Categories
Archives
Sign up to our Newsletter
5 social curation sites/apps and why customer publishing agencies should be interested
Social curation has been a hot topic in the digital world since the latter part of 2010. With an ever growing base of content fighting for consumers' attention, people are looking for ways to filter the stream of information and news.
Through analysing data from people's social networks, taking into account ‘likes' and friends' updates, social curation sites automatically collate stories and news from social networks that are specific to this person, so that what they experience is relevant to them. In effect some of them create daily online newspapers and magazines for people.
There are many sites that offer a social curation service these days, and we have decided to look more closely at five of these.
Paper.li
This service organises links shared on Twitter and Facebook into an easy to read newspaper-style format. Newspapers can be created for any Twitter uses, list or #tag, so that you can ensure you do not miss out even if not online 24/7. The downside with this service is that it often includes stories that the user may already have seen.
Storify
As it names gives away, Storify is about "turning what people post on social media into compelling stories." It gathers the best photos, videos, tweets and more on a chosen subject and publishes them as a simple story that can be embedded anywhere. Currently only available to selected users.
Likebutton
This is one for those who favour Facebook over other social networks. Powered by the Facebook Like Button and social plugins, it compiles the most liked things across Facebook, and even splits it into particular categories. A powerful tool for those interested in what the Facebook community, globally and socially, is into in real-time.
Flipboard
An iPad app that describes itself as a "personalized, social magazine," which connects with people's social networks to bring the "beauty and ease of print to the web." It also has Flipboard content lists that users can follow, e.g. FlipTech or FlipDesign, for a complete iPad magazine experience based. An aesthetically pleasing social curation app.
Mashable Follow
Launched last week and currently limited to Beta testers, Mashable Follow enables users to find and share Mashable content that is most interesting to them. Users can curate their news streams by selecting topics and people of interest to follow within the site. The site encourages engagement by awarding badges for sharing content - taking on the features of geo-location sites like Foursquare, linking one's social networks and following topics.
For agencies working with brands and content production in the digital domain, the rise of curation sites is not to be overlooked. As people become more able to select what content they receive, high quality content and its shareability will become paramount in order to permeate the ‘inner circle' of people's digital content experience. 4Comments
4 Comments on "5 social curation sites/apps and why customer publishing agencies should be interested"
The main reason why publishing agencies should be aware of these sites is that they reinforce the value of editors, something agencies can provide and auto-collation cannot. See our post on http://bit.ly/g6C24o
Interesting post. Curation is definitely one of the hottest topics in tech right now. I just wanted to call your attention to one more powerful curation tool -- Pearltrees. (Disclosure, I'm the Chief Evangelist for the company). Pearltrees is the first social curation community and has one of the largest and most active communities of people curating content online today. The software allows anyone to organize, discover and share the cool stuff they find on the web and it allows people to spontaneously "team-up" to collaboratively curate content in real-time. Curated content can then be shared or embedded in other sites. Not only does it allow people to preserve the most interesting material they've discovered, it allows for organization that provides context and thus deeper meaning to collections of links. For brands it can be a powerful way to manage links to press coverage and to expose that material in new and interesting ways. It can also be a tool that brands can use for community engagement by allowing passionate brand advocates to team up and curate brand-related content. Please check it out and let me know what you think. If you have questions, you can get me @owstarr.
The lines are blurring between "social" media and online media curation methods. There's also Eqentia, a comprehensive content aggregation, curation and re-publishing platform with integrated social media hooks. (I'm the founder/CEO) E.g. Here's a curated showcase portal on the topic of Content Marketing including lots of curation-related material. http://portal.eqentia.com/contentmarketing
Thanks for this article. Active space indeed! I wanted to bring Scoop.it to your attention (disc: I'm a co-founder). It's a "publish-by-curation" platform: the curator acts as an editor in chief: he/she selects, edits, organizes and shares content at will, on a topic-centric media. Content can come from a built-in search engine (crawling the social web), from a bookmarklet (to grab on the fly), or from users suggestions (a collaborative touch). The result is a neat, personalized media. Please see a few examples: http://www.scoop.it/t/cities http://www.scoop.it/t/web-content-digital-curation http://www.scoop.it/t/coveting-freedom http://www.scoop.it/t/violins We are still on beta but experiencing a very nice growth, so thought you could be interested :)