What exactly is curation?

In a nutshell, curation is selecting content from the web, based on specific criteria and presenting it to an internal or external audience, or both. With aggregation, the precursor to curation, we generally selected content for our personal consumption and had little filtering control. We usually had to be satisfied with receiving all content from a given source (the entire RSS feed of a site, for instance) without being able to filter out content we didn’t want. With curation, you choose specific items to share from a source and have the option to add your own editorial comments. If you’ve ever tweeted a link or retweeted someone else’s tweet, you’ve curated content.

Did you see that thing I tweeted?

It can be frustrating to try to get information you want to share to everybody on your team who could benefit from it. You all need to be up to speed on your market, competition, technology, trends, etc. If you’re sharing this info in a haphazard way (using multiple communication channels, crossing your fingers that team members will see and act on the info, mixing items of personal and professional interest), then having a system for content curation might be for you.

Where to start?

Curation platforms are still in their infancy; no single tool is likely to be the perfect solution for your needs. You’ll have to explore the various platforms and keep an eye on the evolution of the trend if it interests you. Be on the lookout for curation features to start being integrated into collaborative project management platforms. In fact, Producteev, a task management app that we’ve covered before, will soon allow team members to curate content and attach it to specific projects and tasks.

Fortunately for you, Pierre Tran, a French tech journalist, recently carried out an extensive comparison of a number of curation platforms, and prepared a very useful table in English and French that you can use to start exploring.

The platforms in Tran’s table offer a range of output options (the format in which people will be able to consume your curated content) from RSS feeds to embeddable widgets to stand-alone web pages. Their intended use ranges from collection of business intelligence (BI) for a company’s or team’s internal use (Eqentia, Knowledge Plaza, Factiva) to collecting and sharing interesting images or multimedia (Fancy, Pinterest, Magnify). Depending on what it is you do, the BI platforms might meet the needs of your team but, then again, if your team is composed of graphic artists, the “pretty picture” type of platform might come in handy as a group inspiration board.

You also need to decide if you want to curate exclusively for your team, or if you also want clients or the public to have access to the results of your curation efforts. Most curation platforms are designed for sharing the content with a public audience (Pearltrees, PublishThis), which your team could also access, of course.

Scoop.it

The only curation platform I’ve spent any time with is Scoop.it. It allows you to create a standalone page that resembles a blog and features content you have selected from the sources Scoop.it has helped you gather. There’s also a bookmarklet you can use to scoop up content you see when you’re out and about on the web.

Your team (and your clients, and the public) can subscribe to the RSS feed of your Scoop.it page. In the near future, you’ll have the option to keep your Scoop.it page private if you prefer to use it for your team only. Here’s an example of a Scoop.it page.

You start by entering keywords for your topic, and Scoop.it automatically pulls content from a number of major web and social media sources (you can delete those you don’t want). You can then add your own sources, like specialized blogs, individual Twitter accounts, and more.

For each piece of content, you can add your own comments, which is very useful if you want to point out to your team why you selected an item and what you want them to get out of it. You can also create posts from scratch.

Scoop.it’s still in beta, and has some shortcomings in terms of user experience and functionality, plus it needs to give users more control over the appearance of their pages, but it is still quite usable.

You don’t need a curation platform to curate

The sites that have been curating since before everybody was calling it that use tools that were already out there to get the job done. If none of the ready-made platforms work for you, don’t forget that you can, for example, create RSS feeds based on keywords in Google Blog and News search, and from there curate and furnish your selected content manually in a number of ways.

Copyright

The idea of curation isn’t to steal other people’s content in its entirety and use their work to draw traffic to your site. That would be unethical and illegal, even if you credited them. If you’re sharing your curated content with the public, you need to be sure that what you share with the public falls within the bounds of fair use and link to the complete, original content at its source.

If you read French, I highly recommend Pierre Tran’s companion article to the table he created on curation platforms (Le Guide de la curation (3) – les outils), and another table he created on automated publishing platforms (those with no manual filtering) in English and French.

If you’re already curating for your team, please let us know about your tools and workflow in the comments.

Photo courtesy Flickr user Minke Wagenaar

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Cost

About.me is completely free, while Flavors.me has a free plan and a $20 per year version. Many of Flavors.me’s features are only available on the paid plan, including some that probably should be free but aren’t, like the font faces you can choose from.

Design Features

I found About.me slightly easier to make a good-looking page; the basic layout was more professional and better designed. Flavors.me, however, has four different page layouts available with its free plan, while About.me only has one. However, you can drag your main information box anywhere on the screen.

About.me offers users a variety of fonts, while Flavors.me makes you upgrade to get the more interesting ones.

Content Options

In About.me you can add links to any site (such as your own website), instead of being limited to popular networking services. Linking to your own site is a must if you want to use one of these splash pages as a business card. But as far as I can tell, the only way to add a link to your site from Flavors.me is to add it to your “About” section, where it can’t be styled to stand out from the rest of your description. However, Flavors.me offers linking to more services than About.me, and paid users can add custom content.

When you add a service in About.me, what’s displayed, whether you like it or not, is the icon of the platform and no other information. I think that this is a major problem. Besides wanting the clever name of your blog or your Twitter handle to be spelled out, I have found that many educated, professional people don’t have the slightest idea what any of those icons represent. So if you want to make a client-facing page, and your clients aren’t necessarily fluent in Web hieroglyphics, this is something to consider.

About.me also doesn’t allow more than one account on any of these services. I have three Twitter accounts and several blogs on the two platforms above. If you enter, for example, multiple Blogger blogs, the first one is assigned the Blogger icon, and any others are spelled out in the list, in the order entered. There’s no way, like in Flavors.me, to reorder your items through drag-and-drop.

In Flavors.me, I had some difficulties adding several WordPress blogs. It accepted one WP-hosted blog and one self-hosted WP blog, but for some reason, I couldn’t add another self-hosted WP blog, which happened to be my main blog. Not being able to add that defeats the whole purpose of having the page. Update: Flavors.me contacted me to let me know that the free plan allows up to five services to be added, which wasn’t clear in the documentation. It’s also possible to add a freestanding website using the RSS option under Content>Add.

External links operate differently in the two services. On Flavors.me, links open within the Flavors.me page. On About.me, if you click the icons, they open in a widget on the About.me page. But if you click links in the list, a new window opens.

Other Features

About.me offers a nice “Email Me” button and contact form. A similar feature is available on the paid version of Flavors.me.

You can use your own domain name with the paid version of Flavors.me, but not with About.me. About.me provides a dashboard with stats on visitors, social media reach, and more. Flavors.me makes you pay for stats.

Both platforms were obviously created to showcase individuals rather than to serve small businesses, and neither is perfect. AOL bought About.me just four days after it launched, while Flavors.me still operates independently. It will be interesting to see how both services evolve, and whether they will move to meet the needs of a professional audience.

Whether you run a one-person shop or a small business, either of these sites could turn out to have some practical use. I recommend trying them both. You may also want to consider such alternatives as Retaggr, GizaPage, and Chi.mp, which we’ve written about previously, or even the rudimentary splash pages now available with .tel domain names. I’d love to hear your take on them in the comments, especially if you’ve found creative ways to use them for business!

Do you use About.me or Flavors.me as an online calling card?

Disclosure: Automattic, the maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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In Toshl, there are only two things to input to record an expense: an amount and a tag(s). The only way to enter your expenses is through your phone, which makes sense to me. Otherwise I’d have receipts stacking up next to my computer, and you know how that would end. You can sync your data with the website manually from your phone, or set it to sync automatically over Wi-Fi or other connection. And if you want to keep track of the cash leaking out of someone else’s wallet too, you can. Toshl lets you sync multiple phones, and you can create a tag for your name and theirs to see who’s spending what.

Essentially, the Toshl website is only used for viewing and exporting data. You can’t even create an account through the website; you have to do it from your phone. Your expenditures can be displayed by time period or tags in two different graph formats. With the free account, you can export your data in .csv format. With the Pro version ($19.95 a year), you have a few more options, including exporting to Excel, PDF and Google Docs.

There are a number of other expense tracking apps out there, but most have many more features than I need or have the patience to learn how to use: Mobile app ProOnGo (not free) also syncs with a website, has a receipt reader and exports to QuickBooks. Expensify (free) also exports to QuickBooks and can be used for tracking time and mileage. PageOnce (free) allows for globally tracking of all of your expenses and bills, and offers alerts and notifications. EasyMoney (Android-only, not free)can also be used for tracking both expenses and bills, and allows you to enter more specific info for each transaction. Expenditure (iPhone only, not free) has a nice interface, but it doesn’t offer syncing or graphs. SplashMoney (not free) can connect to your bank account, and also has a desktop version.

Toshl is available for iPhone, Android, Nokia Maemo and Symbian. The company plans to add more features gradually, but I hope they don’t abandon their less-is-more approach.

What do you use to track your spending?

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Dropbox is simple, yet rich. And it’s got more going for it than simple file transfer and cloud storage. In fact, what makes it really special is the file syncing. You can work with your Dropbox files and folders locally, right on your computer, and they’re automatically synced with the files on the website. And it will also work with the most popular mobile devices: iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry and Android.

Here are some examples of how Dropbox has come in handy for me lately:

1. I was part of a team of writers who were covering a major conference. The team leader had a lot of info to organize and share with the writers and her co-leader in advance (session plans, speaker bios, schedules, travel info, etc.). She wanted something that would be more efficient than email, save her some time, and keep her, the team, and the materials organized. I spent 10 minutes on the phone walking her through Dropbox explaining specifically how I thought it would work for her, and she was sold. One of her challenges was that some of the writers were not very tech- or web-savvy; Dropbox’s easy-to-use interface interface was essential to their adopting her system and the tool.
2. My husband and I manage translation projects. He deals with the clients, I deal with the translators. In the last two months we’ve had to manage 10 projects involving 28 translators, and that can get a little hairy. Even though our computers are networked, we have all the files we use for job tracking in a Dropbox folder. We update the files when it’s convenient, and because the files are all kept in sync we know that we’re working with the most current info. Also, when I needed to get huge PDF user manuals to translators for reference, I just created a Dropbox folder for that purpose and sent them all invites.
3. A client lost 90 Mb of files that I’d delivered months earlier and needed them urgently. He sent me a Dropbox invite and he had the files in minutes.
4. I installed Dropbox on my iPhone and another app called PlainText, which automatically creates its own folder in my Dropbox. Twice in the last couple of weeks, I’ve jotted down notes in PlainText on my iPhone while at semi-social, semi-work lunches with people. When I got home, my notes were already stored on my computer and I could follow up effortlessly.

If you want to see what else Dropbox can do, check out Scott’s How I Use Dropbox For Maximum Productivity.

A 2Gb Dropbox is free. Pro accounts offer more storage; a Pro 50 account provides 50 Gb and costs $9.99 per month, while a Pro 100 account offers 100 Gb of storage for $19.99 per month.

How do you use Dropbox?

Photo by stock.xchng user tatlin.

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Posterous takes care of this problem for you by making it extremely easy to post content to the social media apps you use.

Doriano previously described how you can use email to share photos through Posterous, but I’m going to talk about how easy it is to use the Posterous bookmarklet to share any content across multiple platforms.

To create a Posterous account, you don’t fill out a registration form, you send an email. Then you get a confirmation email that will take you back to Posterous to add your social apps accounts to the service.

Once you’ve added the accounts to which you want to be able to post, the next thing I recommend you do is install the bookmarklet. On the “Manage” page, under the “Posts” tab (the default) scroll down and find the “Posting” box. Click the bookmarklet link and follow the very simple instructions to add the Posterous bookmarklet to your browser’s bookmark toolbar.

Now go to some content that you want to share and click the bookmarklet in your bookmark bar. In the window that pops up, you can customize the info you’re about to post:

Posterous grabs images, videos and sometimes text from the site and lets you pick which you want to use. You can add your comments and click “Post” if you want this item to go to all your social media accounts, or you can click “Advanced Options” and pick and choose which accounts to post to. For example, I only want this link to go to my Twitter account and a personal blog:

Tips: If you want to use a specific text excerpt from an article, select the text before clicking the bookmarklet, and it’ll be added to the image/excerpt options. Choose it, and it’s neatly inserted as a blockquote. If you want to send the item to a blog where you have categories, in the title field, type ((tag: Category1, Category2)), for example, and it will automatically be categorized on your blog.

Note: Unless you want the cute puppy video you sent to your family blog, the excerpt of the article on agile programming you sent to your pro blog, and the photo of Freddie Mercury in an eyeball suit you just tweeted all to appear together in sweet cacophony on your Posterous site, you need to create multiple Posterous sites. This is easy to do, and you only have to add your social media accounts once. Then when you choose Advanced Options in the bookmarklet, a drop-down lets you pick the Posterous site you want the item to appear on:

I have only tested sharing with Posterous to a blog, Twitter and LinkedIn. If you post something to Twitter or LinkedIn, Posterous inserts a link that takes people to your Posterous site, not to the original site online. I assume the same is true of other social media apps, too. On a blog, the links go to the original item wherever it appeared online. I recommend testing Posterous a little bit at a time to see how it works for you.

I’ve only talked about the bookmarklet here, but do check out the email options. The first thing I did with Posterous was take a photo with my iPhone and email it to Posterous, which automatically autoposted it to every service I’d added. Doriano explained how to email content to specific sites in his article, so check that out as it’s actually kind of hard to find the info on the Posterous site.

Have you tried Posterous yet? What tools do you use for social sharing?

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I saw Mel Gibson on a talk show last night. He was there to promote a new action flick he has coming out, and the host asked him about his “Three E” approach to movie making. He responded that there are three things he tries to achieve with his movies: first entertain, then educate, and then, if possible, elevate.

I instantly thought these were admirable objectives to shoot for in almost any kind of communication, though the order of priority would vary depending on the type of communication and its purpose. It may seem like I’m stating the obvious, but what came to my mind right away was how appropriate these three objectives would be for a content development strategy.

Then it occurred to me that in this context, there has to be a fourth “E,” one that is pretty critical in the social Web: engage.

I wrote about content strategy not too long ago. It’s a hot topic and a rising career field. So if you create content (and who doesn’t these days?), you might want to ask yourself if your content satisfies any of these four criteria. Think of them as a kind of quality control standard.

The content you create — from animated demos to blogs to tweets to videos on YouTube — all influence your clients’ and peers’ perception of you. As a professional, you understand the importance of the quality of your product, and you should consider your content as one of your products.

Think about the people you follow on Twitter or whose blogs you read. Chances are your favorites provide a lot of Es. I looked at the tweets of one of the people I enjoy following, and found that most of his tweets qualified:

Just for fun, take a look at what you put out there and do a quick analysis to assess the quality of your content based on the four Es. What do you see?

If you want to learn more about content strategy, don’t miss “Content Strategy Forum 2010,” two days devoted to the topic in Paris in April.

What guidelines do you use for the content you create?

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Here I go again, writing about organization. This time, though, it’s not because I’ve found a great new app to help me. You see that picture? It’s my inbox, aka my “to-be-dealt-with” pile. And there are two more like it. If only there were an app that could help me!

It’s so much easier to stay organized when everything is virtual. Or, if the files on your hard drive aren’t organized, at least you’re not tripping over them on your way to the kitchen. The moment I have to deal with something tangible these days, I seem to get in trouble. I used to be organized, but my life changed. So I need to get re-organized.

Part of the problem is that when I came to Paris from the U.S., the physical space I could use was drastically reduced. Another part of the problem was adjusting to the organizational methods — if they can be called that — of my office mate (husband).

Just as I was reaching the point where I could no longer tune out the chaos around me, when it was getting really oppressive, I discovered the 5S methodology. You may have heard of it if you’ve ever worked in a place with lots of equipment and people. It’s a five-step program that originated in Japan and was designed to get a work environment organized and keep it that way, all in the interest of maximum efficiency. I’m going to see if I can apply it to the occupational hazard I currently call my office.

The 5S Process

The five steps of 5S, and their approximate English translations are: seiri (sort), seiton (straighten), seiso (shine), seiketsu (systemize), and shitsuke (sustain).

1. Seiri (Sort): Get rid of anything in your work space that is not absolutely necessary for your work.

This first step is supposed to enable you to simplify tasks and use space effectively. It’s also supposed to help you be more selective about what you introduce into your work space and keep the number of work-related items around you to a minimum.

Frankly, for a personal office, I think this is a little extreme and bad for morale in any circumstances. I have a couple of things on my desk that are just there to give me something fun to look at. They’re staying. But the rest can go: the Advil, CDs, business cards (the bane of my existence), masking tape, Christmas postcards I meant to send to the two people I know who haven’t discovered email… There are a few other trouble spots I need to hit too, like the top of the filing cabinet, and that box of cables taking up space I could use. Step one is going to take me a full day at least.

2. Seiton (Straighten): A place for everything, and everything in its place

This step is about efficiency. It encourages you to make optimum use of your work area and to outfit your space with functional storage. It is also important for everything you use for work to have a convenient and appropriate home to which it is returned when you’re done using it.

This is how I used to operate, back when I had a lot of space. Once upon a time, I knew where everything I owned was. The fact that I couldn’t find a recipe last night, despite having paper files for my old, pre-computer recipes, may be the very reason why I’m writing this today. (Getting them onto the computer is on my to-do list. I have gotten as far as comparing recipe management software.)

3. Seiso (Shine): Clean up after yourself

This third step is about being responsible for keeping your own space neat. Most importantly, it doesn’t work unless everyone who shares the space does the same. The idea is to treat your office as if you might have a client drop in at any moment.

OK, once I get all the junk off of my surfaces, I will clean them. Regularly. There’s no way I can begin to do seiso without getting through the first two steps. Until then, no clients allowed.

4. Seiketsu (Systemize): Make it a habit

This fourth step is about establishing standards and a system for organization, and integrating them into your workflow in order to maintain a high level of neatness.

Some time last year, I stumbled across the concept of the “unpleasant task day” on the blog of a management consultant, and thought this would be a good way to approach this step. Michael Wade, the author of that blog, suggests you pick one day a month to do the things you hate to do. But since the 5S process is about neatness and efficiency, I’m thinking it should be more frequent. Maybe I’ll have a weekly “terrible task afternoon” for cleaning up and filing instead.

5. Shitsuke (Sustain): Prevention of backsliding

This last step is more accurately translated as “discipline.” It’s about making yourself maintain the neatness standards and system you’ve put in place.

Because I was once very organized, it shouldn’t be too hard for me to get back in the habit. I’m not so sure my husband is going to like this whole 5S thing though, even though he has the most organized hard drive I’ve ever seen.

The Reality

Clearly it’s unlikely that any of us could strictly adhere to a system like this, especially given the constantly changing nature of our work. Plus there may be uncontrollable factors (like husbands) that can toss a wrench into the works. But I’ve always found that a little structure never hurts when it’s used as a guideline, so I will try it out and see how it goes. Then I’ll try to apply it to my computer files, emails, etc. Anyway, it’ll be fun to say “Seiton!” the next time my husband puts the pliers down on the corner of my desk.

How do you stay organized outside of your computer?

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I’m currently working on a project that is pushing me to my limits, physically — that’s not something that usually happens when I work! There are three components: a lot of interesting and useful Internet research, some less interesting but easy recording of data in a spreadsheet and, the hard part, running all over the city of Paris. It initially sounded like fun, but in reality what I’m doing is quite grueling because, like most Parisians, I get around on foot and using public transport. (Doesn’t sound so bad? I climbed 300 steps yesterday alone!)

In the last 13 days (yes, I’m counting the days), I’ve been reminded of some strategies that have worked for me in situations like this in the past, and decided to share them because they can be useful in any situation where you’re in over your head.

1. The moment you realize you’re in trouble, negotiate the deadline. Even if you can only get a couple of days out of your client, it will help. You can get a lot done in 20 or 30 hours. Plus, even a short extension will reduce that sense of panic a little, maybe long enough for you to take some practical steps to address the problem, like the next one.

2. The moment you realize you’re in trouble, get help. Call on your network, tweet a plea for help and beg for a retweet, do whatever you have to do. The point is to try to delegate enough bits and pieces so that the load you’re left with is manageable. But be careful not to delegate to people who can’t operate without direction or whom you know to be flaky, no matter how desperate you are. They’ll just cause you more stress and fail to lighten your load.

If you can’t get any help, the next three points are even more important.

3. Pace yourself. If you work 18 hours one day, you’ll be much less productive the next day. Then you’ll just be more stressed, which will make you even more fatigued, etc. Sure, if you’re 25, you can probably do crazy long days for longer periods, but it will catch up with you eventually.

4. Schedule in at least one day a week to regroup. Try to accurately assess the amount of time you need to complete the work, and make a schedule that distributes the work more or less evenly over the time remaining till the deadline minus one day a week. And by “regroup,” I mean rest, not spend the day trying to catch up on the 10 projects you’re neglecting because of this one. That won’t help. Reassess the workload and adjust the schedule every day or two.

5. Don’t lose sight of what you’re getting out of the project. This will help you get through your darkest hour and keep you motivated. I’m not talking about the money, although that may be an important factor for you. I’m referring to the intangible things, like what you’re discovering, how you’re growing, how this work and experience will benefit you personally and professionally. You can usually find a bright side!

If you have survival strategies for desperate situations, please share! (I still have 10 days left and can use all the help I can get.)

Photo credit: stock.xchng user straymuse

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I have one account that I essentially use to deliver content to a special interest group. I manually search for people who might be in this group using a saved keyword search in Tweetie. What I do is follow them just to let them know the account is there. If they’re interested, I figure they’ll follow back. And I don’t do this aggressively — only a few people a month. (Read Twitter’s rules/recommendations for acceptable follow practices.)

After a while, I had a buildup of people I had followed but who hadn’t followed back. And because Twitter won’t let me follow more than 2,000 people, and this keyword search technique is how I get the word out about the account, I can’t waste follows.

So this morning I did a Google search on “mass unfollow,” and found a few tools that would unfollow everybody who wasn’t following you. The problem was that they didn’t allow you to pick and choose, and there were a few of those tweeps I wanted to hang onto. So I did another search for “selective unfollow” and found Tweepi, “the first and only Twitter follow management with stats.” To quote the developer, it’s “very much a beta,” but it did what I needed and more, with a perfectly intuitive UI that required zero learning curve.

Selective Unfollowing

First, I needed to go through over 200 non-followers to decide who would get the axe. So I chose “Cleanup” and got a table that looked like this:

The “Friend?” column showed both people I was following who weren’t following back and “mutual friends.” I wasn’t axing any of the latter, so I clicked on the header of the “Friend?” column to sort the accounts. Then all you have to do is check the checkbox on the right and when you’re done with that page, click “UnFollow Selected.” You can only see 20 accounts at a time (it goes up to 40 if you tweet about Tweepi!), but even though I had to do 60 pages of this, it didn’t actually bother me at all.

Clicking the avatar at left takes you to the user’s Twitter page, but you shouldn’t have to do that. You can also customize the columns to show the info you need to make your decision:

Selective Reciprocating

Then, because I have other things going on in my life besides Twitter (as I’m sure you do too) and I don’t necessarily check out new followers the instant I get notified of a follow, I also had a buildup of people who’d followed the account but whom I hadn’t followed back. For this I chose “Reciprocate,” which showed me only these people, and I went through another 30-some pages, deciding whom I should follow back.

Safelisting

One of the nicest touches is the “Safelist” feature. You know those tweeps I said I wanted to hang onto? I can click the plus sign at the right of their stats row, which protects them if I ever get in a bad mood and decide to do an indiscriminate mass unfollow, which Tweepi lets you do with its “Flush” feature.

Geeky Follow

This is an experimental feature that suggests people you might want to follow based on various criteria. I didn’t test it, so if you do, let us know how it worked for you in the comments.

Not That Much of a Beta

The app did hang up about halfway through my unfollowing process, but when that happened, Tweepi displayed a progress message and provided a link to “safe mode,” which instantly unhangs the app and puts you right back where you were, so it wasn’t an issue.

I recommend this app for those of you who use Twitter for business purposes. And be sure to give the developers feedback so they can make it even better.

What third-party Twitter tools do you use?

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What is Content Strategy?

Kristina Halvorson sums it up nicely in her superb article “The Discipline of Content Strategy” on A List Apart:

“Content strategy plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.”

If you’re tweeting or updating on Facebook or elsewhere, you’ve got creation and publication of content down. But what about all the other keywords in that definition?

Developing a Content Strategy For Your Social Media Presence

Putting together a content strategy for your social media presence can be a real challenge, especially when you mix business with pleasure; my Facebook friends include relatives, old friends, new pals and purely professional contacts, some of whom I’ve never met personally. You can’t please all the people all the time when you have such a mixed audience, and the privacy settings are too global to adequately address this issue. (My only strategy for Facebook is not to publish things that are too personal. Content strategy is as much about what you shouldn’t publish as it is about what you should.)

But Twitter, for example, is a different story. It’s easy to have separate “personal” and “pro” Twitter accounts. And if you have a pro Twitter account, it’s also easy to apply a content strategy to it. The same is true of professional networks like LinkedIn.

Planning and Governance of Useful, Usable Content

Here are some ideas that might help you get started on a strategy:

• Planning: Define your mission (what you want to achieve with your content). Define your audience. Define what you want your content to do for your audience (inform, persuade, entertain). Define the nature of your content (what it should consist of and the tone of the content). Decide how often to produce it. Decide how you will interact with your audience.
• Governance: In this context, I interpret this to mean managing and monitoring your content and its impact, as well as your own role. Are you meeting your audience’s needs? What’s working and what’s not, and why? Is the quality of your content consistently high? Are you responsive and available?
• Useful and usable: Most of the blogs and Twitter accounts of small businesses I see need a content strategy. They tend to be too inwardly focused, all about their own updates and services (boring), or else they are too much about the owner/founder. These businesses generally need to figure out how to provide some real value to their audiences in order to keep them coming back and turn them into real fans, or even evangelists.

Here’s an example: I discovered a nice app the other day called Memory-Life. It’s a site where you can store media and other files in a virtual “box of memories.” (It’s still only available in French, but hopefully not for long. You can see a demo by clicking “Voir la démo.“)

It has a Twitter account, but it could be doing a lot more. Its audience is interested in preserving memories, so in addition to the occasional updates about upgrades and features, it could share links to articles about repairing old photos, or compressing large video files. It could provide creative suggestions, like “Upload pictures of all your grandmother’s jewelry to your box of memories” or “Create your own art gallery with Memory-Life.” It could suggest alternative uses for the app; designers could use it to create inspiration boards, for example.

If you want to connect with and engage an audience, your content has to provoke thought and action. You know you’re adding value if your content is being retweeted, liked and shared. It takes work, but it’s worth it.

You Too Could Be a Content Strategist!

Content strayegy is a relatively new career field. Large corporations are beginning to have in-house content strategists, but there is no reason why this job shouldn’t be done by consultants, which is where you come in. It could be an ideal occupation for a web worker.

If you’d like to learn ore about content strategy, in April, several chapters of the Society for Technical Communication are putting on “Content Strategy Forum 2010,” a two-day conference on content strategy in Paris. The conference is intended for:

“…anyone who develops, manages, or delivers content within their own organization or for their clients: user experience designers, information architects, business analysts, technical writers, web project managers, documentation managers, translators, web marketers, practicing content strategists, and those looking to break into the field.”

Learn more about the conference program and register here (tickets are very affordable).

Here’s some additional recommended reading on content strategy:

• “Content Strategy: The Philosophy of Data,” a great article by Rachel Lovinger
• There are several good articles on A List Apart about content strategy.

Have you implemented a content strategy for your social media presence?

Image by the_franz from sxc.hu

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