In today's Internet, social media driven marketing and information world it seems that tools and practices are coming at us a break neck pace. Every day brings a new latest and greatest site or tool that we are urged to utilize. Even the way we go about promoting ourselves, or our business has changed greatly over the last few years. For me personally I enjoy trying new things, I love being asked to get in on beta projects, some I continue to use, some sit in the tool bar until I finally delete.
Recently I have been having some fun and success with some content curation sites, curation is the act of preserving and maintaining information. Much like the curator of a museum who collects, catalogs, and maintains museum items, there is a growing use of digital curation happening today. What is interesting about digital content curation is that with the sites I am going to discuss the boundaries for collecting are limitless, one can pull from anywhere on the Internet. Through the use of hash tags (#), keywords etc you can really pinpoint your topic or subject and pull information from the entire Internet.
Lets take a look at some of these tools/sites. I will be referring to how I personally use each site, that by no means it is the best way, we all have our own ways of doing things, I urge you all to explore, experiment and develop your own manner of utilizing these tools.
Image via CrunchBase
Storify, Scoopit, paper.li to name a few.
Storify: I like to use Storify to compile "highlights" from twitter chats. There is so much information being shared and presented during a twitter chat it is impossible to capture all of it. However, I go back the next morning and through the use of hash tags, I isolate all the tweets that were posted during the previous nights chat with the appropriate hash tag to that chat. They show up on the right hand side of my screen and I can, at my pace go through and pick out the outstanding tweets from the night and just drag to the left. It is easy and I do it in a manner that keeps with the time line of the discussion. It compresses everything into one neat package. It is a great tool to get highlighted tweets out to those that were involved. It also gives the option to notify the author that their tweet was quoted in the storify project. A very handy tool.
Paper.li: This is a great tool to create your own newspaper like publication. Using hash tags and keywords I direct the paper.li crawlers to find information about particular topics. Paper.li utilizes Twitter, Facebook, and RSS feeds to gather the information.
Image by paulamarttila via Flickr
You provide the subjects/topics and paper.li does the rest. I personally have a weekly publication. I have had a daily, but with all the other information sharing options out there, I think a weekly is sufficient.
Scoop.it: To me Scoop.it is a perfect compilation of both Storify and paper.li.
Image by theunquietlibrary via Flick
You compile information much the way Storify does, and it is presented in a nice "publication" like manner,one of the things that I really like about Scoop.it is, besides FB & Twitter, it also integrates with G+, Tumblr, Linkedin, and Wordpress. That really opens things up. I use Scoop.it to present information in a report manner, such as "Social Media and it's growing impact on our daily lives", you pick the subject, curate, and share. Scoop.it is more visual than Storify, and more verbiage than paper.li in it's presentation. I use Scoop.it to gather information on very specific subjects and title it in a neat package for sharing.
Lets look at some applications of these sites, any business that sells anything can curate information on a particular area, product etc and create a way to present that information to their customers/clients in a informative, pleasing manner. What about information on a particular company name, isolate the searches to that company name and everything that was ever written relating to that name is there for the taking, might be a good way to gather testimonials. What about a Realtor that gets a lead call, you get the email address, you know the area that the potential client is looking in. You hang up the phone, and by using one, two, or all three sites, put together a nicely packaged, information rich project for sharing with the potential client, and you can isolate it to just the area or topic they are interested in.
The applications of such tools are limitless, I could write 25 - 30 pages of ideas, but we all do things differently, the important thing is to get involved, check it out, and put it to good use for you.
* I wanted to make you aware of another curation site, Dashter is also one to check out, I am not familiar enough with Dashter and did not feel I could offer a competent opinion on it. I will say that I have heard great things about it, and will be diving in myself in the near future.
** There are many others out there as well, these are just three that I use regularly, explore for more.
Related articles- Four Popular Content Curation Tools (adrsocialmedia.wordpress.com)
- Curation is the New Creation (timberry.bplans.com)
- Storify gets a redesign: New 'front page' makes content discovery easier (thenextweb.com)
- Publish Your Own On-Line Magazine with Scoop.it (coydavidson.wordpress.com)
- Optimizing Twitter For Paper.li (smallbusinessmavericks.com)
- Become a newspaper publisher the Paper.li way (philipramsey.blogspot.com)
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