all the work they put into their latest offering is going to change as soon as they ship, because their customers are going to have something to say back. Changes are going to happen, things are going to be fixed or dropped, and the last 10% you spent 3 months working on was completely ignored by everyone.

For Keith and his committee, they just need ship. Do something, and see what happens. Start a Twitter account, and then decide what to do if someone says something bad about you. Start the account, and then fix the thing that goes wrong. Start it, measure it, and then fix it.

But for the love of God, ship it. Remember, real artists ship. The timid, the perfectionists, and the procrastinators are still fixing, tweaking, and perfecting. But shippers win, the timid, well, don’t.

My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available on Amazon.com, as well as at Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy.

Photo credit: jekemp (Flickr)

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Personal Branding Twitter Chat on Friday, April 29 at 12 noon EDT

I’m hosting my first Twitter chat on personal branding next week.

I participated in my first #PRWebChat last week, and had such a good time talking with other PR professionals that I want to host my own Twitter chat. In fact, I have to thank @prweb for hosting this, and hope they will join me on mine.

I will be hosting the first personal branding chat — use the hashtag #PBchat —on Friday, April 29 at 12 noon EDT. (It’s the day after #PRWebChat’s discussion with Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz — I know where I’m going to be that day!)

The easiest way to participate is to go to TweetChat.com, sign in using your Twitter account, and then enter pbchat in the hashtag window at the top of the page.

Enter "pbchat" into the text box at the top of the window.

I will be posting pre-written questions about every 10 minutes, all about personal branding, and you can answer, discuss, debate, provide tips, or even ask your own questions. My questions are just guidelines, but you’ll be creating the conversation.

Whether it’s questions about job searching, networking, career advice, or even just growing your personal brand online and offline, we’ll be asking and answering over the lunch hour on April 29. (And if there’s enough interest from my West Coast friends, we’ll do one for them as well, at 12 noon PDT.)

So, please block out the time on your calendar, and join us for as long as you can.

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Can Your Company Survive Without a Corporate Blog?

Does your company need a corporate blog if it’s going to survive the next 10 years?

Maybe not.

Will your company thrive and grow if you don’t have one?

Maybe not.

A corporate blog is a great way for companies to share information with their customers and vendors. It’s a great way to promote their products, answer customer questions, make special announcements, and even sell to new customers.

A corporate blog will help your company appear at the top of the search engine rankings — there are roughly 88 billion Google searches per month. How many of those are you missing out on? — and will give you a place to send your customers when you interact with them through social media marketing. (Uh, you are using social media to talk to your customers, aren’t you?)

People are reading blogs whether they realize it or not. In fact, Technorati estimates that 76% of active Internet users are reading a blog of some sort or another. I think that number may even be higher, because so many websites, online newspapers, and landing pages are actually blog posts, and not regular html pages. People visit the blog thinking they’re finding a page or article, but in actuality are reading a regular old blog post.

The great thing about blogging is that anyone can do it. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Fortune 500 company with a marketing budget measured in the hundreds of thousands, or a one person operation whose total sales are measured in the tens of thousands. At its very core, its very essence, a corporate blog is just a company talking to its customers about the things that matter to the customers.

The blog is the great marketing equalizer. It levels the playing field between big and small companies. I’ve seen small companies with more passion than money turn out great blogs that are well-written and well-received. I’ve seen huge companies with lots of money and personnel that create crappy blogs that are poorly written piles of jargon-filled manure.

A corporate blog can cost thousands of dollars in design, content creation, and web hosting, or it can be one of the many free options hosted on someone else’s server. The expensive blogs don’t always do better, and the free blogs are not always lacking in quality.

What matters is the content and whether you’re creating enough of it.

So will your company survive without a corporate blog? Maybe it will.

But it will certainly be outclassed and outpaced by the companies that do have one.

My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available on Amazon.com, as well as at Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy.

Photo credit: Coda (Flickr)

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Four Ways a Corporate Blog Can Help Your Company Increase Profits

A corporate blog is more than just a company diary where someone from marketing talks about the latest trade show. A corporate blog is a support tool that can lighten the load of several different departments within your company. Here are four ways a corporate blog can help your company.

1. Reduce Marketing Costs and Improve Reach

In the past, Marketing put a lot of time and money into developing, creating, and printing new sales literature and brochures. But once the specs changed on a particular product you got a new area code (it happened to my company in 2002), or you made an egregious error (guilty), the remaining 8,500 copies of the brochures were rendered obsolete, or you had to hand correct every single one of them with a black marker.

A blog can replace a lot of sales brochures and literature, introducing customers to the new product, letting them read the new specs, and finding out the latest features and prices. A blog will also let you show new photos and video demonstrations, tell people about the upcoming trade show or the show you just finished, or even post a video of the CEO talk about the product and what it means for the industry.

By turning to electronic publishing, you can reduce printing costs, reduce costs per lead, and ultimately, costs per sales.

2. Serve as a Newsroom

The PR department spends a lot of time chasing down the industry media or traditional media, trying to get them to talk about your latest product or service. The problem is, the media isn’t always willing to listen, or they can only publish on their own schedule, not yours. But by posting news articles to your website, you become the news source, not the traditional or industry media.

A blog will let you disseminate the latest news to your customers, helping your most loyal customers not only read what you’re up to, they can share it with their readers, which promotes your news as well. The media can use your blog as an information-gathering source as well. This lets them see what you’re doing, rather than waiting for a press release. They can find your press releases, product photos, and HD video clips, and get everything they need with ease. They can also get further information and details without calling your PR person while she’s on vacation and unavailable.

3. Sell to New Customers

Corporate blogging can greatly benefit the sales department, because salespeople can talk about the benefits of the new product, use blog posts to answer frequently asked sales questions, and preemptively overcome any objections potential customers may have.

While this won’t answer every question and objection for every customer, you’ll find that it cuts down on the time per sale. When I started selling on the Internet in the late-90s, I found I had cut my time per sales call down from 40 minutes to 10 minutes just because of the information I was putting on my website.

Again, this is where video demonstrations can be invaluable to potential customers. This also helps improve search engine rankings, so your site is more easily found during web searches, which means more customers could find you, which in turn means means more sales.

4. Provide 24/7 Customer Service

If you have a product or service that has frequent questions, don’t just rely on an FAQ section. Turn your blog into a knowledge center, and ask your customer service reps to write posts that answer those frequent questions. Make them as easy to find as possible (proper keyword tagging, links from the FAQ page, or even listing them in your “popular posts.”

Ask other customers to leave comments on individual posts about different fixes and solutions they’ve found as well. Incorporate their answers into the official blog posts to continue the discussion, and to make your customers feel like they’re contributing.

Finally, customers can search your website and find in-depth answers to questions they have. This saves phone calls about basic constantly-asked questions, which means you can help reduce customer service costs.