In a previous post I wrote about content creation becoming an increasingly important way for businesses to drive traffic to their websites and generate leads. As I continued to explore that idea I stumbled across more and more posts/articles that were all basically saying the same thing — every company is a media company. This concept has been around for some time now and I’m honestly surprised at the small number of businesses taking content creation seriously. I think it is pretty obvious though that many (ultimately all) businesses will begin to see the advantages and eventually start gathering, distributing and publishing content relevant to their respective industries.
Realizing this I began to wonder what it meant. What would the Web look like if virtually every business and individual was publishing their own content? I barely have enough time in my day now to slog through my work email, personal email, RSS reader, Twitter feed, Facebook feed and the ever-growing number of websites/blogs I frequent. It is going to be crowded.
Will it even be worth it then for businesses to create their own content in an environment that is sure to have an extremely low signal-to-noise ratio? Of course, but what I (and many others much smarter than myself) foresee becoming a very important compliment to content creation efforts is the art of “content curation” — the qualification and selection of the best/most relevant content on any particular topic. For businesses this means to not only publish content on their latest product releases or case studies. On top of that, why not curate the best content on the Web related to your industry in order to provide a valuable resource to your customers and prospects?
Media companies will need to catch onto this a lot sooner than general businesses for a lot of reasons. But for the smart businesses who have already begun to map out content creation strategies it would be in their best interest to start thinking about content curation as well. Already there are products popping up that enable businesses to automate the curation of industry content and there are some great examples of businesses leveraging crowds to do the curation for them. Of course, there is always the old-fashioned way of doing the curating yourself.
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If anyone happens to stop by, and has read this far 😉 , I would love to hear your thoughts, opinions, ideas, etc. I pretty much use these posts as a brain dump for things I’ve been reading and thinking about, but it would be nice to connect with others and learn from them or build on these ideas.
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