Top Ten 2010 Trends: The content challenge
Jeff De Cagna is chief strategist and founder of Principled Innovation LLC, and editor-at-large of SmartBlog Insights. Widely recognized as an association community thought leader, Jeff is the executive producer of the Principled Innovation Blog and Podcast, and also posts on Twitter as @pinnovation.
If you have feedback on SmartBlog Insights, Jeff can be reached at jeff@principledinnovation.com.
Last month, I released my Top Ten 2010 Trends for Associations, and I am publishing a series of posts on SmartBlog Insights in which I will discuss two related trends and their implications for associations. The focus of this post, the second in the series, is the content challenge.
• Content Conflict — For the last few years, the conflicting interests of association content consumers, creators, publishers and financial supporters have played out both online and offline. Continued changes in technology and expectations will intensify these conflicts going forward.
Association publishing – including books, journals, magazines and other print resources — has been in a period of significant upheaval for nearly a decade and a half. Open access to content has been a front and center business challenge for association publishers since the 1990s and the long-term sustainability of advertising-driven print publications is an open question for associations, especially during down economic cycles. With new technology tools and delivery platforms going mainstream, 2010 may well be the year in which the competing interests of content stakeholders come to a head.
In late January, Apple announced the introduction of the iPad, a touch screen tablet-computing device with built-in Web access that will run current iPhone apps as well as iPad-specific apps now in development. The iPad is just one of many tablet devices hitting the market in 2010, as well as several new e-book readers, that will provide content publishers, creators and consumers with powerful new options to more easily deliver and access rich and immersive content experiences in a timely and convenient fashion. For association publishers, the time to rethink current business models and experiment with fresh approaches, including what I call “mobile magazining,” is now.
• Curate to Innovate — One of the most significant innovation opportunities for associations is content curation that helps their stakeholders make sense, make meaning and make better decisions around their personal and professional challenges.
According to some estimates, the amount of information on the Internet will double every 72 hours by 2013. As content creators and publishers, associations contribute to this staggering rate of information growth. As content aggregators, associations play a role in finding and organizing at least some of that material for their members. But neither of these functions wholly addresses the core problem today’s association stakeholders must confront: how to manage their finite human attention in the face of nearly infinite content creation and almost unlimited access.
With this problem in mind, associations must begin to take seriously their emerging role as content curators. From my point of view, content curation is an intentional and careful effort to identify meaningful content and place it a rich and valuable context that supports understanding and enables action. To be effective content curators, however, associations cannot simply pick and choose information that fits with their existing worldview. Providing “deep support” through content curation demands the inclusion of a full range of perspectives, including the unorthodox, unpopular and controversial.
Figuring out the content challenge will be critical to the development of successful business models for associations in the years ahead. As part of this strategic conversation, association leaders must understand that, in many ways, the future of content will bear little if any resemblance to its past. Engaging in this crucial conversation with a future orientation is essential to long-term success.
Jeff is leading a three-part Webinar series, “The Future of Associating is Mobile: Powerful Strategies from Third Screen Success” beginning March 5. For more information or to register, please visit http://bit.ly/thirdscreensuccess.
Previous Top Ten 2010 Trends post: Mobile technologies
Next Top Ten 2010 Trends post: Intelligent decisions by design
Tags: associations, content, innovation, Jeff De Cagna
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Posted by AaronEndre on March 1st, 2010 at 12:38 pm
Attention Age (http://bit.ly/cwWvpQ) discussion in “Top Ten 2010 Trends: The content challenge” (via @pinnovation) http://bit.ly/duhjWE
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Posted by BethLudwick on March 1st, 2010 at 12:47 pm
SmartBlog Insights: Top Ten 2010 Trends: The content challenge: Jeff De Cagna is chief strategist and… http://bit.ly/c4BSWw #association
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Posted by associationjam.org on March 1st, 2010 at 12:55 pm
SmartBlog Insights » Top Ten 2010 Trends: The content challenge…
Association leaders must understand that, in many ways, the future of content will bear little if any resemblance to its past….
Posted by SmartBriefScoop on March 1st, 2010 at 1:45 pm
Smartblog Insights Editor-at-Large @pinnovation continues his Top Ten 2010 Trends Series w/The content challenge http://ow.ly/1cVIy
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Posted by MemberClicks on March 2nd, 2010 at 6:15 am
Top 10 2010 Trends: The content challenge (by @pinnovation) http://ow.ly/1cW6Y
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Posted by Janet Clarey on March 3rd, 2010 at 4:35 pm
I think being a curator is the most interesting and rewarding part of my job. Now if I could just find a way to get paid (well) to do it.
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Posted by dhutson on March 4th, 2010 at 10:04 am
Top Ten 2010 Trends: The Content Challenge http://bit.ly/agkdXT
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Posted by Splash: A Blog from MemberClicks » Blog Archive » Friday Top Five: The content conundrum on March 5th, 2010 at 7:30 am
[...] I loved Jeff De Cagna’s post at SmartBlog Insights this week: The content challenge. Now that everyone can create and distribute content more easily, there’s the challenge to [...]
Posted by Jeff Cobb on March 5th, 2010 at 1:17 pm
Amen to that, Janet! Curation generates a lot of value, but at least for the time being, that doesn’t necessarily translate (directly) into cash in the bank. Thanks for commenting. – Jeff
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Posted by nancyrubin on March 5th, 2010 at 4:53 pm
Top Ten 2010 Trends: The content challenge http://bit.ly/9iRTKI via @AddToAny
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Posted by JeffHurt on March 8th, 2010 at 6:45 am
Top Ten 2010 Trends: The content challenge by @pinnovation http://ow.ly/1ePON #assnchat #nonprofit
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Posted by #TFOA 47: The Content Challenge « The Future of Associations in an Internet-enabled World on March 9th, 2010 at 12:06 am
[...] in tfoa Jeff De Cagna brengt nog maar eens een boeiend item op zijn blog Smartbrief. De uitdaging op het vlak van content (inhoud) is een gevolg van de impact [...]
Posted by Mark Athitakis on March 15th, 2010 at 9:03 am
Good post, Joe—and I’m not just saying that because I sit three feet away from you.
One thing I’d say, though, is that there’s a reason why "curation" is a four-letter word in journalism circles: It emphasizes the job of gathering and summarizing the relevant information that’s *already out there* at the expense of the warm bodies who are capable of *creating* new relevant information. In that sense, "curator" is closer to "research desk" than it is to "editor," let alone "reporter."
This isn’t just a matter of semantics. Research-desk work is a valuable thing that will only become more important as more information gets sprayed out there. But in the same sense that a reporter starts at the library but eventually has to work the phones and walk the pavement, information-gathering efforts are just the start of what curation ought to be. The best "curators" (or whatever we want to call them) will be the ones who not only collect information but can also a) identify where the available information falls short and b) solicit people to successfully fill in the gaps. You address that point in the last graf of your post, but I wanted to draw a bright line under it, because it too often gets lost in the shuffle in these conversations.
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Posted by Acronym on March 15th, 2010 at 12:30 pm
Isn’t “content curator” just another term for “reporter”?…
A few recent posts in the association blogosphere have the idea of “content curation” on my mind. I love this idea, but the term also bugs me a bit. Before I explain why, let’s get up to speed: What is……
Posted by Maggie McGary on March 16th, 2010 at 12:31 am
When I think "content curator" I don’t think so much reporter as finding the right content to plug into certain channels. The nuance part, to me, is picking the right content to plug into each channel, given that each has a different audience. I find the challenging part to be that now, instead of just focusing on one audience: members, we have to find content that’s relevant to many different audiences. If your association has a Facebook page, for instance, suddenly you have to provide content that’s relevant to all the fans of the page–whoever they may be–students, parents, members, potential members, etc.
As you said, there is already so much information out there; to be able to weed through it all on a daily basis and figure out what would be of interest to x, y, and z audiences and get it out there does involve, in my opinion, some level of artistry.
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Posted by Kevin Whorton on March 16th, 2010 at 1:12 am
My dot-com years (founder of a web portal subsidiary of a large trade association) taught me that content aggregation was/is key. In the ideal world, we have an efficient process for collecting, translating and sharing all that we know with our core audience, with the appropriate rights and permissions allowing enough of this knowledge to be accessible to non-members/customers/users to entice them or keep them informed to further our mission. I hadn’t heard of a content curator before but it sounds like the role of secondary researcher & reporter .. as long as it somehow addresses the other negative connotation I’d see in the term, which is that of ‘curation’ as a backward-looking discipline, concerned with accurately retelling the past, rather than telling me what is going on today and why this might have bearing on what I should do today and tomorrow.
The journalists lens is more appropriate in considering this function’s role & core competencies, but I also see it as akin to conducting and relating primary vs. secondary research: I often see neither of them done well, particularly when it comes to putting all the pieces together. Many associations will tell me that they are storehouses of information yet as an outsider I find that most of this knowledge is tacit: the volume of web content doesn’t cover much of what the association produces, and associations don’t do enough to link out to the right pieces of content that others have prepared. If I was in livestock management, chances are I want to have a single starting point to figure out what’s new in cows, and I’d appreciate it if figuring that out didn’t take long before I’d have to go out and face the real thing. The association site arguably should be that starting point, fed by a healthy volume of push email/e-newsletters, print, webcast etc. but often it’s not, measured by total peers who go elsewhere for this information–to another portal, to many sources, or the personal/probably ungainly personal info center I’ve been able to construct through RSS feeds.
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Posted by Jeffrey Cufaude on March 16th, 2010 at 6:12 am
I’ll defer to your understanding of curtain being a part of reporting, but when I think of the term I think of it from the artistic side of the house and not the analytical. Museums and publications often have guess curators because they bring a specific point of view in the choices they make for a collection of works. It is this very subjectivity that is valued in contrast to the objectivity people generally associate with reporting (but not opinion columnists obviously). It’s not just aggregating and editing in the mechanical sense I think some might associate with it. Any web algorithm can do something like that. It’s the human filter here that is distinct and valuable.
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Posted by Maggie McGary on March 16th, 2010 at 7:23 am
What Jeffrey said
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Posted by Paul Kidner on June 2nd, 2010 at 6:17 am
@Jeffrey – Spot on! The real value of curation is the act of human editors adding their work to the machines that gather, organise and filter content. Great example of the Museum curator. Thank you. For the purposes of the real-time Web this subjective choice of information will have to be fast and easily consumed. Maybe this is where the analogy begins to divide.
@Maggie – I think the value of curation really comes into its own when you are able to target specific content (that you have categorised, filtered and edited) to the precise set of people that you want to consume that information. So its less of a general spray but a way of synchronising your own networks and communities. For example I may be highly interested in curation, but less excited about new e-book readers. A blogger I like may write about both, but ultimately all I really want is the information he and a number of other people will write on curation.
Where curation will ultimately come into its own is when there is a tool that will help a curator serve me up information just on the topics I am interested in… perfect.
I think this also answers Jeff’s point in that curators and associations will succeed or fail in creating their own followers depending not on the choice of content they choose to organise, edit and distribute. Some followers may choose to follow the unorthodox information whereas others may want the clean and simple. Being able to target both – and not exclude either – is the answer.