Social content curation has been a “thing” for the past few years, but enterprise marketers could still increase their efforts. Curaters operate on the idea that humans, and not algorithms, are the best filters of the enormous amount of information spawned on the Web. The value of these filters and of the information they curate rises in proportion to the social relevance of the source to the end user. Hence, content shared by close friends and associates on social media sites such as Pinterest, Facebook and LinkedIn carry a lot of weight, as these sources have a direct connection and relevance to us personally.
Businesses can adopt content curation on their social intranets (internal-facing). This allows them to present valuable data to stakeholders without having to produce it all in-house, saving time and money. Enterprise content curation allows a larger body of useful information to be introduced faster when compared with self-produced content, thereby increasing the value of the company intranet to its users.
What are the benefits of social curation in the enterprise?
Beyond the obvious cost savings and speed benefits, there is business-building value in sharing information through the enterprise curation model. Primarily, this comes in the form of increased engagement with all stakeholders, including employees, vendors and customers. Increased engagement means a greater ability to send your marketing message to ride along unobtrusively with content, and also to gain insight into the current mindset of those different audience types in order to better communicate and plan.
Targeting specific groups within an intranet management platform, such as SharePoint, could be helpful in spurring ideas through crowdsourcing from particular audiences, data mining, and analytics of the content they are sharing and the conversations being had as a result. Enterprise content curation provides a window into buttons – the cues that people respond to and compel the decision to purchase or otherwise engage with a brand — simply by monitoring how your audience interacts with the data you have selected for them, and what they choose to curate themselves. Groups can also be directly invited to share ideas on new products by posting designs and themes they wish to see on your platform.
Two different audiences.
Internally, examining the analytics on curated content can help illuminate the values of employees and therefore increase productivity when those values and interests are targeted. Conversely, curated content helps employees understand the forces at play in their industry, and if annotations are attached expressing clear viewpoints from management, will help them process what the company’s stance is regarding these forces.
Externally, an outward-facing portal can increase a brand’s thought leadership position and make it the “go-to” place for industry insights through aggregating valuable content. This aggregation can spur interaction, and therefore foster a continuous conversation with customers, making any investment of time in building it well worth it.
As new media sources, including social media users and digital publishers, generate more information in a single day than can be processed in a lifetime, it becomes increasingly important to provide a way to separate the wheat from the chaff and direct the information to the appropriate users that will benefit the most from it. Administrators would be wise to implement the social curation model to their intranets.