Digital Curation with Scott Jangro

Eric Nagel

13 years ago

I have been, or can be if you click on a link and make a purchase, compensated via a cash payment, gift, or something else of value for writing this post. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will be good for my readers.

Curation was a hot keyword in 2011, and it’s going strong into 2012. Scott Jangro, creator of Shareist, held a session at Affiliate Summit West on Digital Curation, which answered some of my questions about what curation is, and why I (as an affiliate) should care.

The beginning of Scott’s presentation reaffirmed that affiliates should build sites with their future audience in mind. He then went on to discuss the (brief) history of curation, from a museum curator to Curation Nation to Scobleizer’s The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators to today’s digital curation tools.

Here are my notes:

Why are you here?
- Affiliates build sites, but without an audience, lose encouragement
- Why are you starting this website?
What is Digital Curation?
- Curators collect information for a museum, library, etc. for a collection (bundles)
  - An online curator
- Curation Nation (book – history of curation)
  - Covers copyright, ethical questions
- Magnify.net
  - Video curation platform
- Scobleizer
  - The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators
    - Bundle
    - Reorder
    - Editorialize
      - Adding value / prospective
      - Get comments
    - Distribute / push to social networks
MasterNewMedia.com
- Curation tools
Filter through lots of information and pull out bits that are useful to your audience

Quora released a curation model in December

Why is curation important / necessary / critical?

Internet is growing quickly / exponentially

Information discovery

Random
- StumbleUpon
- Twitter
- Facebook
Specific question / search
- Google
Curation is in the middle

Aggregation is not Curation

It’s tempting to automate
- Danger – it should be filtered

How to get started with curation

Choose a topic
Create a profile of your ideal fan / customer / user
Discover great content and organize it
- Use the tools mentioned (see photo)
- Twitter / Google / Youtube / etc keyword searches
- RSS feeds
Publish and Distribute
- Biggest mistake affiliates make when publishing is affiliates try to get users to leave quickly & get the cookie set. Make that visitor yours.
  - You’re borrowing Google’s customers
  - Great & easy when the traffic is coming. What happens when the traffic dries up?
  - Pay yourself first.
    - Fan
    - Newsletter
Publish to a platform that you own
- Not ezinearticles, wordpress.com, pintrest
  - Great for marketing, but make these drive traffic to you

Engage with your audience

Curation is a tool and a mindset

What audience can you build?

What problems are you solving?
For whom?
NOT: What website can you build?

Using curation as an SEO strategy

It adds value to your site