Content Curation: There's content, content all around, but not a drop of useful information. That's how it feels sometimes when you search the web only to find yourself drowning in pieces that seem to lack the statistics, facts, or perspective you need. Curated content may be the answer. As the amount of information online becomes vast due to ever increasing legions of bloggers, social media network users, and the like; meaningful content is easily lost amid swells of drivel.
What Is Curated Content?
To answer the question of who needs content curation and why, first it's necessary to define the broad range of digital ephemera referred to as content:
Content includes blog posts, bottomless pools of statistics, catalog listings, news articles and broadcasts, photographs, publications about scientific research, memes, videos, gifs, and many other kinds of information.
You can think of a content curator as a hunter-gatherer or, on a loftier plane, a librarian. Although some job listings for content curators include the duty of producing information -- for example, in the form of company blog and social media posts -- EContent magazine says true content curation involves amassing and organizing digital information rather than producing it.
Who Hires Content Curators?
Look at the listings for content curators on behemoth job portals and you discover that some of these positions fit the magazine's definition. However, others are hybrid situations involving production -- such as blogging online -- as well as organization of content.
A quick scan of job listings may turn up jobs with:
- Companies that sell the work of creatives such as photographers
- Merchants that want to dominate a particular niche of commerce
- Popular publishers that need help tracking their publications that go viral
- News aggregators that require massive searches for top stories and
- Nonprofits that want to develop awareness of their causes in order to raise funding.
Why Content Curation Is Necessary
Content curators make digital information navigable. That's important for-profit, not-for-profit and nonprofit organizations that all want to build social presence, extend reach, make sales and gain what do-gooders and think tanks call "thought leadership." Easily searchable information makes these objectives more achievable.
Some content curation jobs focus on triaging incoming information, such as positions in the digital departments of public libraries. Others involve raising an organization's profile by channeling streams of outgoing information -- including annual reports, blogs, white papers, and public relations announcements -- to make it more accessible. Many involve identifying and managing information for ease of access both by internal and external users.
Nonprofit guru Beth Kanter says that we now live in a "world of content abundance" in which skilled curators are necessary not only to find quality information but also to make sense of it and determine effective channels for sharing it.
Kanter says that effective sharing requires offering "the best nuggets of content to your audience in a format that they can easily digest." She also notes that good curation maps the way for users to apply content. Consequently, one might say that content curators are becoming the cartographers of the Internet.
Do I Need a Content Curation Expert?
Wondering how blogging and content curation figure in today's workplace and job market? Or if your business is truly in need of one? Contact us at Artisan Talent today. We can help!
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