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As a marketer, creating enough original content for your brand can be a constant struggle. With the hectic pace of online publishing, you want to get enough content out there to support your brand and keep readers coming back, but you also want that content to be of the best quality. And quality takes time. Unless you have a large team of writers and social media contributors at hand, creating solid original content each and every week is no small feat. But original content is not the only way to keep your customers loyal and engaged. In fact, expanding the content you share to include useful information from other sources may actually help build loyalty. You’re probably thinking why on earth would I share content that’s not our own? But hear us out.

Bring Your Audience What They Care About

Like we talked about last week, finding your niche in content is paramount. Zoning in on your area of expertise can help you build a devoted audience instead of one that is just made up of casual passers-by. As many of us learn in life, trying to please everyone rarely works to your advantage. The same can be said for content. Whether it’s social media marketing, new indie music, or vegetarian cooking, staying laser-focused on your niche will attract an audience that is as passionate about the subject as you are. Creating original content for your brand with this kind of specificity in mind translates to getting that content into the hands of the people who really want it. But the people who really want content in your area of expertise don’t just want content from you. They want all the high-quality content in that niche topic, and they will go where they need to go to get it. Why not make your brand the only place they need to go?

Become the Destination

We’ve already established that creating high-quality original content around your area of expertise is a major player in attracting an audience, but to go one step further and hang on to that audience, curating content from other sources can make your brand stand out from the crowd. The Internet is a big place, and even the most niche topics have plenty of content to choose from. That fact combined with a good case of digital ADHD means that your audience is likely bouncing around from site to site to get all of the content they crave. If you break the mold and start giving your audience quality original work and valuable content from other thought-leaders in your area, chances are that audience will stick with you. By hand-selecting the best of the best content (including your own) in your area of expertise, your brand will become an authoritative resource for content, instead of just one of the many. Curating from all over the web can make your brand the only click your audience needs to stay informed and well-read on your subject area.

As the saying goes, “If you build it, they will come.” If you present and curate the best content in your field, both yours and from others, the audience will come – and they will stay.

-Kelly

If you’re lucky enough to have gotten a private beta account, you can create personal traps. Personal traps are traps created by you that learn your particular interests and tastes. In this post I’m going to walk through the basic process of making a personal trap.

To begin, click on the “New Trap” button in the upper right hand corner of your screen.

This will prompt you to enter keywords. When selecting keywords, try and think of a word or words that accurately describe the topic or concept you want to create a trap around.

Be aware that the system will search for content that contains ALL of your keywords, so try and use as few words as possible to describe what you’d like to see in your trap. You can hone in on the finer points of your trap through training. In this example I started a trap on “chocolate.”

After you’ve entered your keyword(s) you will be prompted to give your trap a title. Title it whatever you’d like, this is for your reference. For my chocolate trap I ended up using a descriptive title “Chocolate” but you could use things like “Final Project Biology” or “Work: Information Ontology” whatever best suites your needs and preferences.

You will then be taken to your intitial trap contents and prompted to rate them to train your trap. Ranking is how you tell the system exactly what you want to see in your trap. Use the thumbs up and down to rate content that fits or does not fit with what you’d like to see in your trap. In this case I gave my first three articles a thumbs up because they were all about chocolate (yay!).

If you see an article that does not fit in with what you’d like to see in your trap, use the thumbs down button to let the system know it was wrong. In this case I got an article about coffee, which I also like, but I have a coffee trap, and coffee is not chocolate (silly computer). When you dislike an article you will be prompted to select a reason. Use “is not interesting to me” to identify content that does not fit topically into your trap, “I do not like the source” to identify sources you would never like to see again (so if you hate a blogger or a political point of view, this is your recourse), and “Spam/Abuse” to identify content that is bad on other levels and help us make Trap.it better (sorry in advance for any spam, we’re trying hard!)

If you neglect to train your trap your account will bother you about it. This is to ensure that you get good and accurate content. Trap.it is more than a search so entering your keywords is only half the battle. The system wants you to teach it what you want. Even if all your initial results look good (yay!) the system needs a little feedback to make sure it’s on the right track. It’s kind of like when you are told to do something for the first time, even if you start out doing it right, you feel more confident and do it better and faster when you get positive feedback.

Once your trap has enough feedback it will continue to pull content to fill your trap. Continue training your trap as needed to hone in on exactly what you’re looking for.

Them’s the basics, here’s a couple of notes on selecting a topic:

Traps can be started on all sorts of things and some things work better than others. In my experience general noun-based traps take off the fastest, can be surprisingly fun, and offer a new way of following information on the web (think: bears, forests, ice cream, bacon, britney spears…). More abstract concepts (lonliness, poverty, poetry) can be equally interesting, but the nature of abstract concepts is they tend to offer sometimes more abstract results. Finally, place/location based traps (Portland, Paris, Mexico) tend to be a little harder to start because these keywords end up in a lot of content that isn’t really about these places. We’re working on this, but it may save you some frustration to know. Get creative, go trap crazy, and let us know what works!

-Laura

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Discovery is a great buzzword, but what does it really mean? To us, it means collecting and sharing great content from all kinds of sources, big and small, to share insights, open up dialogue, and create interest. Why curate? That is a question that we are often asked and a debate that is still kicking in the content marketing world. There are many reasons to curate content from other sources, but one of the big ones is that it can help give your audience an element of discovery. Everyone has social circles online, and within those social circles, the same content (articles, viral videos, etc.) often gets shared over and over again, meaning that you’re not seeing much content that is new, exciting, or different than what everyone else is seeing. That makes sharing content a lot less fun, too, if you don’t have something fresh and interesting on-hand. For brands, there is an opportunity here to seek out exciting unique content and share it with their followers. If that content is new and interesting to that audience, they are much more likely to share it within their social circles because you have given them the element of discovering something great.

If your audience feels like every time they go to your website, Facebook page, or Twitter stream they discover wonderful content that is new to them, they will want to share that content and they will keep coming back for more. But how do you create the element of discovery? Here are a few tips to make sure that you’re on track to showing your followers what’s new.

1. Curate!

This tip seems obvious, but it’s important. Curating content from sources other than your own gives your audience a sense of trust that you are sharing the cream of the crop of content, even if it comes from somewhere else, and that you take pride in showcasing what you consider quality content. Creating wonderful original content is important, too, but curating allows you to be inspired by others and share that with your audience as well.

2. Share

Share your findings with your audience on whatever social channels you use. Different content might work well in different places, but wherever you choose to share, be sure to give credit to the original sources and perhaps offer a few words about why you or your brand thought the content was worth sharing.

3. Start the conversation

Once you’ve shared the unique, curated content that you discovered, invite your readers and followers to engage with you in a discussion about the content and why it’s important or helpful. Engaging with commenters and users in a conversation about whatever niche your brand falls into will encourage trust as a topic authority and will also give you insight into what kind of content they might want to see in the future. Both of those things can help grow brand loyalty among the followers you do have, and attract those that you don’t.

If you and your brand can follow these steps with careful curating and thoughtful sharing, your audience will see the value that you and your social properties offer them. They will see that unlike many brands who only share their own content and fail to incite conversation, you are taking an interest in all of the best content out there on your subject matter, and are excited to share that content with people who will appreciate it. Giving your audience a sense of discovery every time they see your brand sharing content will undoubtedly foster positive engagement and keep them coming back on a regular basis.

For more detailed information on how curation can help your brand, click here to download our e-book 5 Reasons You Should Start Curating Today.

-Kelly

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It’s estimated that more than half of all adults and teenagers in the U.S. already own a smartphone and if you look around, this reality is only growing more apparent. In a doctor’s office waiting room, grocery store lines, bus stops, red lights and coffee shops – you see the same dialed-in expression on our faces – that attentive gaze angled down at our mobile devices as we feed our ravenous information appetite. On top of increased ownership of smartphones, both e-reader devices and tablets are on the rise, too. With mobile browsing consumption now at an all-time high, content must move that way as well. Publishers must do whatever it takes to make content universally mobile-friendly for users on the go.

Although mobile internet usage is expected to overtake desktop browsing by 2014 and is set to continue increasing by 66% annually down the road, growing mobile trends shouldn’t force an entire audience or user-base into the same box. Users should be given options that fit their mobile behavior. Publishers must acknowledge that although there is a shift in how and where users consume content, it’s unfair to assume that all users will consume content in identical ways.

That being said, traditional desktop browsing isn’t a dying breed like print journalism and certainly shouldn’t be treated like it. I imagine some content consumers solely use desktop browsers as their main source and plan on sticking to it. While on the other hand, some brands will want to get with the roughly 31% of smartphone owners who consume all content solely from their mobile device. Whether users prefer to browse content via unique native applications, mobile-optimized sites, or traditional desktop layouts, the experience should have a seamless balance no matter the device.

Depending on our mood, location and what screen we’re looking at, users should be encouraged to choose any of the browsable methods without running into significant dead ends. There is nothing worse than having a functionality roadblock when taking an article from a desktop browser to a mobile browser only to meet with an error screen. What is the best solution? Perhaps publisher platforms that allow users to log-in to one solitary account, gaining universal access to all information inside, regardless what device is being activated. This plays out similarly to how iTunes uses cloud-networking to sync music throughout all devices using one standard Apple ID as the fingerprints to mimic the same experience either at home or out on the go.

Publishers hosting their own mobile application have the opportunity to provide this experience of a seamless universal connection on any device, bringing options to the table for changing mobile behavior. In a perfect world, users can log-in from any device and witness their individual accounts updated with the latest relevant content, personalized for their interests. The experience should run like a car – although there are many engines potentially at play, it should require one key to start it up.

-Geoff

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Whether you lay claim to a local startup, a small business on the rise, or a Fortune 500 giant, operating a company website without a featured blog is wasting away a grand content marketing opportunity in today’s digital age. Making the effort to host a company blog with a steady stream of relevant content serves as an invaluable tool for establishing sustainable brand awareness, enhances influence in a targeted field of expertise, and to further engage a connection with a growing readership who may become loyal customers in return.

However, driving a prosperous business blog is not easily done overnight and often comes with many pain points along the road to content marketing success. Here are a few business blog tips worth fancying.

Don’t forget the folks on mobile devices

Back in 1999, just 38 million people had access to broadband internet. Today, over 1.2 billion have it on their mobile phones. Odds are, when a newcomer finds his or her way to your company blog for the first time, there is a solid chance they found it while navigating on a mobile device. If the blog’s mobile layout is cramped or cluttered and the method of consuming content is more confusing than it is convenient, expect the attention span of an average user to swiftly jump ship without looking back.

Raise the bar in subscriber versatility

On top of the social media buttons that jump to official microblogging accounts like Facebook and Twitter, it’s about time for business blogs to recognize the importance of offering readers more versatility as to how they subscribe to blog content. Sure, joining email lists can be enticing if user interest is very high on a particular brand, but promoting a more advanced form of RSS syndication that dissects a blog’s content is a game-changer. For example, rather than offering one solo firehose feed that collects all content, why not offer a plethora of feeds broken down by topic, by author/contributor, by multimedia type, by article length, etc. The fact users are forced to subscribe to all content that may include publications like event announcements, job listings and press releases, when all we may really want is to be notified when the blog’s next tutorial video comes out, makes subscribing to anything at all less appealing.

Use curation to fill in holes where content creation lacks

Consistency and commitment are of utmost importance when trying to build and maintain trust between a blog and its readership. Unfortunately, one of the common trends that brings a business blog to its demise is the pressure that comes with producing high quality content that never skips a beat. Under certain circumstances, content staff can be limited and writer’s block happens to the best of us, which is why blogs need to be more open to the idea of publishing content created outside the walls of the company. The Delta Airlines blog is a great example of one source reaching out to another in order to keep incoming content fresh and robust. Providing a hat tip reference to the National Geographic Travel blog, Delta Airlines is able to stick to its path as a travel destination influencer all while taking a break as the blog’s content creator on that particular day.

Engage, engage, engage!

Lastly, I wanted to dish out a few more examples of awesome blogs that simply get it when it comes to audience engagement. Bucketfeet, an artist inspired shoe company uses its blog to get fans involved by asking people to email images of themselves modeling the brand’s shoes in their day-to-day activities. The most artistic images get featured on a popular Kicks of the Week post. 37Signals, a tech company specializing in team building and remote collaboration, takes a similar route to Bucketfeet by asking users for submissions to be featured on a future blog post. For example, readers were asked to submit a painful story of a terrible work commute experience. As an incentive for making a contribution, the blog offered a $100 gas card to the best (worst) response.

In today’s digital age, customers expect more from their brands than simply being tossed a sales pitch telling us why we should buy their product. By implementing content marketing strategies across a blogging platform, brands are able to create an identity that shows the business strives for more than simply economic prosperity. Without truly reaching one’s audience, that identity remains detached from its true potential.

-Geoff

Many employee advocacy programs focus solely on promoting a company’s marketing-related content. While that’s one way of doing advocacy, it’s not the only way. Many companies are overlooking the gold mine that is corporate social responsibility (CSR). Volunteer work and community organizing provide ample opportunities for employees to show another side of your business on social networks.

Indeed, employee advocacy and CSR go together like love and marriage, like peas and carrots, like peanut butter and jelly… You get the picture. In this post, we’ll take a look at a few tips for bringing life to your CSR initiatives through employee advocacy.

A Glance at Corporate Social Responsibility

If your company already has corporate social responsibility initiatives in place, you have seen the benefits. But just in case you haven’t looked into CSR or need a quick refresher, here are a few highlights:

• 55% of consumers are willing to pay more for products from socially responsible companies.
• With millenials, that number is even higher. 70% of millennials are willing to spend more on brands that support the causes they care about.
• Continuing in the millenial vein, CSR can help attract new talent. Millennials like to work for companies that share their values. More than half of millennials take into consideration their morals and values when choosing an employer.
• Furthermore, studies have shown that corporate social responsibility initiatives can help companies gain trust and legitimacy in their markets.

Now that we’ve quickly outlined the benefits of CSR, it’s time to discuss how you can showcase your company’s values and social impact. That’s where employee advocacy comes in…

6 Quick Tips for Mixing Employee Advocacy and CSR

Rather than posting about your CSR initiatives solely from nameless, faceless corporate channels on social media, it makes sense to include your employees, doesn’t it? After all, your employees are the ones who bring your CSR initiatives to life, and chances are they’re proud of the work they’re doing. So, here are a few tips to get you started:

1. Align CSR to Your Brand

There are plenty of examples where companies have been derided for paying lip-service to their social causes. You can probably think of a few off the top of your head. (If you can’t, just do a Google search.) That’s why all CSR initiatives should be aligned with the brand and culture that the company espouses and that employees are living each and every day.

For example, if your company wants to position itself as a good neighbor in the local community, you cannot have ineffective community development programs. Or worse, you cannot have non-existent community development programs. You need to tie your neighborly efforts to proof points that show your company’s impact on the community.

2. Encourage Your C-Suite to Promote CSR Initiatives

Your executives’ participation is crucial for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, executives are the most visible employees at your company. As such, they should commit to your company’s CSR initiatives and actively discuss them on social networks. If middle managers and individual contributors are the only ones who promote your social responsibility activities, buyers and corporate stakeholders will notice. And most likely, they will not hold a favorable opinion of your company because it will seem as though your company is not fully committed to your social endeavors.

Second, executive participation sets the tone and tenor for the rest of your employees.There’s a trickle-down effect when it comes to employee advocacy and CSR. Without the example of the company’s leadership, your employees will not feel like they can (or should) discuss their volunteering efforts on social networks.

3. Commit to CSR

Some companies treat CSR like a box that they need to check. They do their yearly volunteering. They tweet about it. They write a blog post about it. Their employees share that blog post. Then, they’re done for the rest of the year.

But here’s the thing: “One and done” CSR campaigns can deter company stakeholders, who easily detect inauthenticity. If you’re going to incorporate CSR into your employee advocacy program, it needs to be on an ongoing basis. It needs to be something that employees are routinely involved with, feel proud of, and are willing to discuss with their friends, families, and colleagues on social networks.

4. Focus on the Community Impact

CSR initiatives backfire when they are self-centered. That’s why you should encourage your employees to focus on the impact. How are other people benefiting from your company’s activities?

For example, if your company runs a canned food drive, sure, employees can tweet about the thousands of cans that your company collected. But be sure to emphasize how the food will be beneficial for your community.

5. Supply Educational Content

A good CSR program is not just about actions. It’s also about education. Your employees need to understand why your company is participating in, say, the fight against hunger. Armed with that knowledge, your employees will be eager to help their family, friends, and colleagues understand the issues that your company cares about.

Education requires content. While your company can create masses of great content, you shouldn’t forget to share credible third-party content with your employees on issues that are important to your company. And don’t discourage them from disseminating that educational content to their connections on social media. The more people who understand what’s at stake, the better.

6. Ensure that the Company’s Social Media Policy Reflects a Commitment to CSR

Let’s imagine that your social media policy discourages employees from discussing sensitive issues on social media. At the same time, you want your employees to promote your CSR initiatives, which may revolve around sensitive topics like sustainability or LGBTQ youth or any number of issues. That leaves your employees in a pickle, doesn’t it? How can employees comply with your social media policy and promote your CSR initiatives? That’s why it’s important to take CSR into consideration as you craft a social media policy.

Conclusion

An effective employee advocacy strategy doesn’t just include marketing promotions and offers. With some creative thinking, you can think of other ways to excite your employees and buyers on social media. For instance, you can use your employee advocacy program to promote your company’s culture, and corporate social responsibility initiatives are a good starting point. By using the tips above, you’ll be armed with the best practices for mixing employee advocacy and CSR. Good luck!

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Turn back the clock to autumn 2004, my first term at the University of Oregon. I can picture sitting at my dorm room desk logging in to a perplexing new thing called (The) Facebook for the first time. On first impression, it was a social media Utopia. The readers and publishers were folks I could relate with, college kids posting ideas that fit the social mold of life in your late teens, early twenties. However, in retrospect I realize how much stronger social networking has grown once it became far less of an exclusive club, and more democratic to the user experience. Family, friends and even businesses are now welcome to engage, creating a far more well-rounded space for forward-thinking.

Today, my social space is all grown up – no longer engulfed with mundane themes that remind me of college life. In a forum where anyone and everyone can be a publisher, my timeline stays brimming with content that caters to both traditional and newfound interests, layered with breadth and substance, with posts from those scattered across the globe I consider to have valuable social influence. When choosing whom or what enters my timeline I often consider, is the discourse and commentary brought to the table enlightening? Did I learn something and process a healthy thought triggered by the content shared? Do I trust these chosen influencers will exemplify quality over quantity and continue to publish gold?

These are the questions I dwell on when considering the value of the time and data I burn on Facebook, and that goes for anyone I choose to follow on all social media platforms. I treat friends on social media the same as I would an RSS reader–I simply won’t continue to subscribe if I don’t find the content published interesting and worthwhile. And by content, I mean anything that throws data into the deep wilderness of the internet–videos and articles, or more constrained media, such as rants, integrated Instagram pics, Vine clips, etc. Anytime I reach a tipping point contemplating leaving a social network, I know personalization–despite the tediousness of weeding out bad apples–will always make the experience more meaningful. The moment my timeline shifts into a forum of bickering about first-world problems, real-time errand-running updates, or barrages of cat-baby-food pics, I know all it takes is one click to hide and unsubscribe to make any voice disappear. This is social democracy at its finest. I choose exactly what I want to see.

However, not all voices on social media are this conveniently avoidable, and it’s a growing frustration in our social spaces. In the past few years, it’s become clear that not all the discardable data that filters through our timelines comes from friends we’ve accepted into our social communities. We’ve been forced to make room for a more business-minded social experience as brands now account for a substantial presence on social networks. It’s unique in the fact that brand presence doesn’t just float around the edges of our web page, able to be easily ignored. It’s scrutinized far more closely because it surfaces within our social feeds, interrupting the fluidity of the user experience. This doesn’t have to be a bad thing, even if Facebook plans to force video advertisements à la YouTube–it’s up each individual publisher and the content it curates to steer the perception one way or the other. Is the content that a brand publishes driven to engage and entice, or will it be perceived as intrusive – an interrupting roadblock?

Fortunately, not all brands today are coming across as intrusive after purchasing a piece of prime real estate within our social feeds. It’s actually a breath of fresh air to witness brands doing it the right way – ditching efforts to bombard an audience with product-centric pitches that are blatantly thirsty for a sale. Forget the pop-up, billboard-esque methodology–we are not moths simply drawn in to whatever makes our screen glow. It’s far more desirable to discover a brand willing to stir the pot and dive into the relevant conversations that make social media great. Rather than solely emphasizing sponsored/suggested posts around sales pitches, brands are joining the ranks as a trusted influencers – and it all starts with the selected and curated content they publish and the human voice they establish.

The question then becomes, where does a brand look to discover the right content to drive home its point, to make its voice crystal clear, and to visualize the angles to effectively engage with its audience? That’s where Trapit’s Content Curation Center can help, empowering any given brand with the ability to discover, engage, and publish with ease.

-Geoff

As the sports editor here at Trapit, it has been an absolute privilege to be encouraged by my fellow colleagues to stay on top of anything and everything in the sports world.

I’d like to welcome you to my humble abode, the sports page:

For the first time in my life I finally have an outlet (within my grasp) that allows me to build a bridge between my life on the job site and my life as an aspiring “sports guy” socialite.When I accepted the position, I knew right off the bat that one of the larger scale challenges was going to stem from my ability—or lack thereof—to broaden my horizon of sports interests. I’m talking all of them. I had to come up with a game plan because I knew I would overwhelm myself trying to chase around headlines from all the worldly sporting events, all of which occur simultaneously, ‘round-the-clock, and on seven different continents.There was only one solution to simplify this process:I was going to Trap them one-by-one and bring the content home to me (and to you)…where it belongs.

To become successful at this I had to catch the travel bug without leaving my desk.When I began brainstorming, I knew the Tour de France was coming up, so I began my quest by creating one of my first Traps on Pro Cycling on the eve of the big race to see what would happen.

I wanted to picture what it would feel like to be a rural farmer in France—chills running up my spine—as I watched a rabid pack of cyclists fly by my property.I wanted to witness firsthand that nationalistic pride when a sport is recognized as timeless, an unbreakable tradition that would outlast any economic disaster.

Before 2011, the Tour de France had only been cool, because that Lance guy with the Livestrong bracelets had been relentlessly dominant, and just so happened to rep the red, white and blue.I found out just how naïve I had been after weeks of monitoring the Tour de France via Trapit.

Allow me to break down what I uncovered following this year’s Tour de France using my Pro Cycling Trap.

First and foremost, let’s put this journey into perspective.The whole thing is over 2,000 miles long, and you have 23 days to finish (two TOTAL days of rest off the pedals). It’s like biking from Times Square to Salt Lake City.It’s a trip that would take you 35 hours in car (if you didn’t stop for food, gas or even a bathroom break).The race is broken up into 21 stages, ranging from steep declines to grueling alpine climbs, depending which day it is.

So yeah, no doubt, the endurance on your average pro cyclist is impeccable and absolutely unquestionable.This, I already knew.Just like a marathon runner, you don’t just roll out of bed one morning and develop superhuman calves and lungs.It takes ambition, nutrition, hunger and many other traits that I can only begin to imagine.However, when I ask myself, why on earth would I tune in to watch next year’s Tour de France or any other cycling tour?The answer is now simple:

Why? Because, these gents are absolute warriors! The degree of their refuse-to-lose mentality is a spectacle you rarely see in sports, and I have a perfect example to reiterate my point.Allow me to introduce you to a pair of cyclists: Juan Antonio Flecha and Johnny Hoogerland.During one of the most memorable stages (the infamous #9) in Tour de France history, a France television car sideswiped Flecha’s bike, causing Hoogerland to instantly veer off course.At full speed, Hoogerland flipped over his handlebars and ended up abruptly tangled in a wooden barbwire fence.The man was a mess, and the video was absolutely horrifying.With no ambulance hauling him off and blood pouring down his legs, Hoogerland only lost 16 minutes due to the crash, despite eventually needing 33 stitches to sew up his wounds. The incident even sparked an internal investigation by French police! The pictures speak for themselves, don’t you agree?Amazing.

I started out creating Traps with a mission to expand the horizon of my fanhood. And here I sit from my desk feeling like a certified world traveler.There is an endless abundance of material out there covering any sport you’ve ever wanted to give a chance. You just have to Trap it, and the content is yours.

Cheers!

-Geoff

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I recently read up on an interesting argument that took a stance against the future of curation in today’s content marketing world. The article raised some valid points on brand building, encouraging businesses to strive to be more than filters of the web’s already-public content and to become more of an authority figure on the creative front of its industry. The writer’s main concern over curation stemmed from the question, should a brand choose ‘to be the curator or the curated?’ My response is simple, why not choose to be both? Rather than take a black and white approach where it’s one content marketing strategy or the other, a brand should strive to be as versatile as possible, finding the ideal combination of both content creation and curation that most effectively grips hold of its audience’s interests.

The Dilemma: Avoiding Content Gaps and Consumer Abandonment

Although I wholeheartedly agree with the writer that content creation is integral for a well-rounded marketing campaign, it’s much easier said than done to keep those creative juices flowing for the long haul if all content output is manufactured internally. What if your staff doesn’t have (or runs out of) time, inspiration and financial resources to keep the ball rolling – then what? If that inkwell happens to run dry and triggers a lag in the content flow, the goal of establishing consistency has been abandoned, and in effect could very well result in audience members abandoning the brand online. Remember, for consumers with social media-adapted attention spans, it’s as easy as an unsubscribe, unlike, or unfollow button to say goodbye. Treat content like the nutritious social fuel that it is. Consumers desire it, and in today’s day in age, need it to survive the day. Feed consumers regularly and become part of our consumption routine, but don’t force feed junk food data simply out of necessity to throw something out there.

Stocking the Cupboards: Where Curation Tech Subs into the Game

How much original content can your brand create? That is never an easy answer to address as inspiration comes in waves, topic relevancy shifts and evolves, and free time to be creative is sparse one day and wide open the next. Brands need the curation tools to lean on when the time calls for them, when content creation becomes a pain point for a company’s content marketing agenda. I argue if a brand has already paved its avenue of interest, why not let others ride alongside if they also know that same avenue like the back of their hand? Perhaps even better. Sharing fresh, relevant content that comes from an outside source doesn’t take away from a brand’s authority as a subject matter expert, even if coming from an unknown blogger or business competitor. If anything, it only builds layers atop an already established expertise, telling consumers that this is a brand that cares less about clicks and SEO hounding than it does about bringing the audience the best information available. By curating the great work of others, a brand is not only pushing the market along with original ideas, but riding along with it, breathing in the many voices speaking up within the industry. It even seems to humanize a brand a little bit when they too identify themselves as readers and consumers of content, not just writers and product pushers.

Summarization and Annotation = Reach & Collaboration

One of the more underrated uses of curation in the field of content marketing comes when there is a nice collaborative mix of both curated and original content all within the same published piece. You often see bloggers partake in this method as they grab snippets from a noteworthy article and implement them in their blog post as a platform to address their personal reaction and commentary. However, for brands, this strategy doesn’t need to be used in a manner that says, this is what so-and-so wrote, and this is why they are wrong. Rather than annotate outsider content to set the stage for a fiery rebuttal, use this strategy to show praise to the original source, or furthermore, to provide additional context and value. We’ve all seen how excited folks become when they are retweeted by a famous person or entity, just imagine the reaction after a brand shows love to user-generated content by sharing and adding them to the conversation. Curation doesn’t have to feel like piggybacking someone else’s work and should be looked at as a convenient outlet for inspiration when content creation attempts are lagging. Find an awesome animated video discovered on the web? Perhaps that video could be reposted, but with a twist, given a stat-loaded infographic, a clever cartoon, or a brief passage on whythisis a great contribution to the conversation. This is a great chance for brands to establish its voice, sharing feelings on why it chose to endorse the piece of content that it did, and why it should strike importance to the audience following.

The field of content marketing is a crowded room these days, it seems all brands are jumping on the bandwagon to find links to feed their various social media engines. As a consumer, I don’t expect all brands to pump out exemplary content on a daily basis, but I do expect them to have a firm grasp on the latest dialogue within their industry. Curation tells us a brand is paying attention, while creation shows us its fierce level of passion. Quantity is important, because it holds my interest in a fast moving internet and keeps the brand fresh on my mind, however when it comes time for a brand to speak with its original voice, quality is paramount. Creation and curation shouldn’t be competitors, they should be teammates.

-Geoff

You may remember the legend of John Henry – the post-Civil War railroad worker who put his muscle and sinew-powered hammer against that new-fangled technology: the steam hammer. Or maybe “The Matrix,” where the world as we know it was turned into something looking like Detroit – victim of “the Robot War.” And then there’s “Rocky IV,” which though never nominated for an Academy Award, but did have some pretty cool scenes of Rocky working out like John Henry in the snow, while the evil Ivan Drago pumped iron and chemicals in a laboratory with more wires and electronics than a bad Frankenstein movie.

In each of these stories – and there are hundreds more – the theme is the same: when will these pathetic lumps of flesh and bone – i.e., humans – be replaced by the superior strength, speed, and intelligence that can be delivered by the technology of machines?

In the early years of the 21st Century, US intelligence agencies spent years crawling through billions of bits of data in what would be the forensics of 9/11. Their conclusion: had this data been processed – and patterns recognized – in seconds, not years, 9/11 theoretically could have been prevented.

There’s not much debate that when it comes to crunching massive amounts of data, a computer will clean a human’s clock -all day long. And when it comes to drinking oceans of data, consider this: it is estimated that 90% of all the world’s content has been created in the past two years. From Fred Flintstone painting on cave walls to Plato and Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Emily Dickenson and George Lucas, all of these brilliant folks and thousands more in between account for only about 10% of the world’s content. Now, that is a statement of volume.

Machines have the ability to sift through massive amounts of data at light speed, recognizing patterns and ultimately delivering to you the content you want, so trying to use a human in the process is as outdated as asking old John Henry and his hammer to knock down Yosemite’s Half Dome, right? Well, maybe, but not so fast. Apart from the still nascent science of neural computing, machines today are binary. They are great at breaking information into elemental bits – ones and zeros – and crunching through streams of these bits really quickly, making comparisons, recognizing patterns which can eventually lead to recommendations. But despite the science fiction of “Terminator” and Schwarzenegger and Skynet, computers can’t think – at least not yet. Consider the battles between spammers and anti-spam filters, or the whole concept behind “Search Engine Optimization” – SEO – that really isn’t about optimizing your search at all, but rather about fooling machines into delivering you content that somebody else wants you to see. Machines can be fooled by rather simple structural elements of the non-digital language – for example, it would be easy to envision a story about a bird watchers club in Maryland getting delivered to a fan of The Baltimore Orioles – a mistake a human would not likely make.

Point is, while maybe Schwarzenegger may come back from the future some day as a killer android, that’s not today. Machines are awesome – manhas created remarkable technology that has improved our standards of living, dramatically increased leisure time, and enabled the Kardashians to become international icons. But, science fiction notwithstanding, machines are the tools of mankind – not the other way around. At Trapit, we love technology, we live on the Internet, and we’ve built our business around “Artificial Intelligence” and “Machine Learning.” In fact, remember that 9/11 project a couple of paragraphs ago? Well, from that, Trapit was derived! And so was Apple’s Siri! But we understand enough about machines to know that they are not ready – yet – to fully take on the task of curating content – of storytelling. For while machines do a wonderful job of quickly crunching billions and billions of bits of data, they don’t really understand nuance yet, or fully appreciate context, and semantics, even though great strides are being made in these areas.

In our Trapit business application, we offer the option of “assisted curation” to our customers – that is, allowing a human to intervene in the last mile, making the final decision on which of the stories recommended by Trapit will actually be posted. For any topic Trapit can provide an accurate pool of content to choose from, from millions of articles are selected dozens (try that on your own). But perhaps one article’s take is a little bit too bullish on a competitor. Or a blog post focuses on a region where you don’t do business. There could be hundreds of reasons that relevant content doesn’t quite fit. But Trapit can do the heavy lifting, saving time and money, while leaving subtleties of storytelling—selecting the best of the best content to capture your unique message—up to you.

So Skynet – what’s the beef, man? We come in peace – we’re not looking for a fight. Can’t we all just be friends?

Gary Griffiths
Trapit CEO and Co-founder