While the stereotype of your elementary school librarians persists, the truth is that library sciences are focused and defined by the act of providing relevant content that people need, organizing it so it’s user-friendly and then sharing it with others.  That process is also what content curation is all about.

Content curation is the new buzz word in social media circles, but it simply represents what librarians have been doing all along.  Industry leader Curata defines content curation as “the human element of content curation and the team member within an organization tasked with finding, organizing, reviewing and adding insight to curated content prior to publication.”

Steven Bell, from The Library Journal,  says he was surprised to learn that he was really a curator, without even knowing it.  He shared, “All these years of producing a filter blog and I never realized I was a content curator … When you think about academic librarians and the work they do, such as putting together a library collection, content curation seems quite similar. Now that curation is hot, perhaps academic librarians can get our communities to see us as less about ‘books’ and more about ‘adding value.’”

The process of content curation is critical to the marketing and social media efforts of every organization. That’s the reason that Fast Company recently identified content curators as the superheroes of the web.   Curation is different than an aggregator.  The latter simply pulls content on a given topic and then places it on a website, usually to improve SEO.  Curators put serious effort into the process of sifting through all the data and pulling out the pieces that are truly relevant or contextualizing the content.

The last step in the process is sharing the information once curated—and in today’s information age, the fastest and easiest way to share this information is online.  Outlets such as blogs, Facebook and Twitter allow curators to create their own tribe of followers that look to them for specific, niche information.  In fact, the public relies on curators to do the job of filtering out the junk to get to key sound bites.

When this happens, librarians move from curators to influencers, impacting a brand’s bottom line.  Neicole Crepeau at businessesgrow.com offers that the definition of marketing influencer is an elite group of people who love to share great content.  And so we come full circle, back to the core of what it means to be a great librarian.  When your company needs to cast a broader net, perhaps you should think about tapping into the power of your corporate librarian!

Contributed by: Sheena Hunter, Social Media Director at Cadence Group

Image by: Andres Rodriguez at ©Depositphotos.com