I think someone must have peed in David Meerman Scott‘s cornflakes a couple of weeks back. He was so hacked off that he went off on a rant on content curation:
You may have noticed that content curation has grown very quickly as a way for people and organizations to publish on the Web.
Sure, there are some benefits to this effort. But as a strategy for generating attention for yourself or your business, content curation is nowhere near as powerful as generating original content.
Content curation
Unlike writing your own blog post or shooting your own video, content curation simply involves pointing to others’ work.
Services like Scoop.it and Paper.li have sprung up to make it easy for anyone to publish an online magazine by linking to anything on the Web.
Yes, there is value in pointing to others work. But that is the point – it is other people’s work, not your own.
Many organizations use guest writers to create content, which in my mind is another form of content curation. Nothing wrong with having a guest blog post now and then, but if you never showcase your own peoples’ ideas, I think it is a mistake.
Original Content: The focus a successful marketing [sic]
The best way to generate attention is to create original web content including text based information (sites, blogs, a Twitter feed), video content, photographs, infographics, and the like.
You brand yourself as an organization worthy of doing business with. Done well, an added bonus is that the search engines rank the content highly and people are eager to share the content on their social networks.
And hey if you generate some interesting stuff, then the content curators will link to you!! Wouldn’t you rather have the links come in?” via Content Curation: A Poor Substitute for Original Content | Social Media Today.
Now David’s a really smart guy — I even own his book “The Rules of Marketing & PR” — but this article doesn’t reflect that especially on the topic of curation…
The kind of curation David talks about is only one kind of curation — linking to other people’s content. This post is another type of curation. Sure, I point to David’s site and quoted a couple of his paragraphs but I’m adding my own value by pointing out that there’s another form of curation that David chose not to consider but that actually adds value. It looks alot like this…
There is a ‘wrong’ way and a ‘right’ way to curate and a lot of it carries over from the ‘wrong’ way and ‘right’ way to write a term paper; correctly leveraging a quote is appropriate and brings power to your writing and your Search Engine Optimization [SEO] done properly. Like this post.
Todd Lohenry 