Stephen Colbert knows “great and greatest” ideas when he sees them.
According to my friends at Econsultancy, it’s tied for Greatest. Chris Lake published a fantastic article today outlining 17 steps to curating killer content.
I follow Econsultancy on Twitter and there have been very few posts that I haven’t clicked through. Interestingly, few of them have been linked to their own content.
Chris wrote about this very concept, commonly known as the 70/30 rule. It goes like this:
“70% of content [should be] curated, 30% branded. Why? Because the rest-of-the-world is at least 70% more interesting than your brand; and, promoting external content builds social capital, makes grateful fans of influencers.”
That quote is from Todd Defren and is a great rule to live by. Now I’m not going to get into the 17 steps Chris lays out in his post, but I do want to add a couple of ideas to it.
Chris mentions Google Reader, RSS feeds and Twitter lists as great ways of quickly finding good content. I would also add the Zite app to your list of tools. It’s available for iOS and Android. It lets you customize the content you read by keyword, author and blog.
Ecconsultancy, based in London, is a great resource for content about digital marketing and e-commerce
But you should think before you share, because some of these articles get shared hundreds of times as soon as they are published. Chris says that he doesn’t link to Mashable articles because so many people share them and he doesn’t want to “sound like a broken record”.
So how do you avoid sounding like a broken record? The article suggests that you find a niche and fill it. If you look at my Twitter feed you will see that most of the content I post or retweet deals with social media and digital marketing strategies. But you don’t have to be a nerd like Chris or me to do this.
Let’s say you own a bike shop. Try to find an hour out of your day to scan your preferred content curation platform (you have one now, right?). Then, jump on Buffer, load up your tweets, then set it and forget it.
There are two platforms to publish that content that I would recommend: paper.li and Springpad. I haven’t used paper.li but I just got an account today so I will be testing the waters soon. Springpad is like Pinterest for content. Springpad lets you post photos, videos, articles and even write notes to share with people. But here’s what I really like about Springpad (other than its killer mobile app): collaboration. You’re a business owner. You don’t have the time to curate a ton of content during the day. So why not collaborate with other people? Springpad allows you to open it up to other users to add content to your notebook. So not only will you share things quickly and easily, you can also see what other people are reading. And guess what? As a business owner, you will be able to see what your customers and other competitors are thinking about and reading about.
So content curation comes down to curating and sharing. That’s it. It can be time consuming but if you use some of the tools listed above and the ones that Chris talked about, you should be in good shape. So good luck and happy curating!
Did I miss something? Did you love Chris’ article as much as I did? Let’s chat in the comments.
Brandon Manson 