How Curation Fits Into Your Content Marketing: Enterprise-class Curation Tools

How Curation Fits Into Your Content Marketing: Enterprise-class Curation Tools:from Business 2 Community by Liz Wilson

Enterprise curation needs specialist tools and processes. Photo by contemplative imaging on flickr

Part 3 of my content curation guide gives a taste of some enterprise-class curation platforms.
Part 1 was an overview and tips on getting started and part 2 reviewed some free curation tools.

Why would you need an enterprise-class platform?

There are many reasons. Your core business is not curating, so you want to spend the minimum time doing it. Your enterprise doesn’t want to build its own curation software. You need to find very specific content from trusted sources in the maze of information on the web.
You have a team of editors who need a proven, user-friendly user interface; you might want to configure filters and business rules to decide what is aggregated and presented to editors or rejected. You want to create your own custom-designed publishing channels.
So, if you’re a medium or larger enterprise, you may want a paid-for content curation platform offering highly sophisticated, customizable features.
This class of platform will allow you to complete all 3 steps of curation (finding content, organising and annotating it, and publishing via one platform, rather than needing to use separate tools. It will first aggregate news or other content for you using sophisticated algorithms. Then you will be able to select, organise and contextualize the content. Finally, you’ll publish it to different channels. All these features will be customizable.

What an enterprise curation platform should do

Susan McKittrick, a consultant with the Patricia Seybold Group and an expert on enterprise content curation, sums it up nicely:
Help you find the best content
Make it fast and easy to select items and add commentary
Provide flexibility in presentation and distribution of curated content
Support the information consumer’s experience through personalization and navigation
Report data marketers need to improve execution, demonstrate value and gain customer insight

Some examples of enterprise-class tools

As with free tools, there are now many enterprise curation providers. Susan McKittrick, writing in September 2011, talked about an explosion of content curation solutions.
Today I’ll introduce you to just 3 of the most popular to give you an idea of what’s available. Follow the links to check them out. Bear in mind this article only intends to give a flavour of what’s out there – these are not recommendations as every use case is different.

Curata

Pawan Deshpande and his company Curata try to provide curation thought leadership

Curata is possibly the best known and is a content curation tool specifically designed for B2B marketers. The company tries hard to provide thought leadership and produces some excellent free resources.
Take a look at the comprehensive product tour on their website and then, if you’re interested, request a demo.
Sue McKittrick has done a detailed product review: read a sample or buy the full report.
And if you want to get an idea of pricing for your organisation, go here.

Eqentia

Eqentia describes itself as the most versatile aggregation and curation platform. It provides a range of products and services for different use cases from newsrooms to individuals (knowledge tracking, content curation and personal news streams). So curation for content marketing is just one of its applications.
Here’s how it describes its content marketing capabilities.
Aggregate and curate content that will delight your customers and draw new visitors to your website
With timely, authoritative and focused content from Eqentia, your website will become invaluable to the people you want to reach…
…Help your existing customers by providing them with the information they seek
…Help prospective customers understand how your products and services can work for them…
As with all Eqentia solutions, you can curate the content or simply rely on our filtering to bring you timely and topical news
Read Sue McKittrick’s product review and find pricing information here.

PublishThis

PublishThis is designed specifically for content marketing. It has a Discover – Curate – Feed – Optimize workflow. It says:
PublishThis… enables brands to become powerhouse publishers. Attacking this challenge no longer requires adding cost-intensive human resources to your marketing team or complexity to your business operations…
Our powerful curation and marketing automation tools are helping businesses like yours evolve and embrace a modern publishing playbook which fuses human insight and extraordinary technology
Price appears to depend on your specific requirement as there is no general information available.
If you’ve visited all the links above you should now have some idea what an enterprise-class platform could look like.

If you want to go further

If you are thinking of investing you’ll need to do substantial research about different providers to make sure you’re getting the one that best suits your purpose.
The first step is to define your own use case, then evaluate any potential providers.
Susan McKittrick has also drawn up an excellent Content Curation Evaluation Framework which you can download free (with email registration). This will give you detailed background on the how and why of curation in content marketing, help you to decide what your own use cases are, and guide you in organising your research.

More resources

I want to avoid information overload, so there’s just one more resource today.
As mentioned, Curata publishes some excellent free ebooks, webinar recordings and other materials. This is probably the best destination to expand your knowledge of how to use curation in your content marketing.

• This article draws heavily on Susan McKittrick’s work so many thanks to her.

In part 4 of my series I’ll show you some real-life examples of content marketing using curation. Sign up to my email list so you don’t miss it, or check back here next Friday.