Increase your credibility with basic curation

From www.spakephoto.com

Curation is a new term for many of us in social media, so as a simple definition for this post I would say curation is the collection, preservation, and sharing of good quality, relevant, timely, and valuable content on a specific topic.  As business people, we may want to curate great content in our areas of expertise.  For example, a biomedical engineer might curate the best biomedical posts on the web, as my friend Tiger Buford does in the orthopedic field with Ortho Streams.  Buford’s status as a thought leader in his industry is enhanced through curation.

 Finding great content

The content is out there.  Finding it is not the hard part; filtering is.  I personally subscribe to over 200 RSS feeds relating to my 3 major areas of curation:  social media, real estate, and Memphis.  A good RSS reader, like Google Reader will help you get through a lot of content with a reasonable amount of time investment.  When you find and item you want to share, be sure to include proper attribution.  Even though you are usually sharing a link, make sure it is clear where the original content originated.

Simple curation and sharing with Delicious

I have loved Delicious ever since I stared using it a few years ago.  It lets you easily clip and categorize web content via bookmarklets and share buttons, and then share the categorized feed via RSS,  links  or publish a digest on your blog (Note: if you are a WordPress user, the RSS Digest plugin works great, and can be set up to automatically post to your blog – here’s a sample.

Here’s a quick screen cast on using Delicious:

And  Yes, what’s interesting to you IS interesting to others. They will be grateful for the content you have found and shared with them.