WHAT IS A KING IN THE CONTENT MARKETING GAME?
When we think about this, something being king, right? That means it’s the top of the heap. It’s the ultimate ruler. It’s the thing you should really focus on. And a lot of, I guess, when I hear this phrase, especially around content marketing, I always wonder, why do we have to place this strategy above all else? Because increasingly today – and this is something probably that will go beyond curation – increasingly today you have to kind of look at your full marketing as your ability to reach out and garner attention with your target market in as many platforms as possible.
Be it social, your blog, other content platforms, any other platform that’s is coming up. Mobile, tablets, you know however people want to interact with you, your brand, your company, you have to be to interact with them in those platforms, right?
CONTENT VS CURATION
So when we talk about content versus curation and whether one or the other is the king, I think we have to really dial it back a little bit and say that all forms of marketing is in the kingdom so to say. Is in the castle. And is content, the act of creating content to connect with your target market, be it if you are a B2B – business to business marketer, or a B2C – business to consumer marketer, does content play a role? Yes. Because if you are engaging in social media, you can always curate stuff and curate stuff from other sources, but ultimately that’s someone else’s idea, that’s someone else’s product, it’s always better to be able to find ways to connect your product and to curate, to create stuff around your product I should say.
IS CURATION ON A HIGHER LEVEL?
So, I don’t think curation is on a higher level. In some forms, curation is kind of like the prince. Not the queen. Cause I don’t know what the queen does. It depends on each dynasty obviously, some queens are more powerful than others. But I think that curation is more like a prince. And what I mean by that is you’ve got content marketing, which is creating content, creating unique content, is really a lot of times the driving source and what really creates authority and creates persuasion with your marketing.
IS CONTENT CURATION KING?
But when you add curation onto that and let’s say the prince, the prince if you think about it, typically if you’ve got a very strong king that has accomplished a lot, the prince is always trying to find ways that he can live up to the name of the king. Live up to the accomplishments of the king. And that’s really where curation is placed, because curation, in it’s essence is a great strategy if you’re just getting started. It’s a great strategy to capture traffic. It’s a great strategy if you’re a content marketer to add on top of. Especially if you own the platform.
But, it will never, unless you – and I will add a caveat to this – curation will dominate the king, will essentially assassinate the king and become king if you do a really good job of it and you become a platform that is known to curate the best in your market. Then, a lot of times it will become king. You look at the way The Huffington Post got to it’s rise. Now they are obviously focusing a lot on unique content, but a lot of it was curated content, aggregated content.
CURATION PLATFORM EXAMPLES
Techmeme is another good example, that’s a straight curation platform. They don’t do any unique content. BuzzFeed is another good example. BuzzFeed started just curating stuff and even now they do a lot of curation but they are starting with unique content.
So you can do it but you have to do it in a very focused fashion and so the prince, in some ways, can outshine the king, but that prince better be good and better be ruthless, and eventually that prince will have to adopt the strategies of a king. And I believe if you do look at this – if we want to use this kind of analogy – content creation, when done right with a voice, with authority, with heart, with a why, always will win out above curation, because it’s your own ideas. It’s something people can connect with. It’s an emotional aspect done right.
ULTIMATELY YOU’RE CITING EXTERNAL SOURCES
Curation, ultimately you’re always pulling from someone else’s source. I still feel, even if you’ve mastered content marketing, you’ve master creation, you’ll notice everybody who has, they still curate. And they still curate on their own platform because it’s more traffic. It’s more eyeballs on their stuff. And in some aspects, when you get known as a content marketer, as a person who can create content I should say, and you put the strategy of curation on top if that, you’ve built authority, ultimately you’re looking for more eyeballs. You’re looking for more traffic. And that’s what curation delivers to you.
So that’s another interesting aspect to this.
So is content curation king? No, I don’t even think its queen. Possibly it’s a prince. I definitely don’t think it’s a peasant. But it’s somewhere in the upper echelons of the court – the king and queen’s court. So it’s somewhere in there.
And I’ll say one other thing, if you’re new to the show, if you’re new to curation, number one if you’re new to content, start with curation. Because it teaches you how to be a good content marketer. So I would suggest start with curation. We have a tool called Curation Traffic that allows you to really easily do that.
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Great and podcast about content curation. The article has a good point, that if you are new to content marketing starting with content curation can help you get a feel for the content your audience likes.