ItsDevelopmental - content + technology + people

Why it pays to curate content

This is an example of the value of curated content but before I start let me clear up the misleading title - no one paid me for the curation I am about to describe. It would have been nice but I actually wanted to do it anyway.

Also, let me get the downside of curation out of the way now and that is that it takes a lot of time. You can pull feeds of tagged or hastagged content but if you want to hand craft the content ie put it into a new bog post with headline, link, image and them let people know about it then it takes time. Be warned.

Oh, and I am awaiting access to Storify - I hear that could be good for this type of curation. I also did quite a lot of this sort of thing at Reed Business Information (where lots of my former colleagues do this kind of thing) where we used tools such as Coverit Live to curate content.

The curation project I am talking about here is this post that aggregates all the blog posts from the Tru London 3 recruiting unconference. All I have done is pulled together all the posts that have been written about the event (last count 52).

NOTE: if this event had NOT had a hashtag this piece of curation would have been a nightmare. As it was I followed the tag on Tweetdeck and double checked what I pulled from that with a Google search. 

Taking the time to create such a post brings these main benefits:

Good search rank

Your efforts will be rewarded with high placements in the search engine results page  - especially if you are curating event content and lots of people write about it. I curated posts from the Tru London 3 recruiting unconference. Search for 'Tru London 3' in Google and this is what you get.

Add value for other readers/writers

You provide value for those who attended the event, those who blogged about it and those who did not attend the event. You have all the content in one place. Looking at the referrals to the post I see it has been bookmarked in Delicious. By adding a line about the post your including you are also adding a filter - a help to users to let them know what that post is about.

Provide content for other services 

You enable others to use the links to help them produce newsletters or ebooks or whatever else they might use them for. You will get credited for your efforts (and complain if you don't) which is good for you - your efforts have not gone unnoticed. Far from it, you get known for the person who is helping create more value from the content

Build connections

You can provide commentary on your curation project via Twitter or other channels - see below for an example tweet. This enables you to build up connections and reinforce relationships (if you are already connected/have met face-to-face).

This is a straightforward example of how you can approach curation. It does take time but it does add value for others and anyone can do it (who cares enough to want to)- it is especially useful for events.

 

When was the last time B2B content made you laugh?

Just because it's business to business doesn't mean the content has to be serious all the time. Does it?

Of course not. Why? Because we are all human and we like to laugh and to be entertained. I think B2B journalists tend to forget that readers are human and do actually enjoy the lighter side of life.

I have been looking back at some of my B2B acievements and some of them make me smile - the Diet Coke sponsored IT hunk of the year at Computer Weekly, for example, makes me laugh and cringe in equal measure. To think we printed a gallery of 60 hopefuls. I won't go on.

But seriously, content that puts a smile on your face will probably be shared and is probably far more engaging than some journalists might think.

A good example of engaging and funny B2B content is Tim Relf's Field Day blog over at Farmers Weekly.

The Times Word Nerd - simple, shareable and fun way to promote your writers

Maybe I'm a sucker for this kind of thing, but I like the Times Word Nerd - it is a very simple tool that scans your tweets and gives you a score.

For me, it is:

• Quick
• Simple
• I got something back - ie a score and a 'label'
• It is shareable - easy to tweet your participation, share on Facebook etc

BUT, more importantly, Word Nerd is also helping push users to Times writers - see right side of the page . . .

There is a science behind Word Nerd, according to the Times . . .

‘Word Nerd’ tests the distinctiveness of the words you use on Twitter. It works by scanning your last 100 tweets, and comparing the words you have used with those stored in Google’s immense NGram database - a collection of several hundreds of thousands of words Google has gathered from its Books project.

Foreign words, non-words (like ‘Lolz!’), and ‘stop words’ - words like ‘the’ and ‘and’ that are used so frequently by everyone as to be irrelevant - are first removed from the list.

A custom algorithm then calculates the distinctiveness of the words you’ve used by examining how frequently each appears across the books from which Google’s NGram database is derived. (A word that appears more frequently scores lower, and vice versa.)

You are given an ‘overall score’ based on the distinctiveness of each individual word in your tweets, and ranked in one of four ‘performance quartiles’.

It seems to be a clever idea to attract readers to the Times and to its writers/columnists, as Jennifer Whitehead points out on the Wall blog.

Seems like it is taking off . . . 20,000-plus have taken it so far . . . or maybe a few hundred people keep trying to raise their score. Watch out for wordy tweets!

 

 

Content ideas #1 Personality tests

OK, so I thought I would start this series with something a bit left field. This is an example that I was responsible for so you can blame me . . .

A few years back I was working at Personnel Today, a website for HR professionals. We ran a story that the UK intelligence service MI5 was advertising for new agents. This seemed like a great opportunity to do something fun.

We managed to get in touch with a company that builds bespoke personality tests - Testsonthenet and with their help created a test, based on the job specs/traits listed in the job ads, to find out if our readers had what it took to become a secret agent.

It's a simple idea that worked well (it was a few years back so am going in search of the stats). It was fun, easy to do, interactive and was based on the give and get model of engagement ie the user gives some information, in this case answers a test, and they get a short report. We also incentivised it with a prize.

I have always wondered why jobs boards do not use this type of tool in their content marketing armoury - scrape the job ads (and do it over time to build a more comprehensive picture) and provide short tests to engage jobseekers eg Have you got what it takes to be a xxxxx?

[Picture credit: Mark Hillary]