These slides are from a Webinar given through Social Media Leaps. You can view this and other Social Media Leaps Webinars at http://www.socialmedialeaps.com/Past-Social-Media-Webinars.aspx

1. Content Curation Show your expertise—by sharing the best of others. Heidi Cool Internet Strategist heidicool.com Web Design & Strategy http://www.heidicool.com/blog/

2. What is content curation? Curation was once the realm of museums and libraries . Now anyone may participate. Content curation is the process of finding and sharing the best content in a given subject area.

3. The Web is a noisy crowded place. Content Curators help sift through the noise.

4. Choosing Content Gather the content that best represents your topic. Library of Congress: Gottlieb Jazz Photos

5. Distributing Content Share the content in the spaces where your audience spends time. Blogs

6. Why Curate Content? Provide more comprehensive resources You save time when you don’t have to write everything yourself.

7. It’s not all about us. Become a one-stop shop for the best information in your niche & people will follow. A mix of content helps you provide more comprehensive resources. My Content Other people’s content. +

9. The quality of what you share reflects on you. Harvard Business Review has a solid reputation. Evil Genius may be an unknown commodity. Read both respected and unknown authors carefully to determine whether their advice is sound. You can find great insights in many places.

10. Originality Counts Is the content unique & fresh? Is everyone else already sharing it?

11. What interests your target audience? Visit their hang-outs and see what questions they ask.

12. Listen to your followers. What are they tweeting? What do they respond to? What do they want to hear?

13. How to find content sources Research now —to build a foundation for later.

14. Find the top blogs in your niche then subscribe to them. Blogs

15. Follow trade journals in your industry Online Magazines

16. Search key words and phrases related to your niche Key Word Searches

17. Use Tweetdeck or Hootsuite to follow people and topics Twitter Lists & Searches

19. What topics generate discussion? LinkedIn Groups

20. Social bookmarking & organization: http://www.delicious.com/hacool Delicious Look at both popular and recent to find the best content. Look at tags shared by others to see what they think is important.

21. Crowdsourcing sites can help you discover what’s interesting in your niche Digg, StumbleUpon

22. Look for links on walls and discussion forums Facebook Pages & Groups

24. Google Reader

25. Keyword search Subscribe to feed.

26. Subscribe to RSS Feeds

27. Subscribing to Feeds Click RSS Icon to subscribe then select your preferred reader. Or copy RSS address then paste into Google Reader. If you can’t find an RSS link, try using the URL for the blog or site. If the site has been coded properly Google Reader will be able to pull the feed.

28. Organize feeds Assign feeds to topical folders

29. Viewing a feed Peruse headlines from a specific subscription Click headline to view post.

30. Read entries View individual items in reader or click through to source. Click headline to go to original post.

31. Peruse Topics Browse all the latest items in a folder

32. View all View items from all subscriptions to skim for the latest updates

33. View feed in Reader Skim headlines for articles worth sharing

34. Monitor key topics - get results via e-mail Google Alerts

35. Relevancy varies - keywords may also bring results for unrelated topics More monitoring tools

36. Save things to share later Save items to Delicious and tag them by topical keywords to easily find them later. Keepstream is a new service currently in beta. I’ve saved the links referred to in this presentation to http://keepstream.com/hacool/content-curation-links

37. How & where to share On blogs, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other services Share excerpts or quotes with links and commentary.

38. Do Not Copy Articles Plagiarism is tacky and illegal . Unless you have permission. (I did not give permission!) My original post. My post on a plagiarist’s site in Argentina.

39. Share via Reader When you click share or share with note, the article will be published to your Shared Items page. This page also produces a feed. You can share this feed on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, your blog and elsewhere.

40. Google Reader Shares posted to various channels

41. Share via Tumblr Tumblr micro-blogging makes it easy to share a variety of content types and follow others with similar interests.

42. Share via posterous posterous micro-blogging let’s you post by e-mail, follow other posterous blogs and share via social media.

43. Share via blogs

44. Share to Twitter, Facebook or other spaces CPA shares links to stories about art, urban planning & Cleveland, in addition to their own announcements.

45. When we share more, people notice. Our CPA plan, initiated in Fall ’09, was to share a variety of art resources from around the world. Apparently it’s working! Tweet Smarts Bored with Twitter already? You just aren’t using it the right way. Here are seven feeds with ties to our city you should check out. Jim Vickers [email_address] Cleveland Public Art featured as 1 of 7 most interesting local Twitter accounts by Cleveland Magazine “ Cleveland Public Art twitter.com/ClevPublicArt From a spinning cloud of heat that can be seen from 60 miles away to an artist’s wonderfully strange computer-generated representation of 40 of his friends’ iTunes libraries, Cleveland Public Art’s Twitter feed connects you to cool, thought-provoking works of art from around the world.”

46. Content Curation Take-Aways Identify the highest quality resources from both well-known and unknown content creators. Select items based on both quality and relevance to your target audience. Use tools like Google Reader and Delicious to monitor and save content. Try to share items that haven’t already been over-shared by others. Publish a mix of your own primary content with curated content to offer a balance of information. Be selective. Don’t post so much content that people need another curator to sort through your posts! Listen and respond to your audience and adapt your content to their needs. Post in the spaces your readers spend time. Don’t plagiarize!!!

47. Heidi Cool [email_address] http://www.heidicool.com http://www.twitter.com/hacool http://www.facebook.com/heidicool Or just Google me. Slides will be uploaded to: http://www.slideshare.net/hacool Related links: http://keepstream.com/hacool/content-curation-links By now you’ve been listening to me way too long. Any questions?