The Value of Content Curation with Curata

spk_0:   0:02
welcome to maximize your social actionable advice on how your business can maximize your social media presence. Now the host of Maximize your Social Social Media Author, Speaker, consultant, founder of Maximize Social Business, The Social Media Centre of Excellence and the Social Tool Summit Neil Shaper. Hi, everybody. This is Neil Shaper. Welcome to another episode of Maximize Your Social. I'm out here in beautiful Boston, Massachusetts, actually, in a building in downtown that is literally facing the state capital, you'll have to check out my instagram for ah, photo of this. And I'm Maxine, the offices off one of the gold sponsors of the Social Tool Summit, which, unfortunately, have already passed. By the time you hear this, but will be announcing that we're gonna be doing another one of these in the fall and hopefully we'll have them on board as well. Then I'm here the CEO of Karada. And you know what? Because I'm not good at pronouncing names. I'm gonna have him pronounce his own name for

spk_1:   1:01
you. Sure. Yeah. Everyone, this is power in a dish bond. A CEO and founder. A carrot here.

spk_0:   1:07
Awesome. So for those of you in the content marketing space. You're probably familiar with the Kurata name. The Kurata brand their product for something the social media space, though, that are moving into social media more and more into content marketing, specifically content curation their company. That should definitely be on your radar if they are already. So I want to just start with, you know, tell us a little bit about the company and the product and start your positioning in the markets. I think there's a lot of lot of content tools out there, but there aren't as many that really focus on the creation, which you know you've been doing for several years now. So

spk_1:   1:38
absolutely so so actually two products and market, but we'll give you a brief discussion about that. I think the curation one is particular element for with the rise of social media. So our curation Partick the needed serves as a lot of folks wanted to content marketing, but they're often under resourced. They don't have enough time in the day to produce all the content they would like, or even if they are, they often don't have enough diversity of perspectives and the content they created. So what are technology does. This will go spider to the Web for relevant third party content. So this is content that's created by other bloggers by that's post on social media. That's from news sites from journal articles there, and you'll go spider the content. The next thing it does is then, well, then use a machine learning. So this kind of Pandora we can train it. Time's up, thumbs down. Here's what I like and don't like it. It's very easy from the surface. Lot of complex stuff under the hood will then bring in the content, organize it for you, and it's kind of checking email. You go through and spend about 20 minutes a day and say, Here's the content I want to share Here's what I don't want to share Here's my editorial perspective and I think that's very valuable toe had as well. And then from there, when you published the content, it could be scheduled rotted template it to go to different channels so I can go to content major systems that could go to social media channels, Marquis automation systems, email newsletters, AP. I flipped harvest anywhere you wanted Thio and calling to each other as well, so it makes it very easy to just have a continuous kind of rhythm on content. And then our second part we launched about a month ago is a content marking platform. So this is a little broader, and, uh, it's it's independent. Whether you're curating, creating light sensing, outsourcing your concentration, it lets you manage the strategy, that production, the distribution and the analytics of the content ingrates deeply with Marquis Automation and the serum systems.

spk_0:   3:28
Awesome. That's actually gonna be a topic that, ah, lot of the other tools vendors have been talking about and some of our Panelists, as well the integration part with all the different market automation system. So that's the second product that I wasn't aware up. So that's good to know. Sure, we'll hear more about the conference. So tell me about the content curation part, and I literally had a client call this morning where the client was saying, you know, howto why every morning spent all this time reading 50 different blog's and getting this information. So that's great. That not only have the system that the spider system but also have that algorithm, it's over time you get more more efficient. How does the process work where I want to post it to different sites with maybe different descriptions, different images as well as you know, have it pre populated email template and melt him just I'm just throwing things out there. You tell me a little bit more about how that works for those that can't quite vision. How much time this is going to save

spk_1:   4:16
that? Absolutely. So did you do all that? It's busy editing metadata on the content and hitting one published button, and it will likely take care. So kind of the way it works is our engine. I'll go find content out there on the Web. It'll then, ah, meckley infer and sort out all the metadata. So it'll, for example, suggests a relevant image that was mentioned in the content. Comically. It's just what the headline should be. What the description text would be. I'll make the category is gone. 10 plus relevant quotes from the content. Tag it with all the keywords, figure out the author who are dead and their twitter handled. So you could mention that when you tweeted out and there's a whole bunch of things like this it's all teed up for you. And then what you can then do is come in and customize that you can say, OK, this is categorized wrong. Let me change. This engine will learn from their or this tag wrong and orange dweller there. And then you can add your own as a toilet perspective, and then you hit, publish and get scheduled in routed to all these different channels. So how that last piece works that scheduling and writing is ahead of time. You go and bind our our software with all your sharing channels. So you go and say, Here's the credentials from my Twitter account. I, like, pick out my WordPress account by marking automation account, and then you go and set up different schedules for eat. So, for example, I could say for Twitter, I want to share only Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Every two hours. I want to put something on there, and it could be a very different schedule for another channel on, And then you can define where what type of content should go on that channel. So you could say on Lee content that is about this specific industry that's been on make the categorize about this industry should go to this channel versus industry. Be should go to a different Twitter account, and then on top of that you can. Then when you go in customized channel, it also set template Ingle Second, say, for example, if it's Twitter, mention the author's Twitter handle here or automatically put YouTube video links. If you've extracted video in Tweet is well, in addition to clink. So there's a ton of customization options they hit publish, and it applies all those rules that you've rebuilt. And then, in addition, you can then have another chance to customize it even more before it actually goes out and override any.

spk_0:   6:26
And you also provide analytics on all the content. That's mean. Sure

spk_1:   6:28
we do. We do, yeah, so we provide Alex in terms of the consumption of the content eso pays using. But then also how many social shares and link click through that content guys, Well on, then, our second part, it has much deeper Analects report on Lee's generated by time mark automation. How much sales pipeline Mr Revenues influenced asshole.

spk_0:   6:50
So for the second product, that concept market product. What sort of content are your average customers using it for? Are we talking block post White papers, e books, anything and everything?

spk_1:   6:59
Yeah, I think it's exactly those have got. I think primarily lead with blog's because that's probably the most baldness form of content. We have this framework with built in the party called a content marking Pyramid. So imagine impairment at the very top is a key piece of content. This could be proprietary research industry survey of performed. It could be, uh, something's biggest Lee, a large print book that you've even put a lot of effort into doing. From there. You can then atomizer contents. You could turn that into a series of webinars and maybe in person presentation of the conference from there that can turn into series of infographics and maybe a long form block post. From there, you could turn into a short form a series of content and then maybe contribute content other sites, and that the right bottom is curated and social media content. You could never get up and down the pyramid, and what the concert marking platform lets you do is track all that the whole pyramid as one distinct content campaign from the mansion perspective for production, but also from Alexa's. Well,

spk_0:   8:01
I saw Jason Miller. I don't If you were a beauty marketing profit last year in October, that's I spoke there, and I spoke with Jason Miller on LinkedIn and he brought up his, You know, one of the things he's done on Slide Chair. I forgot. Was it the content marketing playbook? And he went through that exact same process. And because, you know, have you forgotten like big rock content? This is basically you've created now a system. So I guess the question is, and I had a slide yesterday where I told people my own way of repurposing content. Starting from a podcast, I get a transcript, turns into a blawg creator. Infographic create 20 different tweets from a blogger named would have, you know, similar approach. How much does your software actually hand? Hold the user into creating all that content? You have a suggestion algorithm, or is it basically saying when you create content, put it into this bucket and then we're going to create a general measurement, you know, bucket around all the content? What's the approach from a software perspective,

spk_1:   8:50
you're sure so way haven't announced it, but probably time the podcasts goes alive. Jason Miller. He recently joined our adviser report.

spk_0:   8:57
Oh, that's fantastic. Congratulations. It's a great guy.

spk_1:   9:00
Yeah, it is a great guy

spk_0:   9:02
and knowledge, obviously, but

spk_1:   9:03
and and and his book and encourage You want to check that as well? Indeed. But in terms of helping with the content creation process, our philosophy is that people should use whatever tools and processes that comfortable with. So if they're using word or cool docks are Photoshopped, they can continue to use this process. What are the values that our system provides? And this is the second part of the content. Working platform is really to manage and draw the associations between this content together. So you can say that these are all part of one larger campaign or they're all designed for this particular persona and then provide analysts and reporting around there. So you could say this person is one that we haven't targeted well, and it's not, you know, we're not yielding a lot of, uh leads for this person, So that's, I think, the real value not so much an actual creation process. I think that's a creative process that technology has limited, limited utility, for I think a lot of that just is a very human process that abscess.

spk_0:   10:02
What's instincts? I'm actually on Social Tool Summit. I am going to be moderating the final We call the trend er panel. So these are the actual, you know, people that are in the trenches doing a lot of this work. And I think that final step is one that I think technology can go further on. And I look forward to seeing it happen, not doing the creative process but saying based on the lane, you know, using machine analysis to say you have that you have three different list of 10 different things here. We recommend that you create three different demographics. That is, is this something that you see need for in the market and that your R and D bases working on?

spk_1:   10:37
Absolutely. Yes. I think our approach is data driven content. That's that's what we want to get people TJ's content marketing and I think right now that's where our technology is, is that you can use it will inform you it'll rather than creating content into intuition. You have more informed intuition going into it. I think as technology continues to get more and more advanced, it's not just intuition is that it's a little more. It's more predictive in nature. So I think certainly that's where industries had aside. Not this technology can help in the creative process is well, so my background is this natural language processing and my m i T. And my master's thesis was on on Max. Glamorization of documents are make the synthesizing tables of contents so big. I recently read an article online that a lot of the sports news stories and finance to storage we read online, actually written by machines. They just take the kind of meta data and sports scores and they synthesise article that reads as if a human road it so that stuff is in front of us. So we just don't even know it's all around this.

spk_0:   11:41
Yeah, I hear you. And you know, there's also a science. If you look at what makes content popular on Buzzfeed, they're almost does seem to be a science behind the titles and what have you. So you know, it's funny because we sort of went deep into the product and deep into where you're going in content marketing, I would not take a step back for those either. They're still in doubt as to what we talked about two different products. So I want to go back to the content curation product because content curation. Believe it or not, it's still a new concept for a lot of companies out there. The large enterprises already doing it, maybe for the smaller businesses. So and you started your company several years ago when we weren't even talking about content creation. So how did you have the vision to understand the need and for those that are still in the side dynasty, the are live content creation. How do you respond when people ask you about that? I mean, for the naysayers, they're still out

spk_1:   12:26
there. Absolutely. So when I started the company, curation wasn't a word. I mean, it was a word, but not in the context of digital curation. So we're born aggregation centric and using a lot of the machine learning and natural energy prosecuting Donald, you both just really good at Grayson engine. We started looking for good applications for it and one of the early ones he found was for marketing. It wasn't called content marking back then. It was already blogging on battery brands, and we found that love and just weren't able to keep up their blocks when stale on. And we had this really powerful engine that could find very relevant content. And we found that we could help feel, feel their lives and so forth on then from there, Channel started arising, said Twitter. Facebook lengthen the all these things start arising on. We start integrating with us so and as you start working marketers, they said, we don't just want to aggregate content because we don't know what's getting piped in what's showing up on the other end. We won't want control over this. We also want to add our own messaging and perspectivas well so that layer of control and finesse made it go from aggravation to curation. And hence the name Kurata s. Oh, that's I think, how it evolved from your aggression to take curation in terms of how I like to explain the value of duration for people who were really relatively new to this. If you look at the museum curator. You know what is the role in an arc out at Calorie? Let's say their role is to go and find the best masterpieces from around the world. So they go scour the world for the best, a piece of content or a piece of art on a certain specific topic or subject. That's what they're forming the exhibit around. The next thing they do is, then they go and organize that content so they decide how it's to be hung in the gallery Wish walls. What should go on top of what, how it should be lit. And then they annotate and at their own perspective. So the little called didactic labels our next the content of the painting stake, say who wrote it, who created the the artwork, what the meaning behind it is. And that's their interpretation of its maybe not with artists even intended to start with. And then the last thing they do is that they share it out to a broader audience, so that's very similar to a digital curation process. So you're finding Roland content organizing, contextualizing it and the sharing with the large audience. And if you know what a museum curator. Does they? A lot of them don't even have the ability to create artwork themselves. Don't know how to paint themselves. Yet they add a tremendous amount of values just bringing here. Gather other people's content. So I think in the digital perspective, yeah, it's it's very similar. You don't necessary have to create all the content yourself. If you do, that's a plus, but you can add a lot of value just piping together other content. And on that note, if you look at the top sites that people go to the top news sites, they all have a very strong curation angle. So you look at a reddit and formerly dig when it was at its prime. Those are social courage in sight, so they host very little of their own content. They're just bringing together contact from other sites. There you look at the Drudge Report that's not social curious. That's more experts duration. Matt Drudge is there for a certain side of the political spectrum, bringing together content, putting sensational headlines, and people keep going back there on then you even automated curation aggregation. A ghoul news. It's one of my stopper news websites and again. That's not ghouls on content content. So I think a lot of people have a reaction. That security thing to say. I'm driving people off brand to other sites. Yeah, doesn't this hurt? And e think the reality is that if you're a trustworthy curator and your continued delivering value, whether it's your words or someone else's, people will keep coming back.

spk_0:   16:06
And you know, now you're speaking my language. I was originally an art history major, and it's, um, Internships Museum. So yeah, I'm all over that. And in other words, it's bringing people into your museum right by using other people's content. And I want to ask you, we've seen a number of different sort of curation tools pop up that aren't they don't do exactly what what you do, but they do little things. And one thing one tool that comes up a lot especially you talk about the our live content curation. And whenever I mention this tool, people like, of course, is Snip Lee, and I'm sure you've obviously heard of them familiar with him. What is your take on? And there's other tools, you know you have scoop it where it's their content you're out in your view and you're publishing on your block or sub tomato, whatever it might be. What's your take on curating content and sort of adding your own little your own little brand on it, whether it be a little Snip Lee thing or a scoop it or

spk_1:   16:53
yeah, I think that's this very important. Tad, you're in perspective. I think I've seen consecration evolved over the past five years or so and anything early on. It wasn't necessary. Just bringing together content was a lot of value. But you know, these days it's more competitive to get people's attention. You know this more and more content and that people still only have 24 hours a day, so people have to bury discriminative in terms of what content they choose to consume. And just bringing together content is not high enough of value. And I think they're really kind of

spk_0:   17:26
become a commodity, hasn't it?

spk_1:   17:27
It is. It has in many ways, but I think the best curator is differentiate by what they choose, being very selective and being very focused on ensuring topic. But then also that added contextual ization, I think

spk_0:   17:40
Is that something Kurata is also that you can publicly announce that you're working on or

spk_1:   17:44
yeah, I mean, it's all it's been apart for years now, so that you can add your own conceptualization in any piece of content on this very advanced help letting option. So you can say, you know, I want my commentary to appear next, the content below it. We also have a contributor also, for example, for larger companies where they want to have a set of influencers. Or perhaps your sales team add to the correction process. Crowdsource it. You can give them each a bookmark, lists of murder, scoop it, bookmarklet or simply, as people are browsing the Web. If they find something relevant, they hit this button window pops up on dhe. The article is already in process. They see all the metadata, and you go in and add your own commentary and hit submit. And rather than publishing it all the way out, it goes in this queue, and now the marketer comes in and says, Okay, I like this article. So the second level of curation before publishing

spk_0:   18:38
some curious with the advent of employees, efficacy and social selling. If you're seeing a new demand for that now across the enterprise.

spk_1:   18:44
Yeah, s o I think where we say it is. These like sales teams there. Everyone the company is cure is is consuming content, some shape or form. But traditionally, marketing has been kind of the gatekeeper for the publishing process, and I think gatekeepers for either the right role, But in terms of actually contributing and adding value, I think anyone in organization should be able to do so. That's I think what we're seeing seem to pick up. And it's not only for external use, even we have a lot of customers use our party for a competitive intelligence internally sharing, you know, relevant content and anyone.

spk_0:   19:17
Well, good to hear that you already had that. You had the foresight to build that sort of context realization in your product. So hopefully for those of you listening, and I sort of talked about content creation in a different way that if you're just talking about yourself, you know what I'm gonna talk about. If you know, if you don't have unique content publishing three times a day and you want to tweet three times a day, wonder if you're gonna talk about as a business. I'm curious. And obviously curation, I believe, is more important for me to be businesses. But also important permits were facing brands. Do you find most of your customers tend for the for the content curation Beyond the B two b side, Um, are there any consumer facing brand that you work with that you think are good role models for how those brands can also use content creation?

spk_1:   19:55
So, uh, we work with the BBD, B and B to C Businesses way tend to have more B to be focused on DDE. I think that's largely because content, I think, plays a heavier role in the buying process for considered purchases. So people to see if the research understand what they're what they're getting into before they make a person's decision versus some be deceived. Decisions have the same characteristics. Others are more impulsive and don't require the same amount of content consumption. And so, uh, within there, I think for BGC, uh, brands you a few examples of customers you work with right down the street. There's a coffee shop called the Capital 1 360 Cafe and the Idea credit card

spk_0:   20:38
Capital one correct.

spk_1:   20:39
Yes, that's right. And it's really interesting. It's actually coffee shop. So you go in there, you sit down, you have coffee. And as you're having a coffee, folks come up and talk to you about their banking service is or, you know they won't come solicit you. But if you're if you're interested, you have experienced as well. And so what they've done is on the wall. They have large, flat screen TVs and they show information about the banking service is. But every once in a while they show curated content that comes from curator. So uh, so it's just I think that's very B to C example of social curation and how they help stirrup relationships. For I

spk_0:   21:14
got your very cool Now moving over to your other piece, the newer piece of content marketing piece. So it sounds like if you have a campaign going where you really want to drive awareness or leads, whatever it is for a particular product, you build a whole content creation campaign around it, not something that you're I mean, you might have editorial calendar. You're blogging months a week. We're talking more about when you do your strategic e books infographics all around this one subject for targeted purpose like like Jason talked about. I'm assuming that's where you know I would want to use that product for us. Is that how you see your customers using it

spk_1:   21:46
for that? But also for the day to day content marking as well? So part of the park does include editorial calendar as well, so people can manage the day today. Content creation. And it's not just about what's coming next few weeks, but maintaining a record of everything you've ever created past, present and future on. This really ties into analytics. So you could know what about your past, what you're working on now and how you should tweet that basin analytics and then helping you plan going forward? Very

spk_0:   22:14
cool. And those air, I mean, what we talked about. It's almost like you've built, and I found that the great social media tools vendors have done is they built best practices into the tool itself and lead you down the right route, right?

spk_1:   22:26
That's right. That's right. And we have a lot of experience with hundreds of content working brands over the past two years, so larger learnings and we try to lead by example ourselves. So we do a lot of content ourselves, and a lot of our learnings tried to bake.

spk_0:   22:40
Awesome. Well, I hope you've enjoyed this conversation. Anything else you want out? Just about. For those social marketers that are listening to a podcast, anything that you want to add about, Just, you know, where you see content marketing content, curation going and where you see karate going toe, you know, help everybody out.

spk_1:   22:54
Yeah, sure. I really see them as kind of a very natural allies. And, uh, some extent, this convergence of curation and creation, I think those air quickly converging as u. N. Tate and add your own contextual ization at some point that becomes active creation versus curation and vice versa. And and I think similarly social and content are coming closer and closer together rather than social just being a promotion vehicle for a content that's been created, making often become input into the creation process, as it does with decoration. So I see a lot of similarities and synergies. Opportunity.

spk_0:   23:31
Awesome. I'm looking forward. I know that we could have talked for an hour here. So you have a lot more to share the social tool Summit For those lucky to have attended hope you enjoyed the conversation and look for to keep in touch and seen You know how a content marketing evolves and how you're out of. Also, thank you for your time today.

spk_1:   23:44
Okay? Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.

spk_0:   23:47
And that everyone around the world listening I'm signing off from beautiful Boston, Massachusetts, on a sunny spring day where we are in the world Make it a great social day. Bye bye, everybody. Thanks for listening to maximize your social. We appreciate all of your iTunes subscriptions, ratings and comments. If you would like to appear on this show or recommend content, please contact Neil Schaefer at Neil at maximize your social dot com, please. Also make sure to check out Neil's New Community Social Media Centre of Excellence at Social Media, c o e dot com as well as meals. First social media event. The Social Tool Summit, which will be in Boston on May 12 and in the Bay Area this fall. Thanks again and make it a social day