Flack's Revenge

Content Curation Update and Roundup

I am working on my monthly Windmill Networking content marketing column, and thought it would be a good time to revisit my article Blow Out Your Content Markerting and Lead Social Conversations witih Content Curation, which ran in March.

So I took some time to get caught up with experts in the field whom I know and respect.

Tom Riddle of curation platform CIThread, a solution that I have covered, mentioned that the company is taking a step back and reevaluating its approach to the marketplace.

When I asked him about alternatives, he mentioned Curata (I know and have covered them, as well) and Curation Station, but seemed to wonder whether any curation tech companies were having great success and impact on the market.

I also spoke with Alex Romanovich of Social2B, and he had a lot to say, offering his "two cents" on the state of content curation:

Let's define this first.

Content Curation is a content marketing approach that allows an individual user or an organization to collect, refine, and repurpose or retarget this content to a specific audience.

This is a great opportunity for Small Business or Professionals who are interested in providing unique, curated content to their target audience, as a differentiator. Content Curators are Content Connoisseurs - the good ones are providing value to their audience, and sometime monetize it as well.

Another important aspect of content curation is the fact that well curated content is all about personal story-telling and personalized input on the content obtained elsewhere. The original content is left untouched, yet the curation process allows for a more opinionated and more refined look at nuances and elements of that original content.

So what's the big deal? Well, precision and viewpoints make a difference. The audience likes curators for their ability to refine and to filter content, and thus categorize it for the target audience.

Here are some good examples of Content Curation platforms and what they may entail:

1. Pinterest - image and video curation at its best. More on Pinterest in this Social2B blog post. After you review the blog post, consider this - there are tools now, like Curalate.com, that allow brands and professionals to measure the effectiveness of their Pinterest curation presences. As always, and with any content, you have to be consistent, sustainable and relevant.
2. There are a variety of tools that allow you to create your own Curated Magazine - Storify, Paper.li, Scoop.it, and many others, allow you to select the existing publications and create an interest based publication catering to a particular audience. Passion Marketing and Interest Based Marketing will be entering our vocabulary fairly shortly.
3. For bloggers, there are a number of Blog Curation solutions, including the WordPress itself as a curation platform with various plug-ins. The solutions can be as simple as leveraging Google Alerts and using free tools, such as SocialMention. If you want to integrate other features related to curation, such as voting and feedback, FanNewscast could be a great solution as well - extending curation to Facebook and other platforms.
4. For email marketers, it is possible to integrate your email content with social media, thus extending your message beyond the direct response capabilities offered by email only. XYDO, ConstantContact, ChimpMail, Vertical Response and others now provide well integrated, social content marketing and curation solutions to drive your audience towards the social media and digital media platform of choice

Finally, to get results from Content Curation you need consistency and some level of automation offered my platforms such as Curata and others. Curata includes a more sophisticated level of automation and analytics not immediately offered by other platforms. In the end, Curation is all about telling your story - your own way, refined for your audience and catering to your community.

Taking Yahoo! Pipes for a Spin

As I posted previously (in "PR and Web 2.0 Hacks, Mashups and Utilities"), Yahoo! Pipes seems like it has great potential for the intrepid Web 2.0 savvy PR professional.

It allows you to mix and match Web data sources from any source that offers a feed, process the data,  flexibly view the output, and publish the information via news syndication or HTML.   It taps into the immediacy of RSS, allowing you to leverage the growing number of online information sources for a range of uses.   One of the really cool (and Web 2.0-ish) aspects of Pipes is the social component.  It is possible to mix and repurpose Pipes from the greater Pipes community.

In short it promises to help you be the master of your online info domain.  For the information driven PR professional, it does not appear to get any better than this.

Robin Good, the original newsmastering evangelist had a detailed review in his post several months ago: "Beyond NewsMastering: Yahoo! Pipes Is The Internet RSS Remixer - Overview And Reports."

Also, the Marketing Studies blog has this good post on threats and opportunities for marketers: "Yahoo! Pipes a Dream Come True for RSS Marketers ... and a Huge Threat."

So it was with great hopes and excitement that I recently took Pipes for a spin.

I thought, what better way to get my arms around this then to start with some of the news aggregation and buzz tracking applications that are already out there?

My eyes were big from the possibilities, however they quickly glazed over with complexity.  While it may be true that you do not need to be a programmer, you do need to be comfortable with concepts like parsing text strings in URLs, and in general have a good understanding of how Web content, search syntax and news syndication works.

The challenge quickly becomes clear when you are working with a more sophisticated application, e.g. one which accepts user input and submits the information to a variety of search engines, each which can have different rules for how searches are constructed.   Aggregated News Alerts is one such application.

One of the claims is that Yahoo! Pipes offers a visual programming environment that allows you to drag and drop components and interconnect these to your heart's content.  You can in fact do this, however with the aforementioned application it was a quite a bit to take in. (See View Source).  The graph paper palette and all the components make it look akin to a diagram for rewiring a house.

Luckily, there is helpful documentation and support via Yahoo discussion groups.   And there are no shortage of people who have boldly gone before me.  In searching around a bit, I found this post from Ian Kennedy's Flahspoint blog: "Yahoo! Pipes: a Giant Erector set for the Web", and an application for searching for luxury European cars on top auto blogs, which he helpfully published and provided a link to: European Performance Car news.

You can see how this works by clicking on the View Source tab.  Much less intimidating! In very little time I was able to modify this application to one that I can put to work for one of my clients.

The client is in the enhanced water business, and we are interested in tracking mentions of some of the top brands on the celebrity blogs.

So I tweaked the original application a bit, changing the search terms from car brands to water brands, and plugged in celebrity blogs like TMZ, Gawker and Perez Hilton.

I saved it and published it, and here is the result: Enhanced Water on Celebrity Blogs.

Admittedly, not momentous in terms of functionality or title, but definitely a start.  Now that I have gotten my feet wet I will explore Pipes further, and continue to feature interesting related posts and applications.

Meanwhile, I have updated my Buzzword Du Jour to Yahoo! Pipes and feature the latest news, which I did in about five minutes courtesy MySyndicaat (proving that Pipes and MySyndicaat are not mutually exclusive - there is a place for an information mashup platform like Pipes and a newsmatering solution like MySyndicaat).

PR and Web 2.0 Hacks, Mashups and Utilities

As I have made pretty clear in this blog, I strongly feel  that the Web 2.0 world (including blogging tech, the blogosphere and Wikis) presents challenges for the PR profession, but also opens up important new opportunities.

Keeping with this theme, and focusing on the opportunities, I thought that I'd launch a new section of this blog called "Web 2.0 Hacks, Mashups and Utilities" for PR.

It will serve as a resource, pointing people to free online utilities for the PR profession.  I will also take the more promising ones for a test drive, report on my experiences and describe news ones that I come up with.  Hopefully, people will chime in with some of their own hacks that they devise or learn about.

Why should you care?  Because these resources can help you be more effective and do a better job.  Another reason is that, in putting these tools to work you will also at the same time improve your Web 2.0 literacy.  Also, did I mention "Free?"

I start out with a review of Yahoo! Pipes, and will cover some of the PR applications that are out there for Pipes.

Yahoo! Pipes was announced with great fanfare several months ago, and received rave reviews.  Its purpose is to give non-programmers a way to build their own information mashups, mixing and matching inputs and flexibly producing outputs from user definable Web resources.  In this vein, it can be seen as providing some of the same benefits as a newsmastering solution such as MySyndicaat (see my post Tracking Buzzwords in the Wild ), however appears to be positioned to be more of a platform than a solution.

Here is Tim O'Reilly's post from February,  Yahoo!'s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet, and an excerpt:

"It's a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output. Yahoo! describes it as "an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator" that allows you to "create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant." While it's still a bit rough around the edges, it has enormous promise in turning the web into a programmable environment for everyone."

And here is what Nick Bradbury had so say at around the same time in Yahoo! Pipes is a Platform Play:

"Pipes enables the creation of custom RSS feeds tailored to specific interests. Here's a very simple example: you could create a "pipe" which asks for a zip code, then generates a single feed containing information taken from a collection of weather feeds, news feeds, events feeds and sports feeds pertaining to that zip code. Or you could create a pipe which mixes news about a big event with Flickr photos of the same event. Or how about one that combines comments from the same person across multiple blogs?"

However, in the time since the noise about Yahoo! Pipes has died down somewhat  So, does Yahoo! Pipes hold up to its promise for PR?  What are the good applications that are out there?  Stay tuned, and you will find out more out shortly.