Users want to find the closest match of ready to consume content that is trustworthy and most importantly something that fills the wireframe that they have put together through their own research. With the rise of the digital age and advancement in technology, users are made aware of Content Relevancy - a key metric to consume content. Users are therefore expecting High-Value Content to be delivered at their fingertips, and here is where the folly lies as most organizations charter KM teams to meet this expectation.

Take for example an IT company which has many employees, some are new entrants into the workforce, others lateral experienced hires, managers, group managers, vice presidents / business heads and so forth. If you now see clearly you are not talking about creating content for an abstract audience, but a well-defined persona of users who rate the content based on how easy is it to consume to enable them to become successful. 

Hence, it’s important we familiarize ourselves with the process of Content Curation, which is defined as Collecting, Organizing, Selecting, Packaging and Promoting the best content that is tailored for an audience (users).  So what are some of those practices that can help us develop better collections addressed towards these personas of users?

Identify trigger points to deliver content to the group

Once we have zeroed down on a user group we need to ensure we are aware of pushing the content to them and enabling them through this medium to get hooked on to accessing our content and pulling them closer to becoming brand ambassadors of our content. Hence it’s important we focus understanding their unmet needs that should be addressed through our content.

Creating Fresh Content  V/s Curate the Content

As a Knowledge worker you come across leaders, champions and a host of networks. Its important you follow some of their best work whether it a thought paper, research article, knowledge nugget, webinars or other credible content. Take for example a newsletter weekly edition every good curator has a weekly planner of how he wants to schedule this content and while the supporting pieces can be curated from various sources it helps to manage the central piece and create fresh content so the story progresses with each new edition.  I guess we all are familiar with the Pareto Principle where it’s your 20% fresh content that delivers 80% of the hits.

Don’t limit yourself as the only Brand Ambassador of your Content

Content is no good if it cannot be marketed. And many a time as KMers we forget that it’s not just our job to make sure our best content gets delivered out there. So how do we ensure we identify which content can be marketed by our leaders, peers and gets noticed. It’s important to have a watch on the competition yes as many marketers are in need of content and pretty much are the brand ambassadors that Knowledge Managers should credit for ensuring higher touchpoints of the content we curate. Yes, making our knowledge systems accessible through blog posts, webinars and the likes ensures some of our experts get noticed by marketers and their content gets externally published making our work shine.  So don’t limit yourself to only managing your content strategy alone. Like they say don’t lose the trees for the forest always have an eye on the bigger picture and how your content is credit worthy to other communities.

Sharing credit can make you 'content searchable'

There is a plethora of good content out there and many times although we design our content well in advance and define the sources to gather them from we notice that the piece has already got posted most often by the author. So how does this handicap our content delivery process does it make our viewers lose interest even before we want them to find the content? What could be the solution? Well it’s important to ensure we reward our contributors before others do and publish them in our hall of fame ensuring they feel valued with providing us a steady stream of content that is well researched, timely and ensures they reach us as a first choice.

CTRL-R Managing your Content and keeping it up-to-date

The same old problem of governance where Knowledge Managers are chartered with archiving content that is dated a year back. We see less viewership and no this signals lesser number of hits and hence call for action to archive the content by triggering a few reminders. What instead if we take the same piece and work on it adding a few relevant links, headlines re-packaging it and sharing it with the author for the final proof read? There is a high chance it goes to the leaders and they take notice and on publishing the content post it on their private handle or tweet it highlighting their POV for an industry topic that they follow.  This could be the silver bullet and differentiates good curators. Content Curation is as much about the presentation of good content and sometimes enabling our audience with re-packaging their content ensures we develop better collections that are up-t0-date based on our own expertise managing topic based content over time.

Invest time to discover new content and be bold to critique it

CoPs are a great place to notice someone’s point of view and credit them. As a Community Manager we are also chartered with ensuring we respond to every post and at times critics play a big role in leading us to the right content. It’s important to not play silent spectator at all times and sometimes engage in a interaction to challenge a viewpoint as it helps us to learn more about the SME and in-time develop some of their content to build on our existing collection.

In-Summary

In this digital world where content relevance is measured by how practical, credit worthy and ready content is to be consumed it’s important we ensure we understand the importance of curation. While we are designing our content strategy it’s also important we are open to understanding our user persona’s and investing in defining the right trigger points to deliver high-value content to them. As Knowledge Managers it’s also our call to action to hone our content writing skills and contribute to enriching existing content through our deep industry research skills and ensure we expand our network of content creators crediting them. Over time we are all called to play critic and engage and identify SME’s some of whom we can co-partner with to sustain our collections of content and invest our time in becoming experts in our own industry or topics a curators.

Disclaimer: This article is based on my own experiences and is my personal views. I hope you enjoyed reading it and this would help you investing in reading more on how KM.

About the Author: Michael Sequeira is an independent consultant who is passionate about helping organizations discover how KM can be a key differentiator for their business, teams, and clients. If you would like to learn more about his background and get-in-touch you can connect with him on LinkedIn.