Content curation is one of the most important online activities you can undertake to promote your personal brand.
Original Poster 3 points 3 years ago While I don't write fiction or make films, the videos have helped me become a better storyteller. I definitely attempt to avoid cliches and focus on a unique perspective. In his Content Unleashed webinar, “ Likeonomics' author Rohit Bhargava shared a variety of ways to avoid rookie mistakes and create (or curate) great content. With so much packed into the webinar, let’s focus on some of the most common content mistakes that Rohit schooled us to avoid. How to Avoid Five Deadly Content Mistakes.
Online marketers are increasingly using content marketing and curation instead of traditional advertising because it works and it’s cost-effective. Education is the new marketing.
Content curation is simply the act of filtering, organizing and sharing high-quality online content. The use of the term “curation” implies that you’ve sifted through lots of content to uncover the truly excellent material. Of course, curation is a highly subjective activity and not everyone will agree with your opinion about what constitutes great content. Therein lies the power of this approach.
Content curation – applying your personal filter to the universe of web content – is one of the most genuine ways of expressing your personal brand. When you filter information through the lens of what you know well combined with what you really like, the result is your brand fingerprint. This unique stream of information becomes a representation of you.
When you share your unique content stream, there are many advantages that accrue to you:
- People think you’re smart and credible.
- People ascribe to you the virtue of uncovering wisdom and meaning from the sea of information in which we are all drowning.
- People are truly grateful to you for sharing your hard work with them and they look for ways to give back.
- You are perceived as being digitally sophisticated.
- People get a better sense of who you are and what you believe in.
- All this familiarity and intimacy helps people trust you.
- Sharing gives you an opportunity to be top of mind on a regular basis.
If you’re in the business of advising, influencing, counseling, consulting or recommending ANYTHING to ANYONE, then the above list of benefits works in your favour. Big time.
Fine, you’re saying, these are all things I want, but how do I do this thing called content curation? Here are 5 easy steps to get you on your way:
1. Pick a distribution channel. Twitter is the channel of choice today. It’s easy to set up and easy for people to follow you and receive your feed. Google+ is quickly rising. Facebook updates can be an appropriate tool, as can LinkedIn status updates.
2. Define your brand. This is easier said than done. Start with some clear topics of interest such as your professional areas of knowledge or expertise and some of your hobbies or passions. You can also throw in a charitable issue that is near and dear to you. Avoid politics (unless you’re a politician) and religion (unless you’re a member of the clergy or a devout follower). Remember, you’re building a personal brand that will follow you around, so be smart about it. Think like a publicist or brand manager. What do you want people to think of when they think of you?
3. Find great content. At this point in time, it’s a numbers game. The more content you see – blog articles, comments, videos, infographics, reports, news stories, photos, other people’s Twitter feeds, etc. – the more likely you’ll find great stuff. Start with RSS subscriptions to blogs and new sites using Google Reader. Set up some Google Alerts based on key words and have the results emailed to you daily. Go looking for content based on your ideas.
4. Use power tools for sharing. The key to a successful personal branding strategy using content curation is to keep it personal and human. However, time is always a constraint with humanoid resources. Enter automation. Automating the filtering and selection of which content to share can be deadly because it’s never as good as a trained human eye. (If someone is aware of a tool out there that is as good as me at filtering content, please share.) Automating the knowledge contribution – that distinctly human contribution – can convey that you don’t care enough to consume the material yourself and share it. However, automating distribution is something entirely different. I happen to love Buffer – a tool that allows you to schedule tweets in the future then fill those slots with high quality, personally curated content. The Buffer plugin for Chrome and Firefox kick the whole curating process up a notch. There are a few other tools out there (Hootsuite, for one) for scheduling updates to LinkedIn and Facebook, but I’ve not yet found many that maintain the human touch that is so important.
5. Share frequently. On Twitter, you should space out your tweets through the day and night since your followers check in and out at different times and come from all over the world. On Facebook and LinkedIn, go with the flow and post at a frequency that you think your followers, friends and connections will want. Don’t be afraid to over-share a bit. It’s a self-regulating system and if your followers aren’t getting value they can leave. And they will. Don’t take it personally.
Content curation is the wave of the future and it will only increase in importance as a tool for education and branding as the volumes of content grow online.
3 Deadly Content Curation Sins To Avoid Someone
How to Fix Your Social Media Marketing
For the social media marketing sins that we’ve committed either knowingly or through ignorance, we marketers must atone by acknowledging them and making changes or amends. Here are ten social media marketing mistakes and how to fix them.
- Talking when we should be listening. To become an active social media participant, you must spend time observing the conversation to understand what’s important to the people on a specific social media network. FIX: Before you start actively posting on a new social media platform, listen to the conversation, the topics and the language people use. You must understand that social media isn’t about you.
- Presenting our corporate façade, but not speaking with a human voice. Social media platforms require participants to be real people. While this doesn’t mean that you have to tell all, you need to show your human side. FIX: Decide how your company, products and brand(s) will be presented on social media. How will you give them a human side. Understand that this doesn’t translate to telling everything.
- Focusing on building social media numbers, not considering the real people receiving our social media messages. It’s critical to remember that social media platforms are comprised of people with real lives and real emotions who may interpret your interactions differently than you intend. FIX: Determine how you will engage on social media and communicate with individuals. To this end, understand social media’s social responsibility.
- Shouting buy, buy, buy, not sharing fresh, useful information, both yours and other people’s. Bear in mind that social media isn’t a free platform for distributing more marketing messages. Social media is most effective when it shares content that participants find useful and supports the purchase process. FIX: Create social media content that’s targeted to specific user needs on a consistent basis. To this end, an editorial calendar is useful.
- Expecting participant’s comments on our social media executions, not responding or engaging on other platforms. Marketers single-mindedly focus on driving users to their special implementations. Yet, they overlook the power of being active on other areas of these platforms. FIX: Engage with other social media participants and companies on their social media implementations and blogs. This helps broaden your exposure and shows that you’re an active participant.
- Building a social media tribe for a major campaign, but ignoring it when it’s over. Social media is an on-going dialog that requires continual engagement. FIX: Keep interacting with your social media connections on a regular basis. This means putting out useful information and participating in chats and meetups.
- Hiring a kid who knows Facebook, not employing an experienced marketer who understands your products, brands and company. Social media is not a new flash-in-the-pan technology. It requires that businesses integrate their social media marketing into their regular activities. FIX: Build an internal team who understands your brand and company to engage on social media. If they need outside help, provide the training and support to coach them through. Remember that your brand must be integrated into everything you do on social media platforms.
- Asking employees to participate but not giving them the training, tools or guidelines they need. To protect your firm and your brand, you must give employees guidelines for using social media and how you want them to identify themselves. FIX: Create a set of social media guidelines to let employees know what they can do as employees and how to identify themselves when they’re participating on social media platforms their personal lives.
- Believing social media marketing grows by itself, but not actively marketing your social media efforts to build connections. While social media can support spreading information and content, like any other marketing campaign, social media requires promotion to get the word out. The most cost-effective options are using social media itself and your own internal communications.
- Assuming social media marketing can work but failing to provide sufficient budget and resources to support it. Contrary to what marketers want to believe, social media isn’t free, Some of the platforms are free or low cost but you still need staff to participate, content to distribute, and a budget to execute these strategies. FIX: Incorporate your social media efforts into your overall plans to ensure that you’re able to get your implementations to the next level. (Here’s what to do if you need to hide your social media budget.)
As a marketer, it’s important to assess how you’ve implemented social media marketing strategies and determine whether they’re aligned with the needs of the social media communities you’re participating in. If your executions only take a traditional push marketing approach, there’s a good chance you need to make amends.
What other social media sins would you add to this list and why are they important? How can you avoid these sins going forward?
Happy marketing,
Heidi Cohen
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