Social Media

April 25, 2011 By Erik Deckers

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.

April 20, 2011 By Erik Deckers

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.

Make sure you know your stuff, AND that it works.

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:

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.
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.
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).
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.

Photo credit: Inky (Flickr)

April 19, 2011 By Erik Deckers

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?

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.

Photo credit: jekemp (Flickr)

April 13, 2011 By Erik Deckers

It’s Still Corporate Blogging, Not the Social Web

Debbie Weil doesn’t like the term “blog” anymore. She wants to do away with it.

I was listening to Debbie on Doug Karr’s Blog Talk Radio from the end of February, and she said she doesn’t like the term “blog” anymore. Rather, she wants to call it the “social web,” since blogging has grown beyond a string of chronologically arranged thoughts by writers who wanted to journal publicly (I’m paraphrasing).

I couldn’t disagree more.

While blogging may be old hat to people like Debbie, Doug, and me, it’s still new to a lot of businesspeople, who are only just now hearing about it. They’re only just now hearing about social media. They have just recently quit calling it “Facespace,” and realize there might be something to allowing their employees to contribute to their website.

Some of these guys even have a website. (No, not the horse.)

Keep in mind, the business community still hasn’t embraced the Internet as a whole. According to Formstack, only 45% of businesses in the US have a website.

That’s a friggin’ website! That’s not even a blog.

I built my first website in 1994. On Adobe PageMill. It was horrible. But we were one of the first businesses in our industry to have one, and I’ve been online ever since.

It’s 17 years later, and more than half of the businesses in this country still don’t have a website. They’re certainly not thinking about a blog. Maybe they’ve heard of it, maybe they know someone who’s got one. But they’re not seeing the need to have one.

And if that’s the case, they’re certainly not ready to embrace the social-ness of their website, and stop referring to it as a blog, since they don’t even have one.

Cast of Decoder Ring Theatre, an audio theatre company in Toronto. They're airing 6 of my radio scripts this summer on their podcast.

I’ve seen this “we’ve got to stop calling it by the old name because it’s not accurate anymore” phenomenon so many times before in so many different industries. Radio theatre is no longer called “radio theatre” anymore, it’s called “audio theatre.” Why? Because you don’t listen to these plays on the radio anymore, you listen to them via streaming audio, podcasts, mobile phones, CDs, and even tapes. Who the hell uses radio?

The audio theatre groups I’ve been a part of have been arguing about this for the last 10 years. (In fact, if I want to rile them up, I’ll bring it up again, like shaking a jar of angry bees just as they’re starting to calm down.) But the only people who care about the distinction are the practitioners themselves. Most of the non-audio theatre public still calls it “radio theatre,” because that’s the name they know. That’s how they refer to it when they talk about what they, their parents, or their grandparents listened to.

When I ask them about “audio theatre,” they stare at me blankly, until I say “that’s the new word for radio theatre.” Then they get it. Audio theatre’s biggest marketing blunder was when they stopped calling the art form what the typical listener was calling it, and I think it played a role in the diminished acceptance of the art form, even as audiobooks and other forms of audio entertainment and education have taken off.

If we want corporate blogging to continue to grow, we need to keep calling it a “blog” for as long as the business community has not fully embraced the Internet as a whole. Once everyone has a website and a blog, then I’ll call it a “social web.” Until then, I’m going to stick with the term the rest of the business community is already using. The social media pros can call it whatever they like.

Photo credit: pullarf (Flickr)

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