With great interest, I listened to a discussion about the next big thing in content management online. As my colleague Danny noted in his blogpost, curation of online content amplifies your voice and makes it better digestible for content consumers. Curation is good for at least one other reason: it makes our lives, with overloaded personal information bandwidth, easier.
When I work with clients on assessment of online content, you can call it media monitoring if you want, I usually run into the same problem. How to select the right information sources and channels for listening to dialogue on global brands? If your client is a Top 10 superbrand, it is really hard to assess the local voice in your language – perform a search for such a brand and see how many local results you get. Global sources and channels will overload your channels.
Here is where curation might come to help. I have seen several interesting applications at SXSW, which select trending topics from many sources like Google News, CNN or Twitter for you. You can instantly see what content is most interesting for a large group of people and thus it is instantly amplified. The problem is that when it comes to local languages of European countries (I live in Slovakia), it barely selects anything. No Slovak, Croatian, Roman or Polish online news can beat the global source like Reuters or CNN in getting selected automatically during global events.
Therefore curation in local languages will be needed. Although news powerhouses have more relevance and authority when it comes to covering global events, local sources are more relevant to people in their close surrounding. They help to solve uncertainity of local groups by speaking to them almost directly, in their language and sometimes their dialect.