The term personal knowledge management (PKM) isn’t about management in a business sense but rather how we can manage to make sense of information and experience in our electronic surround.

Personal – according to one’s abilities, interests & motivation (not directed by external forces).

Knowledge – connecting information to experience (know what, know who, know how).

Management – getting things done.

The critical part of PKM is in personalizing information and experience, or to use a business term, adding value. Ross Dawson shows five ways to add value to information (my examples/descriptions follow):

Filtering (separating signal from noise, based on some criteria)

Validation (ensuring that information is reliable, current or supported by research)

Synthesis (describing patterns, trends or flows in large amounts of information)

Presentation (making information understandable through visualization or logical presentation)

Customization (describing information in context)

Digital media has emboldened many brands to consider themselves publishers. After all, American Express has credibility on financial matters and Coke has a network 36 million Facebook fans. Who needs publishers to serve as intermediaries?

The problem is publishing is a lot harder than it looks, or rather it’s a lot harder to do it with the consistency, day after day, that’s needed to build a long-term audience. That’s leading some brands to hook onto the idea that their role lies more in the curation of content.

Curation is the vogue digital term for the ability to not only aggregate and distribute carefully selected information, but also to provide a unique voice on top of the original pieces of information. In the age of Twitter and Facebook, it seems like all the world is curators now. Brands want in on the action.

Brands are trying to establish themselves as trusted sources of information. Hop onto Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr, and you’ll see brands that gather up articles from all sorts of publications and push them out to their followers. For example, look at IBM’s Tumblr, A Smarter Planet, which is a stream of curated content focused on areas of Big Blue’s core competencies. Or there’s American Express’ Open Forum Tumblr (yes, Tumblr is apparently a good platform for curation) that has cultivated a business community online by providing relevant tools and information to help business owners succeed.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, Content is one of the fastest growing segments in Marketing and an increasing number of marketers are relying more and more on their strategies to achieve success online.

I will leave you alone now so you can enjoy it, before that I’ll just point to these two facts I want you to remember:

• 90% of marketers are doing some form of Content Marketing, even if they don’t know it (Have you been doing some content marketing without realizing it?)
• 60% of B2B marketers plan on increasing their efforts this year
• 26% of budgets are allocated to content (obviously is much higher in small business)

However if we take the key points from the Keller quote above which of course was to some extent made with tongue in cheek, we can learn some important lessons from the Huff Post's successful approach to content curation. The lessons can be sumarized as follows

1. Understand and target a specific audience.

2. Curate and or produce content for your chosen audience.

3. Occupy a distinct position in terms of political alignment that appeals to your target audience. This has been demonstrated to be a trusim for both left and right leaning news curators/aggregators.

4. Use a myriad of people paid and unpaid to contribute to your content be they professional journalists , subject matter experts , academics, bloggers or celebrities who appeal to your target audience.

5. Carefully select , link and curate content from established and respected third party media that appeals to your audience and enhances your own whole product.

6. Finally for the founder , senior editorial staff and key executives use every public speaking opportunity or exposure to other media to market your publication.

Twitter made an interesting acquisition on Thursday, when it bought a young Canadian startup called Summify, a company whose service (as its name implies) was designed to cut through the noise of all those social-media streams and summarize the content that matters. More than anything, this is perhaps the single biggest hole that exists not just in Twitter but Facebook and other services as well: the need to give users more ways of filtering the massive amounts of information that keep flooding their activity streams and other social-media inboxes. There are so many ways of producing and sharing content but so few good ways of filtering.

The next-generation tools, like Curata (a HiveFire company) and Curation Station, are focused on B-to-B marketing with a value proposition focused on their ability to drive awareness by improving organic search, and provide organizations with an opportunity to build thought leadership. The key to this evolution is being the “curator.”

The curator is an editor who sorts through the content to find the information relevant to a company and/or its audience. Curators are not content creators. And this is where I think the challenge lies in using these tools for thought leadership.

What is Content Curation?

If you have a good understanding of the new social web landscape then there is no doubt that the term “content is king” comes up again and again. Content is the currency of the internet and by sharing your own great content and other people’s great content you will grow your social network and be held in high regard by your followers as the go to source or expert in your field.

By following all the latest news sources in your niche you can soon find yourself overrun with numerous RSS Feeds, Tweets, Google+ updates and Facebook shares flashing  before your eyes every day. This is where content curation comes in; quite simply content curation is the process of filtering out the best content that you find and then sharing this with your networks.

So in the social media sense, content curation is  the organizing, filtering and “making sense of” information on the web and sharing the very best pieces of content with your network that you’ve cherry picked for them .

The process would look something like this:



Identify opportunity



Any company news is a potential curated collection. Think about a product launch. Reaction to the introduction of a new product is likely to appear all over the Web from a variety of sources. Customers will weigh in, as will industry experts and analysts. People attending launch events will tweet it and blog it, and post videos and photos.
Select curators



The mechanics of curating aren’t complicated; it shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes to acquire the skills necessary to produce a story. Since anybody can curate, the criteria for selecting curators should begin with their familiarity with the topic. The key to a solid curation effort is the selection of the best, most relevant and representative posts.



Monitor conversation



With the curator in place, it’s time to develop key words and set up a monitoring plan. This can be as simple as establishing a few Google Alerts or as sophisticated as tapping into a monitoring service the organization is already using, such as Radian 6.
Select and comment on the best content



The heart of curation is, of course, curating. Curators need to cull through the many items people have posted to find the right posts to create an accurate overview of the news.
Adding context is one more curation chore. When appropriate, commentary improves the value of the collection.
Announce and promote the collection



Simply producing a collection isn’t going to get it noticed, particularly if an organization is suspected of an ulterior, self-serving motive. Use the same techniques you would to draw attention to anything else. Direct contact with reporters and influencers, a press release, a blog post, and some tweets can all get people to give the collection a look.

If brand loyalty is defined by targeting, engaging and inspiring your niche audience, curation is the key to finding your voice.

Niles focuses on traditional publishers in the article, but licensing syndicated content is also a great opportunity for brands. For example, imagine you’re the content marketing strategist for a major fashion retailer. Your entire job is dedicated to building, articulating and spreading your brand’s view on fashion trends through your blog and content marketing efforts. Creating high quality, original content takes a lot of work and time, as it rightfully should. However, imagine that you have the opportunity to license and streamline a huge range of voices and perspectives into your content marketing strategy – from bloggers such as The Sartorialist to the Fashion Toast, magazine publications like Inventory and Elle, major fashion sites like Style.com or The Cut.

Whether you’re a content marketing strategist, an online editor or traditional publisher, the key is meticulous curation. If done right, highly curated, syndicated content can be hugely valuable, cost efficient and sustainable long term. Curating a variety of relevant, niche perspectives not only supports the evolving definition of today’s “journalist,” but also helps to build your own unique voice, better engage your audience and increase the likelihood of people staying engaged and on your site.

Next steps:

• Understand your market and what your audience cares about
• Identify thought leaders and influencers you want to track
• Find content, using tools like Google Alerts and Twitter searches
• Collect and save content, using tools like Delicious (a better way of sorting the 200 bookmarks you have on Firefox!), Paper.li, Pearltrees, Storify, Scoop.it and Tumblr
• Organize and document the content, adding context, meaning or opinion, or telling a story
• Share the content, and make it easy for others to share – but always link to the original source or you’re just plagiarizing
• Measure your results. e.g. increasing number of leads.

To Create Or To Curate, That is The Question!

When content marketers ask this question, they don’t mean that the two options are mutually exclusive. It is just a matter of discovering the right balance between them.

Link to your own content between 25-50% of the time, with 40% being the ideal mark. (and curate the rest).

1. Curated Content Can Inspire Topics For Created Content

Key Takeaway:

As you work on curating content, don’t just settle for sharing it with your network. Instead, think of how the topics you find can inspire your own content.

2. Build On Curated Content To Create Your Own Content

3. Use Curated Content As A “Teaser” To Drive Traffic To Your Own Content

Content curation rewards are not limited to branding and SEO; it can also enhance the visibility and the quality of your own content.

- Passionate hobbyists / consumers like to share: make it simple to add context and they’ll do it because it’s fun.
- Educators: sharing content and presenting it with proper context is part of their job.
- Content producers: curation completes creation and helps give context to content they create, reinforcing its value.
- Experts / Consultants: I believe we’ll see more and more of them sell access to their curated streams, especially in fields where information has great value such as finance for instance.
- And of course Marketers: as Sylvain pointed out, curation helps to show your expertise, and thus build your brand (personal brand or business brand). We’ve started to see companies embrace topic-centric curation as a way to build their brands to an audience with specific interests.

Content Marketing

Content curation was so last year. In 2012 we’re going broader; we’ll be talking about a marketing discipline called “Content Marketing.” It’s actually not all that new; in fact, some social media pundits have been talking about it for years. But 2012 is the year content marketing is hits the social media trends list and the mainstream, because content marketing is now a concept that executives can finally sink their teeth into.

Content marketing is essentially the same thing that social media gurus have been discussing for quite some time, which is that brands must “be the media.” But “be the media” is a scary concept for a CMO or CEO, because they think that media = expensive. Because corporate execs are finally beginning to understand how writing blogs or creating video can enhance SEO, lead generation, customer relationship management, and more, budgets seem to be loosening to allow marketers to create, as well as curate, content as a marketing strategy.

As such, we will be looking for marketing staff with more and varied skills. We’ll need people with great editorial skills; who can write blogs, white papers and slide presentations; and who can conceptualize and perhaps even edit video. If the marketing staff has those capabilities, the costs for content marketing get absorbed into the department and no longer represent a scary line item.

And if our marketing staff is also our content creating and curating team, we also need to think about hiring for our department in a different way: people who are in social media roles most likely need to be the customer they’re servin able to walk comfortably in their shoes. A 45 year old man likely won’t be the content marketer for breastfeeding supplies. Brands will be looking for content marketers who match their demographic, which may open up new corporate job opportunities to subject matter experts in a variety of disciplines.