How Effective Curation Scores Rankings and Social Buzz

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The Curation Analytics Equation Diagram
The Curation Analytics Equation Diagram (Photo credit: Mark Fidelman)

There’s a tiny contingent of bloggers espousing the death of curation and how curation doesn’t work.  I’ve been slipped some examples from readers in the last week since the launch of CurationSoft 3.0.

Because of articles like this and this, people are getting confused about what curation is, and how it is done properly to bring more search and social traffic.  Many are starting to believe that curation actually doesn’t work at all, much to the surprise of people like me and the successful curators who exist in every imaginable market.

The problem with anti-curation argument is that it is based on a complete misunderstanding of what professional curation actually is.

Effective curation is…

A post like this one:  Fall 2013 Ultimate Guide To Google Plus

Components of the above post include:

1)  Commentary from the author that puts the curated content and links into a new context.

The new context being that there are a lot of older guides to Google+ out there that don’t match up with all the new stuff G+ has developed and the social network has morphed into.  Context:  It’s time for a new guide to Google+ and here are all the resources you should follow to get up to speed on everything G+ can do to help with search rankings, engagement, and Circle count.  (Followers)

2)  Key experts are cited in the piece to gain crucial social buzz and exposure on G+.  Curating experts’ content leads to them being grateful and passing the link to the Guide in front of everyone who follows them.

3)  Diverse content:  Videos, articles, images, and lists gleaned from the web with the help of CurationSoft, plus a good understanding of the market’s movers and shakers on the topic of Google+ marketing.  (I know the market well enough to know where to start looking for all the components of a properly curated article on Google+.)

4)  Follow up:  Once the post was done, the more extensive work had just begun.  That is getting the conversation started in comments and then nurturing it and keeping it going as long as people are willing to share, +1, and discuss the piece.  This lasted for 2 weeks after the example post above was published.

5)  Real conversation ensues, real readers appreciate the effort and consider it a valuable resource (sharing it freely), and obviously, Google loves the post in search.

It is now easy to see what the difference between content “puking” aggregation and real curation is.  It is also easy to understand why some are bad mouthing curation, despite the obvious success stories all over the web from the smallest to the very largest sites who use it every day.

Curation is not simply gathering links, videos, pictures and other content around a single keyword and puking it all onto a page.  No expert in content marketing would be caught dead defining it this way.  Which is why considering the source is of crucial importance when it comes to curation do’s and don’ts.

Moral of the story… 

When someone says curation doesn’t work and Google hates it, make sure you take a look to see if they even did it right before you decide your next move.  99.9% of the time, the person who declares something “dead,” it simply means they don’t understand what it is in the first place.  If you don’t know what curation is, you don’t have the authority to call it dead.

People who know what real curation best practices are… (follow links on names for their Google+ profiles)

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