Content curation has become a very “hot” subject over the last couple of months. I remain to be convinced of the value of content curation though. In many cases content curation seems to be a way to avoid having to put a little more thought and effort into writing a proper article (or p”post”). A bit like a glorified and re-branded twitter feed.This is accentuated by the “fake curation” tools that simply creates what is supposed to look like a curated contents from an automatic feed, e.g. from a twitter stream.

In most cases I prefer when someone has taken the trouble to write a post / article and am not very interested in what someone might have “curated”. (In addition, it sounds a bit like museum pieces, doesn’t it?)

But it is very popular.

Someone who is more enthusiastic than me about content curation is Therese Torris, a long-time Lunch at the Circle participant and frequent guest and the author of the interesting blog Return on Clicks.

Therese has just written a rather substantial article on her views on contents curation: Content Curation Tools for Brands.

Here are Therese’s conclusions on the subject:

Here is what I concluded from this research:

• Content curation does help content discovery. Curation helped me discover and share content on my favorite topics. Numerous reports show that social content curation à la Pinterest brings traffic to brand sites. Curated content embeds brand content into a rich inbound context of external content.
• Social content curation fosters customer engagement. Consumers who curate a brand’s content not only send it traffic, they also bring to the brand and its product a much needed validation. Brands like Whole Foods that participate in social curation on Pinterest increase their customers’ engagement.
• Corporate curation tools help create a competitive advantage. In addition to public social curation platforms, brands should use scoop.it or corporate collaborative content curation tools like Curata, CurationSoft or Zemanta to listen to their market, optimize their content and collaborate on their content strategy.
• But content curation is no panacea for failing content creation. Curated content supplements original brand content, it cannot replace it. If a brand has no story to tell, no original content, no topics to share with its audience and no Social Media strategy, content curation will only increase the overall online noise level.

Do read the full article, on the link above. It is full of useful information!

What’s your view? Is contents curation useful or not?