A Digital Curation Primer for Brands Builders and Media Makers

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n an age of “information overload,” a broad range of

rapidly developing digital platforms can elevate a brand’s stories to new heights. By taking existing data and tapping into community tastes in creative ways, brands have powerful new mechanisms for captivating consumers’ attention. In this curation primer, Weber Shandwick’s President of Digital Communications, Chris Perry, gives conceptual inspiration and practical guidance for brands

Chris Perry President, Digital Communications cperry@webershandwick.com @cperry248

to get going in the curation space.

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Brands can deeply engage customers by cultivating unique experiences and compelling stories. Curation is an essential component of captivating these audiences.

The most famous curator of the 20th century had nothing to do with museums. The late Baird Jones was, as it happened, a PR guy. Tapping into the appetites of the hippest people on earth, he drew them in by the thousands, week after week, to the historic nightclub Webster Hall in New York. As he had previously done at Studio 54, Jones sourced exceedingly cool content that fed and bolstered one of the most renowned venues in the city. Webster Hall is where U2 played their first U.S. concert. It’s where Madonna held her infamous pajama party in 1995, making headlines around the world. But before that, Bill Clinton kicked off his 1992 presidential campaign there.

Baird Jones knew something that brands can learn from — the necessity of brilliant curation.

The buzz around curation will become an increasingly important topic among technologists, social media types and creatives. Simple reason: There is too much stuff, on too many platforms, vying for our attention.

A new breed of curators — digital platform-builders, taste-makers and meaning-makers — are fastemerging to help address the issue.

By definition, digital curation is the process of creating repositories of digital content for current and future reference. Curation is widely enabled through hashtags, lists and aggregation platforms like Storify, Magnify, Curation Station, News.me and many more.

In each of these examples, curation is managed via tech-enabled service offerings, metadata or keywords to capture and present relevant content.

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No matter what technology is used, curation will always center on three things: creativity, community and taste. Media properties like Techmeme and Mediagazer, popular real-time aggregators of news curated by Gabe Rivera and Megan McCarthy respectively, show how human instincts and knowledge can build massive value for communities of interest.

The properties have also turned Rivera and McCarthy into tech celebrities in their own right.

Other highly scaled and creative combinations literally reinvent how we discover and experience media of most value to us. These include:

Brain Pickings + Flipboard Huffington Post Huffington Post is one of the most visible examples of curation with scale.

HuffPo is reported to have more than 6,000 bloggers — from politicians and celebrities to academics and policy experts — who contribute in real-time on a wide range of topics. It’s now a proven model for publishing that fuses original reporting, third-party blog posts and news aggregation. The site receives approximately 15.6 million page views per weekday and millions of comments per month. It can be controversial, but that’s because the editors have nailed the art of catering to the tastes of a very specific community — tastes that won’t always be shared by those outside of the community. This is a feature, not a bug.

The Scoop Of the countless media innovations coming from The New York Times, The Scoop is an invaluable resource to New York City newcomers and veterans alike. The Scoop is an app that repurposes the Times’ staff’s favorite restaurants, bars, events and New York insider happenings, then recommendations are delivered via lists or location on a mobile device.

It has everything an app should offer: simplicity, authority and utility — all delivered from their treasure trove of editorial content.

Brain Pickings is a curated creative blog from Maria Popova. She and her partners spend more than 450 hours per month scouring the web for bits of creative inspiration, then post to the Brain Pickings site and Twitter daily. When embedded as a feed to the front page of Pulse (Android) or Flipboard (iOS), the stellar content selected by Brain Pickings comes to life as a multimedia, social news magazine presenting the best in past and current popular culture.

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Aweditorium Aweditorium takes disparate content surrounding emerging music artists — music samples, photography, artwork, stories, lyrics, hi-def video and interviews — and ties it all together into a single, intimate experience on a multi-touch display. Part jukebox, part music sampler, the app lets you explore hundreds of new artists through a user experience specifically designed for the iPad. You can “like” what you hear, go deeper into artist content on YouTube, or head directly to the iTunes store to purchase. The app serves as an extension to your existing tastes, leading you to new finds and developing a body of content that you’ll have the urge to share with your own community of friends.

News.me Longreads + Instapaper A powerful pairing for magazine readers is a combination of Instapaper with the long-form story aggregator Longreads. Longreads links to new story recommendations every day — including some of the best longform content ever published. Magazine stories from top publications (The New Yorker, Esquire, The Atlantic), short stories, interview transcripts, and even historical documents are all on tap. It’s a perfect complement to apps like Instapaper (on Android and iOS), designed to save web pages for future digestion, and optimized to deliver a consistent reading experience across all documents. The combination has been likened to a DVR for magazine content. It offers the ability to create a personalized, full-featured magazine, to be read whenever and wherever you’d like — on any tablet or computer you’d like.

Developed by Betaworks, the investors behind hot properties like Tumblr, TweetDeck and Ideeli, in The New York Times’ R&D labs, News.me is a social news reading app that integrates with Twitter and link shortener bit.ly. It displays the news being consumed by the people you follow — including luminaries like Nicholas Kristof and Steven Johnson — and filters it based on frequency of consumption and sharing across the network. So if you have a friend who always knows the best bands before everybody else does, you can watch what music news they deem noteworthy, as it is consumed and shared.

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With these examples as inspiration, how does a brand take cues from the curation movement to deliver stories and experiences? The good news is, you don’t need to be a publisher or technologist to make curation work for you. Even better, brands can offer a more deeply engaging experience by merging offline and online practices.

Here are three ways brands can get into the game today:

1. CURATE YOUR OWN NEWS Historically, businesses have relied on the press to deliver news and perspective about corporate performance, personalities and products. That exclusivity has long since passed. Brands are aggressively using journalistic practices inside their own organizations to mine stories, publish content, create their own news channels and update followers via social networks and content sharing sites like Twitter, Scribd and Slideshare. HP, a client of Weber Shandwick, is at the leading edge of the trend to not only share news, but link to media coverage, executive appearances, financial performance and more. You can follow HP today on Twitter via @hpnews and its own social news site, Channel HP.

2. BE AN ANCHOR FOR COMMUNITIES OF INTEREST One of Time Magazine’s 50 Best Websites of 2010, Foodspotting is a mobile app and website that allows users to curate guides to the best food and wine in their neighborhoods — or anywhere in the world. Celebrities like Wolfgang Puck have jumped on board, as have brands like Zagat, Whole Foods Market, Bravo and Bon Appetit.

As well as bringing food and travel enthusiasts together around the guides curated for them, brands such as Travel Channel also allow fans to curate their own guides for the likes of Anthony Bourdain. Available on Android and other platforms, the app turns software into “funware,” awarding points and badges for active participation in the curation process. By inspiring and connecting people in a very creative community of interest, Foodspotting has cultivated a large base of users who are affluent, educated and engaging deeply with brands.

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3. C URATE A NEW EXPERIENCE AND BUILD COMMUNITY THROUGH IT Runners all over the world now take for granted the ability to aggregate their daily performance data, track their progress over time, bring the data to life through an attractive UX, incorporate gaming mechanics into workouts, and participate within a community in the process. That’s precisely what Nike was able to bring consumers with the launch of Nike+ in 2006. (Originally a tiny device that measures and records how far and how fast you’re running, these days you don’t even need the accelerometer embedded in your shoe; your iPod or iPhone can track this data now, too.)

Once you’ve got your data, the product’s integration with the Nike website allows for activities like naming runs, competing in the community distance club, challenging other runners, and participating in forums (under the banner “talk some trash”). It was the first of its kind in unleashing the power of personal metrics curation and weaving that data into a rich community experience. Five years since its launch, Nike+ remains one of the gold standards for creative product design and utility.

These examples point to new creative opportunities. Given the fire hose of content produced every hour of every day, a curation mindset is vital for anyone in the media business. Inspiration and experimentation are evident all around the web.

For as Baird Jones demonstrated at Webster Hall, the core components of curation don’t change. The tools come and go, but the human ability to carefully craft a creative experience that resonates with a community will never be obsolete.

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To delve more deeply into the apps, sites and tools cited in this paper, check out the following links.

APPS

SITES

Storify storify.com Magnify magnify.net Curation Station curationstation.com News.me news.me Instapaper instapaper.com Flipboard flipboard.com Aweditorium aweditorium.com Foodspotting foodspotting.com Nike+ nikeplus.com

Techmeme techmeme.com Mediagazer mediagazer.com Huffington Post huffingtonpost.com The Scoop nytimes.com/thescoop Brain Pickings brainpickings.org Longreads longreads.com Channel HP h30507.www3.hp.com

BOOKS Curation Nation curationnation.org

CONTACT Chris Perry President, Digital Communications cperry@webershandwick.com +1 212 445 8007 @cperry248

Jackie Danicki Director, Social Communications jdanicki@webershandwick.com +1 212 445 8040 @jackiedanicki

www.webershandwick.com @webershandwick

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