Content creators and curators

August 13, 2007

I’ve been mulling the idea of curating content lately. Maybe part of the role of marketer will be to be a curator as much as a creator of content… The Wikipedia describes a curator thus:

Curator is Latin and means guardian or overseer

A curator of a cultural heritage institution (e.g., archive, gallery, library, museum or garden) is a content specialist responsible for an institution’s collections and their associated collections catalogs. The object of a curator’s concern necessarily involves tangible objects of some sort, whether it be inter alia artwork, collectibles, historic items or scientific collections

There’s an art to it you know, and a huge amount of knowledge and skill…

In the fast-burn, short news / attention cycle world of media and marketing we can too easily overlook the value of even the recent past to the present.

As we make more content available we don’t necessarily want to take it offline or hide it away on the basis that it will be useful to some people sometimes and since there are no inventory restrictions, why should we.

Things that have made me think about this idea are:

Working with an arts organisation I’ve encountered for the first time the role of the curator in bringing together content for exhibitions.
Seeing how many forgotten – by the owners but not the Google – marketing content microsites there are in the networks around big brands.
The long tail maxim of “make everything available and help me find it” (it’s the start of the last chapter in the book by Chris Anderson if memory serves).

So I was pleased to see the term being used by the inventor of the latter concept, Chris Anderson on the Long Tail blog recently in a post headlined: Wired’s Long Tail web strategy: the “Three Cs”.

…what I call the “Three Cs”: Catalyze and Curate Conversations.

He’s talking about the long tail strategy of a blockbuster brand (WIRED magazine) and the lessons are – as ever, since we all live in the same networks – directly applicable to marketing also.

On the web, however, we have “unlimited shelf space” (an infinite number of pages, which can be created at close to no cost), so that’s where we focus on the niche as well as the mass. We have room for geeky blogs on hacker subculture and Lego. Obsessive drill-downs. And for loads of user-generated content (best shown in the form of our Reddit news aggregation and voting site).

How does that apply to marketing? Well it reminds us that what’s required is not a decision to either go after niches or mass audiences. That there is a definite role for both – especially if you’re already a blockbuster brand.

Lastly, I was also strongly in agreement with his approach to having a spread of new ideas in play at any one time, knowing that not all will be on the money but sure that some will -“fail fast” being another sound principle of online media / marketing strategy in my book:

Some of these experiments aren’t going to work. That’s fine–“fail fast” is as good a motto as any for online media. Indeed, we were just honored by the Knight-Batten awards for our Assignment Zero experiment in crowdsourcing journalism, which was highlighted as “an excellent example of learning from failure.”

In a time when rapid rollouts and fast innovation can bring huge opportunities failures really can teach you as much as success too.

Technorati Tags: long_tail, wired, publishing, marketing, brands, advertising, strategy, innnovation

Antony Mayfield

Public notebook

8 responses to “Content creators and curators”

Heather Yaxley

August 14, 2007 at 12:58 pm

I like the idea – I’ve always thought that losing the librarians that most big organisations used to employ to manage their archives was a mistake. A curator is a more pro-active form of this.

But shouldn’t we move away from thinking of such a role as being one of “marketing” (or PR for that respect)?

In museums and art galleries, curators are experts on their subject and know how to bring interesting things together.

Should they only do this for promotional purposes?
Antony Mayfield

August 14, 2007 at 1:19 pm

Heather – I think in some regards we do need to blow up definitions like marketing – and PR for that matter – they seem to have too much baggage and get in the way…

But aren’t librarians capable of being curators too?
kelvin newman

August 15, 2007 at 3:45 pm

I think a lot of the boundaries between job roles are bluring, it’ll be interesting to see what the fall out is.

Not see any job adverts for content curators yet… Must be a matter of time.
Simon Collister

August 16, 2007 at 9:42 am

Was having a slightly related conversation with someone yesterday. There are two ways of marketing through social networks like MySpace, Facebook… either mass marketing to lots of people (masses) during the initial stage where users pile-in or build genuine relationships with small niche communities that emerge once the network has consolidated. We agreed most marketeers go for the first approach only and don;t understand why it doesn’t work after the initial buzz.
Ben

August 16, 2007 at 9:47 am

I trained as a librarian and now work in marketing, so I have a certain vested interest in the discussion.

First off on the job description front – the catch-all term for librarians/curators/archivists et. al. is currently Information Professional, for what it’s worth. You start of with general skills relating to the categorisation and classification of information and then specialise by field and the use to which those skills are put.

To that extent, an IP is relevant for the majority of fields, including marketing, but you have to decide what purpose(s) that person is there for:

1. Gathering information about and ordering or managing information resources for an organisation.
2. Organising the existing information in an institution.
3. Setting up systems for the presentation and propagation of information throughout a company.

Any IP, in order to do their job well, needs to have a good understanding of their field of work. You can get away with access to experts, but that will slow down most of the above procedures considerably.

As you note, a curator tends to imply that there is going to be an attempt made to provide an overview of existing resources within an organisation. For a marketing company, this would require that a decent attempt is made to collect that information in the first place in both internal and external forms. For marketing across the Internet as a whole, it would tend to be more of a resource discovery and organisation role.

Personally, I think that any organisation above a certain size needs a IP to approach the above issues, regardless of sector. You need a strong structure for the flow of information, internal to internal, internal to external and external to internal, and that’s what we cover.

Without a librarian to manage the information flows, there’s only chaos – though I would say that, wouldn’t I :).
Simon Collister

August 16, 2007 at 10:42 am

@Ben – have you read David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous? I think you’d like it… he exlains chaos is the natural order for order and also the most effective and efficient way of storing information in a digital world. Maybe you won’t like it ;)
Richard Stacy

August 16, 2007 at 5:03 pm

Curating content is indeed an interesting area to be thinking about. As a producer of what is primarily a link blog (and therefore a form of curator) this is something I am naturally drawn to. I think it goes beyond curating and extends to the whole issue of mediation in social media – which I believe is a very important issue. (See – http://tinyurl.com/2qmxme)

At one level, content has become a sort of medium in its own right. Bits of content are developing two roles – one to convey the information within them (the traditional role) and another that relates to their position or trajectory. Content is something that you can now follow and can carry or attract other things to it. I am starting to see content as a sort of worm-like thing. (see http://tinyurl.com/343mmw)

The spatial aspects of content – where it sits, where it has come from, where it is going, is becoming very important because I think this gives clues to this whole issue of mediation and the ability to define truth, accuracy, perspective etc. Curating 2.0 (ouch!) sort of has to factor this in I think.

Anyway – I am organising the September Social Media Club session (September 20th) on this whole are of mediation in social media – Wisdom of the Crowds or Stupidity of the Herd. I would be interested for your, (or any other readers), thoughts on this issue ahead of the session.
Jonathan Hargreaves

August 17, 2007 at 4:53 pm

What I like about curator2.0 is the way it turns on it’s head the traditional notion of a curator. So someone who traditionally was appointed to a hallowed post due deep learning or insight acted as an authority figure to discern and define public taste so often setting up a self fulfilling prophecy of what this would be. The democratic nature of citizen curators that networks produce are potentially much more authentic than there precedessors. Although a network of brian Sewell’s would probably still annoint Brian Sewell as their creator … what does this say about the Evening Standard’s readership?