7 Reasons You Must Curate
Team Curagami
http://www.Curagmai.com
@Curagami

Martin Smith
Founder & CEO
@Scenttrail
e: martin(at)Curagami.com

Honorable Mention
Top Decks 2014
Haiku Deck
http://blog.haikudeck.com/inspiring-presentations-2014/

Thanks :) Team Curagami

This Haiku Deck is about the changes that happen to YOU when you curate. Without those changes you can't become a great web marketer. So becoming a great curator is sine qua non to becoming a great Internet marketer.

Thanks to Team Haiku Deck for giving 7 Reasons You Must Curate content Honorable Mention in their most inspiring decks for 2014.

See all team Haiku Deck's choices here:
http://blog.haikudeck.com/inspiring-presentations-2014/

Thanks :) Team Curagami

7 Reasons You MUST Curate
* Can't Create Sustainable Online Community without it.
* Reach - you can create 100x more curation in the same time as it would take to create a single piece of original content.
* Costs - once your site is modeled into Google's algorithm everything is expensive and not just in money. If you don't TEST content first with curation you are NUTS.
* Digital Listening - nothing says WE CARE and WE LISTEN faster than YOUR using THEIR content. And they are 99% likely to provide social shares back.
* Authority - No voice = no authority and you create a bigger "voice net" by curating than creating (by what you select and from where so you send 2 signals with every curation vs one with creation. Creation is always about THIS IS WHO WE ARE curation is about THIS IS WHO WE LOVE and WHO LOVES US.

7 Reasons You Must Curate
* Tribes - Tribes don't form because YOU are cool (singular) they form because WE are cool (together). Cool may be the wrong word, but you get the idea.
* Sustainable Online Community - as in your website costs LESS and LESS while giving your bottom line MORE and MORE. The ultimate goal of all web dev is the creation of sustainable online community whether you know it or plan for it or now (lol). M

The Grateful Dead knew a few things about creating sustainable community. When your content spawns moveable tribes wiling to follow you from place to place just to hear how you will change your message today you've more than won you've become a master content curator.

Online Community
There is a sequence to how you build community online. First you need to do a lot of LISTENING and CURATING to create trust. Need to share some INTIMATE and DANGEROUS things about yourself too.

No danger = no one cares.

Content says THIS IS WHO WE ARE, what people do with your statement begins the cycle of CREATE, LISTEN, CREATE AGAIN you will get to know well.

One overlooked reason you MUST curate is using THEIR content on YOUR site is a sure way to create connection. Be sure to do so with attribution and permission, but reward your loyal customers with a piece of the action so they can love you back.

Digital listening is different too.The environment is time delayed and easy to misunderstand, so mistakes will be made. Better to make mistakes of COMISION instead of OMISSION. Can't CURATE too much, but you can create too much.

IF you keep creating OVER your tribes' attempts to engage in a conversation you lose. Listen more than you talk, something only possible once community begins to form, and you win. Getting to sustainable online community faster is what curation helps you accomplish.

Curation Crushes Creation
Let's say we both have a week. You can only blog and I can only curate. At the end of that week the curator will know so much more about:

* What content to create.
* Who will and can help.
* Who will read and share.
* The S/R curve (Stimulus/Response).
* Conversion.

that the victory will be crushing and complete. If you can only do ONE then you should curate with rich snippets. But don't only do one, you need curation and creation to work hand in hand at about a 10% Creation to 90% Curation ratio (hate ratios since they don't find everyone all the time ever, but helps to understand the SCALE of the difference between curation and creation ).

Writing a million words of content is going to cost you somewhere north of $30,000.

Don't think you need a million words? Yeah you are wrong :).

You can create the same acceptance, tribe and support with content curation at about 1/10th the price.

Curation allows you to spread your $30K investment in content creation over a longer period of time (thus lowering costs) and it insures your content creation since all content curation is a TEST where the question is SHOULD I BLOG ABOUT THIS TOPIC.

When your curation trends for days the answer to the "Should I blog" question is an emphatic YES.

Digital Listening
Everything you do online sends signals. Many ignore the most important digital listening signals such as:

* Following Back.
* Answering Shares with Shares.
* Saying Thank You.
* Coaching and helping.
* Listening and Learning.
* Creating SOCIAL content (much more than simply strapping on a social share widget).
etc.

This topic deserves its own Haiku Deck, but you get the idea. What and how you do things online MATTER and everything is saying something to someone.

Here are a few of the ways you can "listen" digitally. Don't forget other more subtle clues such as:

* Having an easy to find subscription form (says we want people to join us).
* Creating easy to understand and device agnostic web design.
* Sharing GREATNESS no matter where it happens.

That last bullet, the creation of public profiles is a favorite. When your customers have space on your site they are 100% more likely to care. You MUST begin to hand the keys over to trusted community members and that means outward facing profiles = part of the quid pro quo for that kind of online advocacy these days.

HOW you say things matters. Go EASY and be FUN. If you are a control freak get someone else to write important pieces of your brand defining content such as:

* About Page.
* Ambassador Program Call To Action and Explanation page.
* Terms (never let lawyers write this critical content).

You might think the lawyers thing is strange, but if you let legal speak go on your site you are DEAD and much more DEAD than if you get sued. You are dead because no tribe will form.

Without a tribe the web's natural and regular costs are unrecoverable. You MUST create online community or be eaten by the inevitable costs of creating and maintaining a website. You must curate to crate a tribe.

No supportive tribe willing to advocate for you and no online brand, no online brand means costs win and you are dead. Know your peeps, love your peeps, support your peeps.

Online tribe formation is a strange dance of desire, intention, disappointment and recovery. Creating sustainable online community is BY FAR AND AWAY the hardest thing we've ever done in our 30 year marketing career.

Easy to mess up and hard to build trust the development of online community is a special kind of torture you must master by curating, curating and curating some more.

The actual cycle is more like this:

CREATE enough content so you can ask for help then go in this cycle:

Create, Listen, Create

Rinse and Repeat over and over, faster and faster, better and better.

The Green Bay Packers know about community. The team is owned by share holders and little Green Bay LOVES their team and are loved back in turn.

Make no mistake, you MUST create sustainable online community or be eaten by the online costs monster and the mere fact you were successful yesterday means little to nothing today. You earn community daily with curation and creation.

We hope this deck has helped explain why content curation is a Critical Success Factor (CSF) for online marketing. Fair to ask, "what the heck IS content curation". A question we promise to answer in another Haiku Deck soon.

Curate On and be sure to share your stories of curation and Internet marketing success, failure and triumph.

Team Curagami is easy to reach:

http://www.Curagami.com
@Curagmai

founded by Martin Marty Smith
@Scenttrail
martin(at)Curagami.com

Curate because you love it or because you must, but CURATE NOW :). Marty