Content and Curation for Nonprofits

This piece was written by Heba Hosny, a guest blogger for Lauralee Walker

This article is full of wonderful tips for taking your curation to the next level and embellish your original content.

"Content curation rewards are not limited to branding and SEO; it can also enhance the visibility and the quality of your own content."

There are many things that caught my attention, here are just a few gems:

Curated Content Can Inspire Topics For Created Content

If you don't master this one, all the other tips won't make any sense

****Understand which topics are irresistible to your target audience

My Commentary:

I love this one!

Here's the tip

****Instead of taking the easy route of sharing the topic with your audience, write a blog post to "build on" it.

You can build on a topic in different ways:

**Beg to differ politely

**Provide additional tips and insights

**Ask clarifying question(s)

My Commentary:

This is a great way to add "context" it can start conversations, which invites others to add their comments, bring new observations and more information about a particular topic.

**A perfect segue to building relationships, community, doing business and increasing knowledge.

Curated by Jan Gordon covering "Content Curation, Social Media & Beyond"

Read full article here: [http://bit.ly/sJs2I8]

Got this from Jan Gordon.  I like the visual showing goals.  Good to use when doing a workshop with beginners to help them think through content curation - to what end?

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This great piece was written by Joe Pulizzi, founder of Content Marketing Institute 

There is no curation without original content. However, curators can expand the readership and help their niche find meaning and insight in the material as it relates to them. 

He says:

"So many organizations are getting caught up in content curation, but the real power of content marketing lies in original content creation."

Curation is more than a tactic, it is coming to forefront because

**people are overwhelmed with too much information.

If you're going to create content, I say mixing that with curated content might be a better way to go, again this depends on many factors,  but that's only my opinion.

Here are a few things that caught my attention:

Y0ur 2012 Checklist -

He says, yes, you can and should use content curation techniques, but this should be secondary.

I say, Curation is more than a technique and will go beyond a buzz word in 2012 as people learn new techniques.

He says:

"Focus on the true pain points of your customers and start planning content series around answering those pain points".

**I definitely agree but this can be accomplished by curation as well. It's not an either or, a curator can add more vital information, another perspective. provide resources or any number of things beyond the original article.

He says:

"Find the content curators in your industry and form relationships with them. They’ll help you spread the word about your great content".

I say:

I believe content creators will want to seek out good content curators  to curate their work.  I watched a six minute video yesterday, the title was "Is Your Content Good Enough To Be Curated"? Now that's a shift in thinking and a very interesting question to ponder, I say, stay tuned........

I think both are necessary in different proportions for different types of businesses.

What do you think?

Commentary by Jan Gordon "Covering Content Curation, Social Media and Beyond"

Read full article here: [http://bit.ly/w104L6]