Why curation matters, enormously?

by PR Coach

curation helps businesses and individuals navigate intranet

Without curation, the internet is quicksand

I have huge confidence in the future of curation.

That’s because we have so much information coming at us in this digital era. The more “stuff” the internet and all the shiny new social media channels throw at us, the more we need brilliant curators.

Without curators, we run the risk of information overload.

There’s no button saying,  “Stop!” Just give me the most important stuff. We try to keep our heads above the quicksand of information from the stupid to the sublime. Curators help.

Without curators, we’d be stuck with Jackass marketing, cat videos, stupid YouTube stunts, sniveling and driveling and content marketing. Of course, if that’s your thing, curators can help you with that too.

The internet doesn’t make us stupid. We’re only really stupid if we don’t use it properly. It’s like the largest candy store in the universe. Kind of a Willy Wonka chocolate factory if you’re curious, a lifelong learner or looking for competitive intelligence, fast information or a marketing edge.

Curators have an essential role to play. We can help others find the best information, the most interesting data, the most touching story, the most useful cloud application and really anything else you ever wanted to know in any niche you can imagine.

When you think about it, curation has huge value because it saves time and money. Business, and many people, just haven’t realized the economic, let alone the marketing and strategic value yet.

Curated quotes of Clay Shirky

NYU Prof Clay Shirky has useful views on curation

NYU’s Clay Shirky

I’ll illustrate why I believe so much in curation by, what else, a curated list of quotes from the always-provocative NYU prof Clay Shirky.

Take a look at the ten following quotes and think about how curation has a critical role to play in each idea:

“It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.”

“The future presented by the internet is the mass amateurization of publishing and a switch from ‘Why publish this?’ to ‘Why not?”

“It is our misfortune, as a historical generation, to live through the largest expansion in expressive capability in human history, a misfortune because abundance breaks more things than scarcity.”

“Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you, may not be worth sitting still for.”

“Media is actually a triathlon, it’s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.”

“Consider the cluster of ideas contained in this list: publicity, publicize, publish, publication, publicist, publisher.”

“The social media world connects people with niche interests at very low “discovery costs.”

“Let a thousand flowers bloom to replace newspapers; don’t build a paywall around a public good.”

“So, in the language of my tribe, the aggregation of news sources has gone from being a server-side to a client-side operation — which is to say, the decision about what to bring together into a bundle is made by the consumer and not at the level — and not by the producer.”

“We are plainly witnessing a restructuring of the media businesses, but their suffering isn’t unique, it’s prophetic. All businesses are media businesses, because whatever else they do, all businesses rely on the managing of information for two audiences – employees and the world.”

That’s the exciting thing about curation. The more “stuff” there is, competing for our attention, the more critical curation becomes in business, education, lifelong learning and in our daily lives.

It’s a powerful force for making us smarter, faster and better users of information and ideas. And its strategic and competitive value grow every day as overload grows.

Want examples of curation done right? Check out Scoop.it, a whole platform of thousands of topic experts and hobby curators. See my Public Relations & Social Media Insight topic or others including Ian Cleary (social media tools), Marty Smith (social marketing), Karen Dietz (business storytelling), Brian Yanish (marketing, social biz), Robin Good (curation),  Jan Gordon (curation, social media), Giuseppe Mauriello (marketing), Ana Cristina Pratas (digital learning) and many more experts worth following.

Author: Jeff Domansky

Clay Shirky quotes gratefully sourced from from Good Reads Clay Shirky > Quotes and Nieman Journalism Lab

Visuals: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull; Clay Shirky photo by Joi Ito Nieman Journalism Lab.



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