Content Curation for B2B Marketing: Part Three

—Content Curation Tools to Feed Your Community A Gourmet Meal…Every Single Time!

Concluding this three-part series, I have collated a shortlist of content curation tools that I have seen to be effective for B2B marketing. There are many others to choose from so I’m hoping that those of you reading this post will contribute other tools that you have found useful in your ongoing content curation initiatives.

I think of content curation as somewhat akin to a star chef’s tasting menu. If it ain’t finger-lickin’ good, it ain’t no good at all!

I wrote some time back on my blog about creating a B2B lead generation tasting menu and my experience with the Chef’s Royal Thai Dinner—a tasting menu of 9 different dishes at Maenam, a fabulous Thai restaurant in Vancouver, BC. My most recent fascination is with Momofuku Shoto, celebrity chef David Chang’s tasting menu restaurant in Toronto. This restaurant has put Toronto right front and centre, back on the map of international dining destinations. I’ve been to a few of these around the world like L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon, Eigensinn Farm and even one on a luxury cruise liner, so I can say that Momofuku definitely holds its own. Chang and his team are creative geniuses—there is magic in what they do with their culinary art. Although, I wonder how much variety they are able to add to their tasting menu or how often they change it; you know what they say about too much of a good thing…? Okay, I can get carried away with this, so I promise to give you more on my delightful experiences at Momofuku another time. (And I want to do that so those of you outside of Toronto can make a trip here to visit our great city; it will be worth it, I promise.) Enjoy some pictures in the meantime from the last time I was there.

Coming back to content curation—and why my thoughts wandered to a tasting menu—it is really a very similar exercise if you look at it. You plan every course carefully, from soups and starters to the main course, desserts, the perfect wine pairing alongside each course, apéritifs and digestifs, and so on. The difference is, when people indulge in a tasting menu, they have the time and are willing to savour each course without rushing it. When searching and trying to find the right content, on the other hand, your target audience does not have the luxury of time. You need to really carve out your amuse-bouche in order to keep them interested, engaged and most importantly, compelled to share your content.

That is how you build your community.

11 B2B Content Curation Tools You Can Use

When looking at what information to curate, begin by segmenting the content sources into these categories:

• Mainstream media (news channels, magazines, newspapers, radio, etc.)

• Thought leaders—these are people who not only have valuable opinions on the subjects related to your industry but are also influential online

• Passion writers—people who simply love the subject and write passionately about it online

1. Google Alerts: This may seem like the most basic of tools, but I really use it a lot for my own research and information gathering. It is especially useful when you want to narrow down your searches and get granular about certain subjects—plus the “alerts” bring you up to speed with valuable content as it happens on the Web. You decide what content you want to be updated on.

2. LinkedIn Today: Another one of my personal favourites, mainly because it is already representative of a business community. When you find an interesting piece of content here, you can also see how many people have shared it and therefore, how much interest it has garnered.

3. Flipboard: Exactly what its name says—an online magazine that keeps you updated on everything you choose to know about. What’s nice is that it transforms RSS and Twitter feeds into a visually stunning experience much like reading a real magazine.

4. Scoop. it!: This is an amazing curation tool that is very easy to use and does a great job of facilitating content attribution. The format is reader-friendly too, like creating and reading your own newspaper. The visual appeal is high and it helps position you as the thought leader who delivers the “scoop” on what’s trending in your industry.

5. Paper.li: Ever wondered why they still give you the day’s newspapers when you travel Business Class? Because, despite all our gizmo geek frenzy, most of us, especially in the C-Suite, still like our news the good old-fashioned way. So for your B2B audience, this online tool lets you create your own digital newspaper; but think of it as a niche publication that only delivers very specific news curated for its target readers.

6. Storify: I like this one for 2 reasons—one, because I love stories; love sharing them and love listening to them; and two, because this tool is an honest and serious attempt to enable marketers who want to help their audience make sense of everything that is being said and shared on the plethora of social media channels.

7. CurationSoft: You can use this to search blogs, news, YouTube, Flickr and many other information sources with a very simple, search-drag-drop function. Now don’t forget what I said in my earlier post—it’s not just about spray and pray and repetition—you have to offer your point of view and a perspective on the content you are curating and sharing with your target audience. The world does not need another Really Stupid Syndication (RSS)!

8. Atomic Reach: This tool helps you focus on building customized content communities, or tribes as they call them. They offer a fairly intuitive curation engine and enable easy tracking and measurement of your content marketing efforts.

9. Curata: Perhaps the best known enterprise level curation tool. A distinctive feature of their curation tool is that it demands contextualization, i.e. while it find and organizes relevant content for your business to share, it leads you to provide your commentary, annotations and perspective before passing it around.

10. Equentia: A tool that makes social media integration for content marketers more convenient and efficient. Personalization is an essential aspect of this curation tool.

11. PublishThis: If you have to think and act like a publisher to stay relevant to your audiences, you need easy to use and feature-rich content publishing tools—that’s what this one claims to be.

As a B2B company, you have your own array of products and services and you know the intricate details of the full menu. How will you ensure your content tasting menu is the best there can be? What curation tools will you use to make this happen? Please email or call me, Louis Foong, at (905) 709-3827.

Image used under licence from Shutterstock.