This post was mentioned on Twitter by danielrmccarthy: Social Content Curation, Facebook and Click-Throughs http://bit.ly/auh8n2...

The broad debate across the social media community about “original” versus “repurposed” content defines the content question in a way that is too confrontational, I think. A good example is the Good Reads summary of things that struck me that I do on this blog. I've been fascinated by the volume of upstream click-thru's I'm driving with those posts. People are reading them and clicking through to the articles that I'm highlighting.

I'm acting as a curator of content that I'm experiencing. I'm applying an editorial filter on that content, and in each summary providing some context for why I think the post is interesting. The blog post itself isn't strictly original, but it is definitely presenting a point of view that some number of my readers find useful.

That's the role of curation, and every brand can benefit from it. For instance, imagine posting once a week on your Urbane apartments blog about new reviews of restaurants in the surrounding area. The reviews can come from any number of sources, and you pick out the ones that you think would be the most interesting to your Community. That's curated content. It's not original. But it is incredibly useful.

That seems easy enough, but then, not really as so many other objectives begin to surface. For instance, it seems that to be an effective and efficient curator, we have to choose which platforms to aggregate the information to, be it facebook, twitter, blogs. Your Circle of Influence isn't evenly divided between any of these, like fishing Where the Fish Are. Sometimes I get the most response from a LinkedIn posts as an example, which seem strange to me.

Then there also seem to be different distribution paths that have different results, such as a direct link to an article on our blog from twitter, verses a direct link on twitter to our facebook fan page,which has a more descriptive outline of the article, with an accompanying link to the blog. While that seems to be a longer path to get folks to the information they are seeking, it also helps build some fans along the way.

And then there is the balance between original content and repurposed content, which evokes a lot of emotion with the purists folks. I don't know what that balance is, but for our own apartment blog, it seems like about 1/3 original to 2/3 repurposed.

The point here being, there seem to be different results based on alternate distribution paths, and other seeming simple adjustments, and they seem to change, which is why marketing sometimes is a mystery I guess. So, we keep practicing,

The broad debate across the social media community about “original” versus “repurposed” content defines the content question in a way that is too confrontational, I think. A good example is the Good Reads summary of things that struck me that I do on this blog. I've been fascinated by the volume of upstream click-thru's I'm driving with those posts. People are reading them and clicking through to the articles that I'm highlighting.

I'm acting as a curator of content that I'm experiencing. I'm applying an editorial filter on that content, and in each summary providing some context for why I think the post is interesting. The blog post itself isn't strictly original, but it is definitely presenting a point of view that some number of my readers find useful.

That's the role of curation, and every brand can benefit from it. For instance, imagine posting once a week on your Urbane apartments blog about new reviews of restaurants in the surrounding area. The reviews can come from any number of sources, and you pick out the ones that you think would be the most interesting to your Community. That's curated content. It's not original. But it is incredibly useful.

That seems easy enough, but then, not really as so many other objectives begin to surface. For instance, it seems that to be an effective and efficient curator, we have to choose which platforms to aggregate the information to, be it facebook, twitter, blogs. Your Circle of Influence isn't evenly divided between any of these, like fishing Where the Fish Are. Sometimes I get the most response from a LinkedIn posts as an example, which seem strange to me.

Then there also seem to be different distribution paths that have different results, such as a direct link to an article on our blog from twitter, verses a direct link on twitter to our facebook fan page,which has a more descriptive outline of the article, with an accompanying link to the blog. While that seems to be a longer path to get folks to the information they are seeking, it also helps build some fans along the way.

And then there is the balance between original content and repurposed content, which evokes a lot of emotion with the purists folks. I don't know what that balance is, but for our own apartment blog, it seems like about 1/3 original to 2/3 repurposed.

The point here being, there seem to be different results based on alternate distribution paths, and other seeming simple adjustments, and they seem to change, which is why marketing sometimes is a mystery I guess. So, we keep practicing,