Our Curated Lives

Published: June 10, 2014

By Gary Griffiths, CEO and Co-Founder, Trapit

 

Like it or not, our lives are curated.  Yet some businesses believe they must rely only on content they’ve created.

Walking down the aisles of my local supermarket the other day, it occurred to me that when it comes to groceries, the grocer plays a role similar to Google.  In the grocery store, it is all about shelf placement — the prime middle spaces on the shelves are more likely to attract buyers than the bottom shelves.  And the grocer demands extra merchandising fees for this prime real estate.

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By Gary Griffith, CEO and Co-Founder, Trapit

 

Like it or not, our lives are curated.  Yet some businesses believe they must rely only on content they’ve created.

Walking down the aisles of my local supermarket the other day, it occurred to me that when it comes to groceries, the grocer plays a role similar to Google.  In the grocery store, it is all about shelf placement — the prime middle spaces on the shelves are more likely to attract buyers than the bottom shelves.  And the grocer demands extra merchandising fees for this prime real estate.

In Google’s case, prime placement is at the top of the search results — and getting on the top is determined by who pays Google the most through SEO or Google AdWords.  Both require pay-to-play — one for shelf space, the other for content — and both are curators who are influencing buyer behavior to optimize their businesses.  There is nothing wrong with that; it is free enterprise in the most basic form.  But it is worth considering how fundamental curation is in our daily lives.

Curation is critical because we are faced with a virtually endless list of choices — whether for canned soup, toothpaste, video clips or news reports.  Someone, or something, must put order in this chaos, whether it is your supermarket’s merchandising manager or Google’s content placement algorithms. 

Consider a museum, where a curator decides which small fraction of the museum’s countless artifacts will be displayed for public viewing.  Or the librarian, deciding which of the millions of books in print will occupy the library’s precious shelf space.  Often the curation comes with annotation. In the museum, annotation is obvious, as the staff goes to great lengths to explain why the pieces that they have chosen to display is important.  The local bookstore often displays hand-written “staff picks,” intended to help the buyer purchase the right book.

Considering how fundamental curation and curators are in our daily lives, I find it curious that many businesses or brands insist on using only original content in communicating the intended messages to their prospective customers or constituents.  This would be analogous to an art museum displaying only pieces that the museum contracted to have painted or sculpted. 

Not only would this lack variety, and make for a pretty boring viewer experience, but the museum would lack credibility, being seen as parochial and biased in displaying only the works they commissioned.  As consumers, individual and business buyers want sufficient education to make the right choices.  We want to believe that those we are buying from are the experts in their fields, but also that they are unbiased at some level. To be unbiased, a business needs to supplement their own original content with respected third-party content, whether that third- party content is Campbell’s soup as an alternative to the in-house brand, or third- party content in the form of a blog or research report relevant to a specific brand or product.

But as noted above, given these vast oceans of content we all swim in every day, how is a brand or business able to sift through all the noise and uncover third-party content that is truly relevant to the products they are promoting?  Trying to find it by searching is futile, for as noted above, Google will find what makes Google the most money, which is not necessarily the content you want. 

While social networks offer some spontaneity and serendipity, most of this content is recycled, re-tweeted, or reposted from the same sources, creating a digital-social-content echo chamber.  When unique or interesting content does fly across the Twitter feed, you’d better be there, for this information is ephemeral, with Twitter information half-lives measured in minutes.

 

Gary Griffiths is CEO and Co-Founder of Trapit, a provider of tools to effectively and efficiently discover, curate and distribute credible information that will help influence your audience while building your reputation as the authority in your field.

Posted in: Demanding Views

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