Getting Curation Right

For a while, "Everyone's a publisher now" was the refrain in social media / marketing / content marketing / whatever the kids are calling all that these days.That's slowly morphed into "Curate all the things!" or something along those lines, as more and more people recognized it was far easier to curate content than come up with their own stuff.The point being, if we want people to come to our site - or even just to find it in the first place - we need to be adding (relevant) content to the site that would make them interested in visiting.Some strive to achieve that by turning their websites into an automation factory, with all the thought and relevance of something that has no thought and relevance.When Paper.li first came out, I was all excited - someone was making a newspaper out of Twitter!Then I remembered there was a reason newspapers were failing. And Paper.li was even worse, because it was fully automated and really had nothing to do with anything except giving people a way to spam their friends and drive traffic to Paper.li. It's aggregation, pure and simple. And there's nothing really wrong with aggregation in and of itself. It's fine. But don't pretend that's curation, because it's not.Curation requires thought. It requires a person to select content that's going to be included. It may automate the process - I personally love using IFTTT as part of the curation process, but just as a means of getting the content from one place to another without all sorts of cutting and pasting. And it really can add value - it adds depth and context, when done right. It enables you to share all the things that inspired you to create whatever it is you've created and enabling those who pay attention to you learn more.What inspired today's post, in fact, was a blog post from Sean Clark about Matt Cutts giving the thumbs up to content curation. The video at the end of Sean's post has Matt (the head of Google's Anti-Spam team) explaining that there's a spectrum of content, and there's room for curation in there if it's not automated and it truly brings value.So, no automated page on your site about "red widgets," as Matt explains, but if you were to gather together links to the best content about red widgets, knock yourself out.The problem is, people seem to always want to find the easy way to do things. There's nothing wrong with looking for ways to simplify how you go about your work. I used to subscribe to many blogs on Google Reader, for example, and have an IFTTT recipe set up where I could star items there, and they'd be moved to my Buffer App. I'd then go to Buffer and clean up the tweet before it was sent out.The transfer of the link was automated. The tweeting out was automated. But the actual decision on what to share and the wording I used to share it was mine. I was still choosing what I wanted to share and how. Same with how I use Plugg.io - I follow several blogs by RSS there, choose the articles I want to share and even have automated rules that add the appropriate Twitter handles. But I still often go in and adjust the text when necessary and actually select what I'm sharing.The automation simplifies, but does not do the hard work of curation, which is the important part, anyway.I gave a presentation in June at SMX Advanced in Seattle on the subject of curation, sharing my picks for the best curation tools. Tell me which tools you like best in the comments! Photo by MyEyeSees via Flickr Creative Commons.