TNT1: A Bargain-Bin MoMA: Content Curation for the Rest of Us

Georgy Cohen: All right, can everyone hear me all right?

Audience: Yes.

Georgy Cohen: All right, cool. My name is Georgy Cohen. I'm from Tufts University. This is "Bargain-Bin MoMA: Content Curation for the Rest of Us". Thanks for coming. There's a couple of things. If you're tweeting about this, please use a double hashtag HUF10 and TNT in keeping the content track shortcode thing. And if you have any questions during the presentation, free to raise your hand and we'll set aside a moment to take those.

So I just want to clarify to start is that if you're looking to the idea of content curation as the solution for our content creation problem, content curation is not to replace over content creation. Creating original content is still the most important thing that you can do for your website. But what we're going to talk about is a way to "unearth" content buried treasure that you find that aligns with your brand.

It's about taking advantage of you to generate a content, taking advantage of the real-time Web to dig up content that aligns with the brand messages and the brand storytelling that you're trying to do.

So the reason I'm up here talking about this is about a year ago, maybe a year and a half ago, I was monitoring our – monitoring Tufts for your social media. Here like managers there, university's brand or monitors via social media is sort of listening or a dashboard, OK. So I was doing that.

And I was seeing all this content out there. I was seeing students creating videos, alumns writing blog something amazing things. And I thought this is great stuff. I need to do something with this. So I started a blog. I started a blog in August 2009 called Jumble. Our mascot is Jumbo, the Elephant. Ha ha. And basically what I call the blog is that we find the best stuff about Tufts on the Web and post it here. That's exactly what the text says on the website.

And I like it as being the Boing Boing of Tufts and one with Boing Boing the sort of gathers the best stuff on the Web. So Jumble is kind of a subset of Boing Boing that's very Tufts specific. And in a year from August '09 to August '10, we had 36,000 visitors. And it became a real home for a lot of the school content that our community was creating that organically aligned with our brand messages that we want to convey about the University.

So here's about the content that we had. We had a professor in our School of Dental Medicine who did a rock about stem cell research. He posted it on YouTube so we found that and linked that up and it will be popular. This is an alumn. This is Michael Sheeley. He's one of the co-founders of RunKeeper and anyone use RunKeeper out here?

So Michael Sheeley, he is an alumn. He co-founded this popular iPhone app called RunKeeper, and Robert Scoble, the founded a blog, did a video interview with him. And this is our student group Tufts Dance Collective, did their spring show and they had a faculty dance and the president, President Bacow of the university and his wife participated.

And you can't see the Facebook like and the Twitter stats on this, but we had a 43 retweets and 15 likes on Facebook via the blog entry so that was some great content that got really was pretty popular.

So I didn't really know what I was doing, right? All I saw was, I saw content. I mean I need to put it somewhere so I can highlight it because it's awesome. So I didn't really know until roughly, recently that I was doing something that has a name called content curation.

So maybe because the word "curation" in the context of a museum, right, where you gather around a theme or an era of a particular artist. But think about a department store window, right? A department store window highlights fashion that is relevant to the season. It's the best clothes that they have to show you.

And it's specific. They select specific items that coordinate with each other so that's the kind of curation as well. And even icanhazcheeseburger. It's a form of curation because you had users submitting lolcats and the community curates them. They vote and they highlight which ones are the best and community is doing the curating, of selecting the ones that are the best and the ones that they want to highlight.

And again, Boing Boing and just like Boing Boing and Fark, they highlight the best content on the Web. Fark highlights and curates the most curious in the news and oddities. Boing Boing just highlights a lot of the coolest stuff on the Web.

So the old model is aggregation. Does anyone watch Porters? So that's kind of the "old" model. It's like you just gather a bunch of stuff together that may have sort of loose common trend. You know like here it is, here's a bunch of stock. But it doesn't really work anymore. There's too much content out there and our users are demanding too much for us to throw stuff back at them.

It doesn't work anymore. It's an old model. This is a new model which is curation. So let's dig a little deeper and find out what exactly curation is. Ann Handley from Marketing Profs has the best definition I actually like, which is that curation is the act of continually identifying, selecting and sharing the best and most relevant online content, other online resources, on a specific subject to match the need of a specific audience.

For me, the three keywords in that definition are 'it's the best," "the most relevant" and "it's specific' and it's just like the department store window that we talked about. But a shorter definition I also really like is that curation is managing voices and these voices are the ones that are out there in our community, our students, our alums, our staff, our faculty who are creating content, much of which, organically aligns with our brand.

In that city, the computer says, "I'm going to create content that aligns with the university brand."

They're just sitting there saying "I really like the A Cappella groups." "I love the History Department." "I love being in an alumn." I blog about it. I want you to video... outing. And that's what they're doing.

It's what we can do through curation – is raise the visibility of that content, build bridges to it and identify the people out in our community who are the content influencers – our brand ambassadors creating content on the Web.

And here's another sort of insights that I like about content curation from the CEO of a company called HighFire which makes the curating software called Curata. He says that for smaller organizations that do not have the problem in part to compete with larger companies that are producing new content, curation level is the playing field.

So like I said, content curation is not a replacement of creating original content. You can't bank in the entire content strategy on it. But if you're short of resources, if you're turning out news articles but you still have the resources to do video, maybe you can go out there and find the best videos that other people are creating about your brand or about to tie into your message and highlight those.

So it can supplement what you're doing in other area. So let's go over to some of the key points of content curation. Content curation happens in real time. Content is being created in real time. It's just happening. To take advantage of it, you have to have your finger on the pulse of what's going on and hopefully a lot of us already do. You have to apply a human filter. We'll talk a little bit more about context in a second but really having criteria from what you want to accomplish with curation, having sort of "focus" behind it, having a means of – reasons for why you're selecting the content that you're selecting is critical. That's what differentiates this from aggregation, just sort of a machine-based robotic process.

This is about being human. Having a blend is content. It's not just about videos or just about blog entry. It's not just about content that your community has created. It could be content from your own news archives.

It's content from newsletters that your other departments at your university are creating. There's a whole sort of sea of content out there. And it's about mixing and matching and finding all – whatever it is out there, from whatever sources that ties into the goal that you're trying to accomplish, the message that you're trying to convey.

Publishing is really important. You have to have a home for when you're curating content, whether it's a blog, whether it's a topic landing page on a new site, whether it's something as simple as a Twitter list.

You have to have some place where there's all lists because what we're doing with curation is real-time content, is capturing it. We're capturing these moments that people are creating and we're tying it down to our brand, aligning it and having it live on for posterity. So having some place where it lives, some place where you can organize it, categorize it, whatever, and have that give it that visibility, is important.

And the other important thing is community. We're reaching out to people who are our brand ambassadors.

People who really can suggest about our university, about our brand and creating content around it. And it's not just about stealing it and embedding it on your blog. It's about building relationships. These could be your future student interns. These could be alums who are out in the community who become your next young alumni ambassadors. Like who knows which people are going to be?

Content could be the bridge that builds a relationship between you and this audience. So it sounds great, right? This is like – this sounds like utopia. It's like, "Oh, my God." They're all going to create content for me. It's going to be greater than blog. But I've a lot to do, right? We all have other responsibility. We have other stuff going on why should this be something that I consider working it to my, maybe later a team, because there is so much content out there.

There is tons and tons of content. These are the recent numbers I could find and they're probably are already out of date.

So what we can do is help filter the chaos because content is chaos. So if we filter the chaos, try to find the best of the best, the most specific, the most relevant, and highlight it. We can gain authority.

It seems kind of silly to say that you have to become a thought leader on your own brand but you kind of do because everyone else is already creating content around it as well. So if we go and out there and bring that in and give it a place and give it visibility, you know, even elevate stuff even further, so you go out there and find that content that aligns with your branding and give it a home.

Like I said, this is already out there. This is the video that students produce after our lacrosse team won the national championship last year. We were going to do this video. We don't have the resources to do this but they were there on the field capturing the moment of the victory. So why not? Why aren't we going to highlight the heck out of this? This is amazing content.

I don't care that I didn't curate it. I'm just curious. And also students want it. The e-expectations are far from Noah Levitz released this summer. What videos are most valuable to students? Twenty-six percent said videos made by students but 67 percent said videos made by both and then of course, just seven percent had said it's the videos made by the college.

Students want to see the content created by their peers. They want to see that alongside the stuff we're doing too, which speaks to the point of having a blended approach to content curation.

If they were at "Groundswell," so Charlene Li is the author of this really awesome book called "Groundswell" and she critically called the engagement pyramid, which is a way of looking at the social demographics of your audience. At the very top of the pyramid is curation.

Curation is the highest level of content engagement. You're taking the people who are the watchers, the sharers, the commentors and the producers and you're sort of taking advantage of all that.

You're mindful all of it. You're highlighting the best of it. It takes time. It takes investment but it's the highest level of content engagement that you can achieve.

The good news is that – where do you do this? In some place then again, just like I was doing with Jumble. You may not know that you're approaching content in this mindset but a lot of ways you already are.

Well, anyone who do like media relations, working on a new site so you're highlighting the press clips that you got your university is getting in the New York Times or the Washington Post or wherever, you're already doing a little bit. You're looking at the content that's out there, that's relevant to your brand, highlighting the best of it and featuring it on your website. That's the kind of content curation.

And university homepage might be one of the – you might not think of it that way but, again, that is a form of content curation whichever side of the diagram you might follow on.

That's also the place where you're selecting what's the best, what's the most specific to what I'm trying to accomplish. What's the most relevant to my audience?

So speaking of that, we're going to talk a little bit about the strategy to use when you're thinking about curating content. Again, what is your goal? What are you trying to accomplish by doing this? You can't just sort of really, really dive in, get a bunch of stuff – here’s some stuff. You have to know what you're trying to accomplish so you can measure it.

Who's your audience? Who is this geared to? Is this geared towards students? Is this geared towards alums? Is it internal audience? External audience? These are the questions to go through.

What is the message you're trying to convey? What is the story that you're trying to tell? What tone are you telling the story in? And this speaks to the value of being human. Zombies don't tell stories, right? And out of aggregation is the product of zombies. It's just little robots who are turning out content, looking for brain, stumbling around.

Being human is the most valuable asset to curating content because you give content meaning. You give content context. So don't be afraid to be the editor of the New York Times, right? Don't be afraid to find the best stuff. Don't be afraid to be selective.

It's your job as the curator of content to editorialize, to contextualize, to find the content that is out there and give it meaning. I think that context is really the most important thing that you can provide to content as a curator.

Steve Rosenbaum is the guy who's done a lot of thinking and talking about the topic of content curation and I really like the way he puts them. "We've arrived in a world where everyone is a content creator and quality content is determined by context."

So what do I mean by context? That could be – if you find the video of the A Cappella group, singing last Friday show, you link to their website. You link to their Twitter account.

You say that they also happen to have a show coming up next week or they just won this award. So that little nugget of content via the video, with the blog post or whatever, you provide the context of a more holistic picture. What's going on with that A Capella group? Where they've been? Where they're going? Why this is important? And that's the value that you provide as a curator.

Trust is critical when it comes to content curation because we are universities and people look up to us. They don't expect us to screw up. They expect us to get it right as they said, in spite of really great power comes great responsibility.

So there's the saying that "one rotten apple spoils the barrel." I think one red solo cup slows the video. So if you were viewing content that's out there, make sure that you review it thoroughly, that you validate as much as possible because I come across really great content that two minutes into the video, there's some drunken carousing going on. And you're like I'm not going to highlight that. It's amazing as the rest of the message in the content in this video is, there's that sort of moment that I don't want to be associated with.

What to blend? Yes. It will blend. Mix up your content. Bring it in from different sources. Don't feel like you just – even if you're doing mostly videos we find, you can find blog post. If student groups on their website have content or student blogs, that's OK. Whatever you're comfortable with, from where you're sitting administratively or whatever, go for it. Mix it up. That's what makes it really interesting for the audience that you're trying to communicate with.

Reaching out to your community is really important. There are those digital influences out there and they're the ones who are telling our brand story for us. Content curation is a lot about relationship building like I said. It's about identifying those people, giving visibility to your content, building bridges to it through our curation mechanisms.

And it's also about recognizing that. The content your community creates maybe better that some can come up with some stuff, a little bit of humility also. We have a Quidditch team on campus. And we found out about this Quidditch team and we're like, great. We're going to do a video – a little video about them. We're going to highlight. It's really fun and it would be cool.

So we're doing the usual emailing to student "Oh, we'd like to profile you." "Oh, when is your practice?" "Oh, I'm a student." "I'm very busy." "I can't get back to you." "I'm very sleepy." And so it just went on. And then one day, I looked in my feed. I saw this video that they had done about the Quidditch team. It was cute. It was adorable. It was funny and it was authentic. A little bit long, four and a half minutes, but that's OK.

And immediately I said to myself, well, let's scrap our plans. We don't need to pursue that video anymore to students because they did the job for us.

And they did it way better than we could have ever done because it's in their voice. We could do a lot of things. We have only some resources. We can do some stuff but one thing we can't do is think authentically as a student because we're not students.

We can't necessarily think authentically as alumn, because a lot of us aren' alumns. So with that content appears and you'd find it, take advantage of it. Build those bridges to it and be original to the point from – your expectation survey. This could live alongside the original content.

If we did a written story about the Quidditch team, embed the video with that they produced. Mix it. Don't stop being original because you can curate best content in the world but you're not curating. You're not putting something out there.

You're quickly going to start pulling off the slope and again, to the point of organizing and tagging and making sure that whenever you have this content live, it's organized. This is going to live on for prosperity. We're capturing those moments and pinning them down.

So to do that properly, we have to do that in organized fashion. So how do you find the stuff, right? We're talking about this wealth of content that exists out there, organically aligned with our brand. How do you find it?

So this is why social media monitoring dashboards because it's Google Reader. What's great is that there's so many sites – Twitter, Facebook – not Facebook – Flickr or YouTube where you can just pull in our RSS feed for whatever keyword you want.

Google blog alerts, well, I don't know Technorati is really relevant anymore. But wherever else and just pull in and so anything that comes across that has Tufts, the word Tufts in it, I'd see, which means I also see a lot of stuff about grass or dogs or – but amidst all that stuff…

[Laughter]

Amidst all that stuff is really, really great content. I've seen some nice pictures of fields and puppies too but – so Flickr Photo Pools. I keep badmouthing aggregation but the one thing that aggregation can do is serve as a platform for curation, something like a photo pool.

Here's something Northern Illinois University or you have people upload their photos and add them to a pool is great. It creates some of them – you know sitting ducks of content where you can get this one and that one and that one.

Illinoist, Bostonist, Gothamist, Chicagoist – any of those sort of city blogs, what they do often is they have a photo pool and photographers in those cities take photos, submit them to the Flickr Pool and then the editors of the blog will highlight you as daily or weekly – I'm not sure – the best photos and then the photographer's site because in my photos I'm Bostonist. My photos on Chicagoist.

So it's a great way for those editors to have all those photography that they can highlight cool moments and cool scenes from the city. And the photographers are excited because they get their content highlighted.

Same sort of principle or aggregation is the platform for curating. Popularity hash pad is great. Here's the one – an example, one that we had for our incoming class Top 2014, New York popularity and hash pads for a new dorm.

You have like new dorm as the hash site. It's like what's coolest thing about the new dorm? I mean, how's like – so the people using the hashtag to share their thing but you highlight the 20. They're the best that aligned with the message that you're trying to convey that's the new dorm. You can highlight that in a story, on your website, your live site, whatever.

Does anyone have any question, so far? I don't want to plow through. All right. So YouTube Direct is a service that YouTube created, which is really you install on your server.

And what it is, is it allows users to submit a video through a forum on your website. It's a video that lives in their account. And what it does it then submits into a moderation queue. If you approve it, it gets connected to a playlist to your YouTube account.

So let's talk about this dorm example. If you have people shooting videos of the new dorm, they're submitting it to YouTube Direct.

It's their on their YouTube account but you could approve and reject whether or not it gets tied to your playlist that you've created from your YouTube account called New Dorm or whatever so that could be a good way or sort of – it's more act of solicitation that sort of going out and finding but you can then from that pool of content you solicit, find the highlight, the best of it.

Google Moderator is the same tool. It's often used for sort of Q&A thing but you could also put out an idea. You can put out a question and people can submit responses and sort of like along the lines of icanhazcheeseburger, the community can then vote, thumbs up, thumbs down so good answer or bad answer, good idea or bad idea, and that could be a way to also use to curate comments or ideas on the topic.

What we found in one of our news channels, Tufts English for a few years is an idea that I blatantly ripped off from the old Atlantic online. Glad this must be online. They had a feature called flashbacks so they would take content from their archives going back decades, decades, the 19th century that was newly relevant in life's current events.

So let's say, the Warner rock started. Let's say there was an article from several decades ago that somehow touched on ethnic conflict they have been sitting for decade. They would link back to that content because this is now relevant in life current event.

So we did that with our own archives. We'll go back in our own archives for our news and find content that was everybody that had new relevance. Here's the example of a veterinarian who's talking about being mindful of your pets during the hot summer.

We did this is back on 2002. The content was so – but we were able to highlight it in light of the fact that it was freaking hot in summer.

Any questions? OK. So what you have all this content you found that how do you share it? How do you publish it? How did you get it out there?

There are ton of services that have cropped up just around the idea of curating content. I'm not going into detail about them because they're all – there's lot of our –had similarity, some differences whatever, but I know that stored by and curated by are two of the ones that are pretty popular right now.

Mixx is also really interesting. A lot of professional sports team used Mixx with articles, include some things like that. The sites are going to be available online after you want to have this list to reference at your leisure. But this really has varying price points what-not. But I prefer to sort of grassroots it a little bit.

I'm not going to go into detail about a lot of this. But does anyone check me out to look into use the service to help you accomplish this goal? So one thing that Google Reader allows you to do is publish directly from the reader.

So if you find this content like here's a tweet from one of our A Capella groups and I want to publish it to channel that I've selected. I can do that.

The one thing that doesn't allow me to do is add the context of supporting content or links or whatever, but I could set it up so that it can just directly go bam! – go to Delicious, go to Twitter, go to Tumblr, whatever which could be handy.

So Yahoo Pipes is interesting. It's a way I called it serve like a set of program or VCR for content. You could set up and it has it roll. It's a little more "aggregationing" but I again quote Steve Rosenbaum who said something I like.

He said that robots can be your friend but don't like your users to smell the metal. So something like Yahoo Pipes, you could really, really find doing content that you're having and go out and find.

But again, it's a robotic process so you lose a little bit of it there but it could be handy whether as a curation to one itself or to help you pull in that content from the big wide Web out there.

Twitter is great but it offers a lot of different ways to organize your content whether it's a Twitter list, a Twitter hash pad, or favorites. I'm really a big fan of favorites because favorites are just instant content for like your About page or your Points of Pride page where if you're going through all your tweets or all your YouTube videos, YouTube also has favorites or flicker will pop up those more in a second.

It's just instantly here's the best content that he's what people are saying about us – bam bam bam bam. So Nero is a service that I first heard about from Karen Jo Lee on her blog "Tired Experts". And it's basically – it allows you to bring together different YouTube accounts.

So if you have a bunch of departments at your university who had YouTube account that created content, you could select different account, type them into Nero, install it, set it up on your Web server and you have sort of cool front end for presenting a lot of different video content.

Duke University students right now is Duke on Demand. Again, you're curating accounts. You're not curating content but it is the way to sort of rain in then highlight some of the content being created at your university.

This is Magnify.net which is a service that this guy Steve Rosenbaum I keep quoting is the CEO of and it's a video curation platform. They like you to curate video, be a service and then incorporate it into your website.

CoveritLive is a tool that I really, really can't say enough good things about. It's authentically – there's a live chat to if you want to host a live chat between your audience and a faculty member who has the research. You can just do that.

But we can also do – you can pull in tweets. Pull in tweets by user account pull in tweets by hash pad. You can have it or do it automatically. You can do it manually, or what it can really do is create a great integrated conversation; or for the chat, you can moderate it for the tweets, pull in the select ones and around a specific topic, you can highlight this great conversation around it.

What we did for – when our A Capella group Beezlebubs were on NBC's "The Sing-Off" last winter, we hosted a live chat during the finale. There's been a lot of people who all – different access our community, logging on, cutting with each other and alongside their live chat's spring, we pulled in a lot of the relevant tweets with people who are excited about the Bubs being on national television.

So it created the sort of really cool conversation that was coming from all different places. It was like an active role in facilitating and curating the elements of that conversation.

I mentioned Flickr Favorite before. Flickr Favorites are great. If you have your tag in Flickr set up for your university's name, you see all the photos, the ones that you like. You click Favorite then you have a gallery of all these awesome, awesome photos that members of your community are taking of your campus of events at your university, whatever.

And with the Flickr API you can sort of mix and match a little bit to set it up and display it on your website.

So whether you have one at your disposal or not, there's different ways you can display this content – really, really awesome digital content that you're paying for. The same goes for YouTube and YouTube Favorites.

YouTube has a playlist curator tool so that you can feed and whether it's just the string of your favorites, or specific playlist. And you can have it embedded – set it up in a little embed that you can put on your website.

But one downside to the YouTube playlist embed is that it displays from oldest first not most recent first, but if you have a – one you can hack a little bit at your disposal. They could hack the API a little bit to get it to show most recent photos but otherwise this is a great way to have so the cool jukebox of video content that you curated from YouTube.

This is what we did again with the Bubs around "The Sing-Off". We had three dozens videos that we found on YouTube that people have taken at Bubs performances.

So every one's jazz up the Bubs are driving content to this package. You can watch all sorts of performances, the songs, by them. So going along the lines of content solicitation and moderation, Tumblr and Posterous are two blog products. And people can submit not just text but photos, video – different kinds of content.

And you can bring it into a moderation queue that you can then review and then approve what you want to get published. Tumblr is really greatest story popular. It's hit among the kids but what I really like about Posterous is that, it's all – a lot of it is formed by email.

So if you popularize an email address, you can then say, "Hey, send your content about this to this email address" and then people can just submit it and it goes right into the queue, or they can submit it via the Web. So those are couple of cool cools for soliciting content.

So some of you might be a little concerned talking a lot about other people's content, right?

And I can understand people being a little bit nervous. It's not my stuff. I'm not sure what I can do or I can't do. You know is this is all legit? So a couple of points about copyright and maybe I should pay Steve Rosenbaum that money. I've been using a lot since – material in this presentation.

But he said some really good – a really good overview of the things he thinks about when – about in the realm of copyright when you're curating content. You can link to anything that's on the Web. It's public. If it's there, you can link to it.

If it's embeddable, you can embed it. You can't violate any sort of Copyright Act. You can't remove ads or part of the content that you're curating. And you have to understand that your content also abides by these rules.

If you put a video on YouTube, there could be an alumn out there who's creating the best content about your university and puts them in their blog and puts context around it. And that's just something to expand when you put content out there. People are going to link to it and embed it and do whatever.

But the other keys – the rule of the road is respect.

If you link to a blog and it's fair game to link to but then that's sort of writes to you and said, "You know, I really don't want that blog to highlight and I know it's on the Web. But you know I just – I would feel more comfortable if you didn't really link to it. You got to be cool with them. All right, that's totally fair because this is about sharing and building community and so a big part of that is respect.

So here's some examples of places where – it has a good job of curating content on the Web. New York Times topics' page as I think do a really great job. Here's one but they have for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill this summer where they have some text here in the photo then summarizes situation, gives it overview.

And it headlines around the Web that aren't New York Times content. This is content from MSNBC, Wall Street Journal but it adds context to the situation. And then here's their own content – the New York Times coverage of the issue.

So if all of these content put together, they have a really good context around this topic and its content it's theirs.

Its content that's not theirs and then it just text that's specifically designed for the purpose of providing context to this topic. SlashOut something you might be familiar with. Pretty simple. They find the best news about technology on the Web and they post it there.

IBM uses Tumblr actually for this blog which is a Smarter Planet and they set this up to highlight a specific aspect of the brand, which is to be instrumented, interconnected and intelligent.

It's latest feature links to all sorts of interesting content that ties into that theme. So here's an article display about the Kindle, neither Slate nor the Kindle, if anything towards IBM but by highlighting this, they say that this content ties to the theme of being interconnected, instrumented and intelligent.

And they're just trying to be – I know that the word, the term "thought leader" people kind of cringe to that a little bit but they're trying to say, "We understand what those, what it means to be instrumented, intelligent and interconnected."

And here's the content that we find that speaks to that message and if they're trying to put their authority as representing that brand by curating this content around the Web that ties into that because people who find the Kindle interesting and find it as a representative of being interconnected, instrumented, intelligent will then maybe connect to IBM on that level as well. That's their hope.

YouTube has a blog called CitizenTube where they scour YouTube for the best citizen journalism, video that is covering current events and then they highlight it on the blog so that's curation as well.

Their goal is to communicate about current events. They're finding video from their own archives, from YouTube's archive that tie into that and giving visibility to this Citizen journalists.

Discovery Channel did acool thing where they popularized this hashtag #mydiscovery and they ask people to share their own sense of discovery of what's out there.

And then they tell you that they'll highlight not only on the Web but on TV as well. So for you as a viewer of discovery, the idea of getting your tweet, your insight feature not only on the Web but on TV is pretty cool. And they're selecting the best ones of what they submitted to highlight in those places.

This is an interior design curation blog called Chris Handy and what they do is they discover all sorts about interior design blogs and they highlight the best of what's out there – the best of what other blogs in their community about interior design are highlighting and publishing.

So it's from all sorts of different sources what they are in it for is to raise the visibility of good quality coverage of interior design. That's what their goal is.

And then there was a collective, is a street art collective and what they do is they highlight in some street are all around. And they recently, I guess, it's probably two months ago, did some curation on YouTube.

What YouTube often does is they have groups that will come and curate content on the homepage. On one group they have recently was this group called Invisible people, about the plight of homelessness saved by this organization that come and curate all the content on YouTube homepage.

And there was all content that tied into the idea of we’re using visibility around the plight of homelessness so this was their collective. What they do is they curate the best of content about street art.

And when they were doing this curation on YouTube a little while ago they set on what I though was a really good approach to thinking about curation. That they said for them, for us, the key to curation is curiosity.

The best curators in the world on and off are curious people by nature. We're constantly want to be inspired and wanted to share what's inspiring us with others. So I think that we talked a lot about the process and what not but really just having a curiosity about your own brand, taking advantage of the curiosity that other people have when they're exploring things for their content and try to inspire people through content.

I like this approach because it's – we're trying to accomplish goals. We have business for trying to do but content to be about being inspired, right, so trying to find the best of it, yeah, we want to accomplish our goals and do our job. But we also just want to engage entertaining people. We want inspire them about our brand.

So to sum up, what are some of things that you get out of curating content? You get authority. Again, to that point about being the authority on your own brand, just like IBM is trying to do. They have a brand. They're trying to – they're trying to own. They're trying to speak to that audience so that's instrumented, intelligent and interconnected so by finding content that's out there and highlighting it, we become the authority on the brands just that we're trying to convey.

Information, by monitoring content and by really getting involved in the content community and those content influencers, you learn a lot.

There's a tweet for student about I found through the Tufts 2014 hashtag where he said, "I'm so excited to come to Tufts. I can't wait to go to same university that Susan Wu went to." I like who the heck is Susan Wu? I don't know who this person is.

So I looked her out. Sure enough. She's a post grad and it turns out that she was like – one of the top 100 Entrepreneurs by Fast Company into some really hot technology person. So like I was never known that unless I've been immersed in the content of my community was creating.

And you find content just like that footage video. We're racking our brains trying to hook up with these students to get this video feature done. By being attentive to the content that's being created, we found the content that they had created around what they're trying to convey about their organization. And that did it for us.

I wasn't going to be like her. Mine's going to be better. I'm going to create this for you anyway. That will show them. I don't need to approach that way.

All I'm looking for is good content, right, that ties into what I'm trying to achieve. If I created or they created, I really don't care. I just want the message out there. If they're telling the story, they're creating the message, I'm happy to highlight that.

And community, by reaching out those digital influences, those content ambassadors who are out there, you don't know what you're going to find. You're going to build those relationships and that could extend beyond the idea of content. You never know where others are going to go and that for me is pretty powerful.

So that's about it. I'm happy to take any questions.

Audience: You refer to that digital brand... the brand you're referring to is... and convey that... Again, I guess that means officially...

Georgy Cohen: I'm going to give you the microphone actually. That's OK. I forgot to.

Audience: Oh. So at that – especially advice to people, you have different levels, I mean I have my boss and my boss's boss who may interpret that brand a little differently than I do.

[Laughter]

Georgy Cohen: Really?

Audience: So I'm assuming that happens at your school. How do you actually deal with that, the discrepancy between the... about the brand and about the brand.

Georgy Cohen: I mean, at the moment you might just get buried every institution. I think that obviously you're going to have buy in from the people who you are reporting to accomplish that. I want you to go by – ask for forgiveness, for permission kind of approach.

But I'm sort of talking about a broad university-wide context. But you can also do this at a very narrow level. One thought is like, let's say, you have secured master's program.

You have a master's program in humanitarian assistance and that the people who run the master's in humanitarian assistance program wanted to curate content to accomplish their goals of raising awareness about their degree program. They could create content from articles and blog post from other people doing humanitarian assistance or whatever, not necessarily in other institution that could go alongside content that we're creating about that degree program.

And thereby, they're doing content curation for your idea of saying "This is what our program is all about. These are things that we care about. This is what we stand for." So to your question about how do – it is basically how do you get by and for? How do you get those – make sure it's on the same page. It's hard to say.

I mean does anyone had experience with that like you're trying to get them on the same page with the brand and how, what that story is? I think that in my institution that isn't really a problem but the brand messages are baking through our brain.

It could be a matter of talking about it as a group and figuring out – maybe it's a narrow thing. Maybe it's one message that you can all agree on. Maybe you're internationalism so international perfected. That's really big at Tufts.

That's really big on your school and you can all agree about that. Really that's some place to start instead of having it to be the end-all be-all of every single message that our institution stands for.

You can start at one place that everyone says, "Yes. This is what we're doing here." And go from there.

Any other questions? Anything from a – oh.

Audience: [42:36 Unintelligible]

Georgy Cohen: Start listening. Start reading. Start finding content whether it's the Google Reader so like Netvibes, Hootsuite. They're probably a whole session just about social media listening and monitoring. But it's about finding that content and not doing anything with it for a while but sort of reading and seeing what people are producing, what's out there, what's the tone of the content is like.

That's the first thing I would recommend doing is just immersing yourself in it and seeing what's out there and then that would be good sense of how you want to be perceived. Maybe you'll do the big overarching, everything about our university. Here it is. Maybe it's one aspect that needs best student content. You'll find out from just sort of vibing, what's here, how you want to proceed.

43:26 And very thing from the Internet?

Audience: [43:43 Unintelligible].

[Laughter]

Georgy Cohen: Any other request or questions? So this is the URL where you can find the slides. Go to a blog post that I'll be adding to. I have a link now to some – links that I've curated on the list that's about content curations. Let's go and take a look at those.

I'm on Twitter Radio Free Georgy. This is my website too. So if you have any questions afterwards, I'm happy to talk.

Thanks.

[Applause]