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Content Curation's Role in Marketing, Sales, and Beyond
62 Plays6 years ago
You've heard of content curation, but maybe you're still not 100% sure why it's something you need to make part of your content marketing strategy. After all, you're focusing on other people's content, right? Maybe you've been attempting to curate, but haven't seen results?
On this episode, UpContent CEO Scott Rogerson shares tips on doing content curation the right way. Learn how a strategic approach to curation takes you a step beyond "sharing other people's content" to build your brand's position as a thought leader and to create a learning organization.
Scott covers:
- Typical fears and concerns when it comes to content curation
- How curation can position the brand and sales reps as subject matter experts
- The definition of good curation and how it's different from content aggregation
- Typical mistakes marketers still make with content curation
- How to use content curation to support evergreen and pillar page strategies
- The importance of consistency when curating (frequency, posting) and how technology can help minimize time and effort
- The role of curation in other areas: social media, employee advocacy, original content ideation, internal information sharing and education
- Enlisting the help of subject matter experts across the organization to curate the right content for marketers to leverage
- Ways to distribute curated content
- How sales teams are beginning to embrace content curation for social selling, personal brand building, and sharing knowledge with the marketing team
- Using content curation tools to build learning organizations (internally)
- Leveraging technology to get more out of content curation
- Legal concerns (like the EU Copyright Directive) and the future of content curation
Have more questions for Scott? Connect with him on Twitter or LinkedIn.
Want to see how we use UpContent on our website? Check out our Jackson Marketing's What We're Reading page.
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The B2B Mix Show with Alanna Jackson and Stacy Jackson is brought to you by Jackson Marketing. Need help with your B2B online presence? Let's talk!
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Transcript
Introduction to B2B Mix Show
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the B2B Mix Show with Elena and Stacey. Each week, we'll bring you ideas that you can implement in your own marketing strategy. We'll share what we know and advice from industry experts who will join us from time to time here on the show. Are you ready to mix it up? Let's get started.
00:00:21
Speaker
Hello, everyone. This is Alaina Jackson. And this is Stacey Jackson. We are the co-founders of Jackson Marketing. And in case you didn't know, yes, we are sisters. Today, we
Content Curation with Scott Rogerson
00:00:35
Speaker
are happy to welcome our special guest, CEO Scott Rogerson from Up Content. Scott is going to talk with us about content curation and how curation can support your evergreen and hub or pillar page strategies.
00:00:48
Speaker
Before we get started, here's a little background on Scott and his company. Before founding Up Content, Scott was the CEO of a marketing agency where he saw firsthand how difficult and time-consuming it is to manage and measure a content curation strategy.
00:01:03
Speaker
which sparked his idea to start up content so he could help others take some of the pain points out of content curation. Up content, for those who don't know, is a content curation platform that helps communications teams discover and share trustworthy content to measurably increase engagement and reduce manual workflows.
00:01:22
Speaker
up content's proprietary Discovery Engine Services news and blog articles based on customer criteria and presents them in a collaboration-focused platform to help infuse a company's distributed expertise in the review and approval of articles. The platform makes it super simple to distribute content via social media profiles, on your website, in newsletters, and more. In fact, our company Jackson Marketing
00:01:49
Speaker
uses up content to populate our websites, what we're reading, and to also find curated content to share on social. Scott, welcome to the show. Thanks very much for having me. It's great to be with you. Can you tell us a little bit about up content and how it helps alleviate some of those pain points that arise during the content curation?
00:02:09
Speaker
Yeah, so you touched on a few of them. I think overall what we've seen, and it'd be great to get your thoughts on this as well from the other perspective, is that content marketing as a whole has changed a lot over the years, starting out as we have to write everything ourselves and do those 300-word blog posts and really focus on volume, and as both our customers
00:02:32
Speaker
And the search engines themselves have continued to get smarter that pendulum is shifting now to looking at quality over quantity. And we're seeing a lot more organizations focus on really writing only what they have unique perspective on and instead surrounding those articles or those pieces with the same type of content.
00:02:53
Speaker
other people's perspectives to reinforce the original perspective that they're providing provide that context to build that credibility and try to serve as an authority figure or a single location for their target audience to come and become educated in that topic area.
00:03:10
Speaker
stimulate that additional action. And really, the focus of up content is to help people do that, allow them to spend more time in those original perspective areas, but still ensure that we're showcasing those original perspectives in the best way possible.
The Importance of Curated Content
00:03:25
Speaker
And curated articles is a great way to do that.
00:03:28
Speaker
Yeah, we really enjoy using the up content tool. It's created that nice spot on our site to show that we're in touch with what other experts are talking about and reinforce our opinion, like you said, and I really love how you guys
00:03:44
Speaker
Have that Snipley integration so that when people do click on one of those, they might leave our site, but they take a little bit of us with them through a Snipley pop up or call to action. It's really cool. We really like content. Love to hear that. More to come and you guys have been great in helping to provide that feedback. And that's what we love about.
00:04:05
Speaker
our customers in the community is that continuous feedback loop. Elena, I'm looking at you on that one to get those thoughts and feedback of ways we can continue to change and improve. And I think, Stacy, you mentioned a great piece about some of the traditional fears of curation. And you hit one right on the head that we hear almost every time we're starting that conversation, which is whether you're using up content or just implementing the strategy manually,
00:04:30
Speaker
But are sending people away to somebody else's site and how does that help me achieve my goals and you know simply is a great solution that we've been a partner with for a few years now to as you mentioned continue to provide that reminder both directly and then certainly indirectly as well if you have related advertising campaign.
00:04:52
Speaker
of who the authority figure was who brought you to that article to begin with. But we also, whether or not you're using that tool, really trying to think about the fact that
00:05:03
Speaker
They're going to find it anyway. And do you want them to try to find that information after reading your article by spending hours upon hours of doing that research or, God forbid, somebody else, maybe a competitor of yours, providing that resource to them and then building that trust and credibility with them instead? We've really tried to couch curation.
00:05:24
Speaker
Not necessarily as a pure marketing tactic, but as a service to that audience, to that prospective customer, and in a lot of cases to that current customer as well, to keep yourself top of mind. And when you share that great article, give them a reason to share it with somebody else. Make them more knowledgeable about the services that you're providing and why you're providing them. And really serve as that, hey, don't just take my word for it aspect.
00:05:49
Speaker
And that's only becoming more and more important as trust right now between organizations and consumers is at an all time low. I was just going to say, like you said, that a lot of companies fear sharing other people's content. And that is one of the biggest things that drives me insane with companies is that they're so afraid to share somebody else's content.
00:06:12
Speaker
But they because they don't a they don't know that there's something like Snipley out there or be they're just thinking that oh, well, we just have to talk about ourselves and they don't understand the importance of sharing someone else's content and and looking like those thought leaders have you noticed that when people come in that they aren't aware of Snipley and is that something that They're like what? This is awesome is have you noticed a lot of them aren't aware of it? Oh
00:06:41
Speaker
Yeah, about 80% of the time, I would say. We hear that fear of, oh, but aren't I sending somebody away? Or isn't that going to hurt my SEO because I'm sending people to other sites? Or what if my competitor is mentioned somewhere on that page? What am I going to do then? And we have that discussion, and we're seeing less and less of that. I think more and more organizations are starting to think about
00:07:06
Speaker
As you mentioned in the introduction, this pillar content strategy and really targeting resources into areas that they can be uniquely effective in their original content and then surrounding it with those curated pieces. And
Role of Curation in Strategy
00:07:22
Speaker
knowing that if my consumer or my prospect wanted to find out about competitors,
00:07:28
Speaker
They have other ways to do that. I'm not the only website in town. I'm certainly not going to be the only one that they're going to visit. And on top of that, there's a lot of research and more and more coming out every day. If you're B2B or B2C, I think the average now is 76% of your website visitors would not complete your conversion action, regardless of how enticing you made it seem. Even if you were giving away the product for free, they're just not at that stage yet.
00:07:55
Speaker
And so we have to stop evaluating the metrics looking for that hundred percent conversion or that eight minute session duration on the site or the fact that they're going to get all the information they ever need from my own voice and my own word. If they had it all from you, they probably wouldn't trust it. And so by focusing on your unique differentiation, how you think about the world and how you think about their problem,
00:08:19
Speaker
And then surrounding it with, don't just take my word for it. And we've all done this in sales conversations or in marketing discussions, right? Hey, here's a link that talks about what I was just saying to you. And now you're actually going to believe what I just said versus here's another article that I also wrote that says the same thing as this other article that I wrote, which is the same thing as this article from two months ago that I wrote.
00:08:40
Speaker
It's hard to trust me if I'm just showing you what I wrote. And we can all think of popular figures who rely just upon their own knowledge time and time and time again to reinforce things that they say by quoting themselves in the past. And we all know how ineffective that is. Now is a good time to take a break and hear from our sponsor.
00:09:09
Speaker
And we are back. So we've kind of danced around a high level what content curation is. Maybe you could really define what up content's view is on content curation and what it's not. And then maybe roll into that evergreen pillar page strategy. That's such an important topic. And we really try to
00:09:37
Speaker
help our customers and prospects and others we're talking to understand the definition of curation because that's one of those buzzwords that gets thrown around quite a bit, right? Curation doesn't mean finding the Jackson Marketing Services RSS feed
00:09:54
Speaker
and sharing everything from there onto my own social feed, even though I know that it's great stuff, because my individuals who are following my social feed or getting my newsletter, they can just go to you guys and get that information. I'm not providing any service by just sharing everything.
00:10:13
Speaker
that comes across. And we remember those days in the past we went to websites and it had the New York Times RSS feed scrolling on the bottom there. And again, really no benefit to that other than now I've learned that you know who the New York Times is, which doesn't really help me determine whether or not you're the right person for me to work with. And so there's a huge distinction between curation
00:10:35
Speaker
and aggregation. And we try to think about this and try to talk about this like, you know, we've all been to that museum, right? And the goal of that museum curator is to piece together artifacts, display resources, other visuals that when I walk up to that exhibit, I understand context, I've learned something about that time period or that specific exhibit topic,
00:11:00
Speaker
without having to go up and read all the little plaques and signs, right? And in most cases, that museum curator didn't create any of that, right? They didn't create the dinosaur fossil. They just found them and pieced them together and surrounded them with other artifacts that helped me get a better understanding of what life was like at that time or more about the specimen that I'm looking at.
00:11:22
Speaker
And that's really how we try to think about the content curation side as well. The way that your what we're reading section is set up is that when I go to it, I can see the various cards and the various articles that have been selected. And it helps me learn a bit more about the two of you without having to talk to you and without having to even read an original piece. And it makes me desire to read more about you and learn more about you just by looking at it. And so I think curation has somehow
00:11:52
Speaker
in some cases or some circles, gotten a bad rap because it is being blended with this idea of just aggregating information and adding to the noise. Where really the goal of curation is to help your prospects and your customers cut through the noise by relying upon you to select the best articles for them to read because there is so much information out there
00:12:14
Speaker
and a lot of cases conflicting information. And so by being the organization or being the brand or being the individual that has brought those articles together, found the best of the best, and easily gotten them to your audience in a way that they can easily consume them,
00:12:31
Speaker
And remember that you're the one who's helping them do that. That's the way to start to build that trust, which builds the relationship, which makes the sale and allows them to be a referral party for you because of the satisfaction that they've received. What would you say are the biggest mistakes that you've seen marketers making when it comes to content curation?
00:12:51
Speaker
So there's definitely still, and you guys probably see it in some of your conversations with clients early on as well, where there's still this mentality of, I need to create as many pages as possible on my site, and I need to put something out once a day or three times a week, and they're talking about it in terms of volume of content.
00:13:11
Speaker
versus, you alluded to this in the intro, this pillar content strategy of, I may not have the resources to create a great piece of content even every week. And maybe I don't even have enough resources to create once a month, but I can dedicate myself to create a really great piece of content quarterly or monthly. And instead of using that time trying to create the top 10 things you should consider for your SEO strategy,
00:13:39
Speaker
because there's already 8 million of those articles out there, I'm going to focus on a specific area that I'm very interested in and drive toward that and talk about that article instead, and then surround it with the other 8 million articles, and most importantly, the 10 out of those 8 million that are super important. And so I think there's too much still of this original versus curated content.
00:14:02
Speaker
where the quantitative research is showing, the anecdotal research is showing, just your personal buying habits have shown that we really should be, when we look at it from a volume perspective, over weighting the curated side. So in a lot of cases, we're seeing 50 to 75% curated content from a study done by Convince and Convert has your conversion rate or number of leads go up by more than two times by having that blend.
00:14:30
Speaker
too many marketers I think are still thinking about this as I'm curating because I can't create rather than I'm curating to help what I create be more valuable, get more eyeballs on it, and provide those who are reading it the context as to where that article came from. So as far as how marketers should use curation to support or help those big cornerstone or pillar hub pieces that they create,
00:15:00
Speaker
How would you recommend they use content curation to support those and improve thought leadership that is associated with them or even the distribution of those to other people? Yeah, really great question. And I think what we've seen in terms of the most effective customers we work with and just observing how others who may be using another method than up content curate content is
00:15:25
Speaker
A, doing it consistently, right? Just like we've heard from the original content side, we need to be consistent. We can't just, you know, and we've all seen those organizations that we know have the summer intern because there's nothing happening on social enough. No emails are received. And then all of a sudden between May and August, they're all active and there's stuff happening everywhere. And we're getting emails and then September happens and we hear nothing again. Uh, so we have to not do that. And one of the ways to do that is make sure that we're spending our time
00:15:55
Speaker
in that comparative advantage concept, right? Doing the things that we can do best as marketers and then allowing technologies or assistance from the outside to help us do those things that we shouldn't be spending a lot of time on. So in our philosophy, it's we shouldn't be spending a ton of time hunting for articles
00:16:17
Speaker
on the web, manually looking through our email or our Google Alerts and trying to remember which one I should be reading, clicking on articles and just reviewing a wide smattering of articles. Let technology help you find that content. And then where we also shouldn't be spending a ton of time is that manual labor intensive soul sucking stage of getting that article to where it needs to go, right? The manual steps of copying and pasting and open tabs and logging in and all that.
00:16:45
Speaker
where we need to be spending our time is the actual curation, finding the articles and piecing them together in a way to reinforce content that we either plan to create as part of our editorial calendar and having that stable of great articles available to us and available to our sales team.
00:17:02
Speaker
or using the curated articles to help us identify what we should be talking about, whether there's gaps in the news cycle or common belief about something differs from what our organization thinks about that same concept. That's a great way to utilize curated content to, once again, immediately provide that context as to why I'm talking about this.
00:17:23
Speaker
and know that we're putting it into a space where it's not being crowded out by the noise. One of
Organizational Involvement in Curation
00:17:31
Speaker
the other areas that we are now starting to see curation evolve into, which is very exciting, I think, for the industry as a whole or the practice as a whole, is that curation doesn't have to just rest on the shoulder of the marketing team or just one individual in the marketing team.
00:17:48
Speaker
And what we would love to see and are starting to see be very effective is that that same effort of curation can lead into professional development. Employee advocacy can be a great final point of that process, but we should be utilizing these articles to help our team be more aware of what's going on, regardless of if they're in the marketing industry or the marketing department or not.
00:18:13
Speaker
Can we actually rely upon those subject matter experts that are already in our organization that we know are already reading things to make it easy for them to provide those articles to our marketing group and then let our marketing group and their ability to understand how that content can best fit into the strategy for the brand, get it to where it needs to go.
00:18:32
Speaker
And we see this a lot, particularly in B2B, professional services, technology, consulting, healthcare, education, right, where the marketing group certainly has a level of depth of understanding about the particular industry or problem that their organization is solving. But they're not CPAs or attorneys or healthcare practitioners or educators.
00:18:55
Speaker
If only I could tap into what she's thinking down the hall and what she's reading. Well, we need to find a way to do that and make it available to that group and make it available to the sales group and make that content available to the customer success team so that we have this unified and consistent communication.
00:19:14
Speaker
Similarly for our marketing channels themselves, right? We shouldn't anymore have to find an article just to create that tweet. And then the article dies and there's nothing else we can use it for, right? Where we've seen the most success from our customers is their ability to take that article, put it onto Twitter, get the sniply link as you're talking about that. So there's that overlay. But also that same article that they spent that time curating and finding or that group of articles can be a great email campaign that's
00:19:41
Speaker
Non-confrontational if you will because I'm not asking you to buy my product or download this white paper. I'm just saying hey guys Here's some great things that I think you should be reading again Setting it up as a service and then you know similar to what you guys have done on your site Making it a resource repository where I know as a current client
00:20:01
Speaker
of Jackson marketing or a prospective client, I can get in there and say, wow, look at all the resources that are here for me. And these can be updated far more quickly than if I had to write it all myself. So long answer to a very, very short question. But I think the idea of the content itself spreading beyond marketing and reusing and leveraging the efforts that the marketing team is already doing is where we see it done right.
00:20:28
Speaker
So extending outside of marketing, have you noticed more people in sales coming into wanting to use content creation and even approaching you about setting up their own instance? We have actually. And it's very interesting because an individual, you know, high powered business development person
00:20:49
Speaker
really wants to build not only the brand for the organization, but they want to build her own personal brand and share great content out there and be at the forefront of the industry because it's this H2H, human to human interaction, right? And that's where we want to be that I'm not working necessarily with Jackson Marketing Services. I'm working with Stacy and Elena and I have a relationship with you guys. And so you're who I want to talk to and you're who I want to deal with, not just kind of this
00:21:18
Speaker
overarching brand that I don't really know or can feel or touch or understand. And so we are seeing more and more of the sales teams raising their hand to marketing and saying, hey guys, it's great that you're putting out these awesome articles once a month or once a quarter, but
00:21:36
Speaker
I need stuff to share every day and the marketing team is pushing back and saying hey salesperson you know you can't be some road cowboy out there just sharing whatever you darn well please because you're also representing our organization and this is particularly true.
00:21:51
Speaker
in organizations that have a compliance layer on top of them. Marketing needs to approve, compliance needs to approve what goes out, but we need to do it at such a scale and such a volume that the sales team not only feels like they're getting what they need, but there's a lot of research showing whether you're in sales or in any of the other departments, the ability for the organization to help support the personal brand building of your employee group
00:22:18
Speaker
significantly increases satisfaction of that team, retention of that team, and the ability to acquire better talent, right? Because when we think about ourselves looking for that next job and next opportunity, what do we do, right? We certainly will go to the website and read all that stuff, but we immediately know that that's gotten so much polish on it that, of course, it sounds great and it makes sense and we're all work-life balance and excited about what we're doing. But what I'm going to want to do is if I'm
00:22:47
Speaker
moving into the sales department or the finance department. I'm going to go to LinkedIn or some other location and try to identify who's already there, see what they're all about, kind of what's that true team culture, feel like I'm looking under the covers a little bit.
00:22:59
Speaker
And if those individuals don't have an actual profile picture or haven't updated their LinkedIn in a year or two years and aren't sharing things actively, that tells me something about the organization. And so we want to really see, and we're seeing more and more partially spurred by this employee advocacy strategy, which is fantastic, but also being spurred by the HR group. And we're seeing HR and marketing start to work more hand in hand
00:23:25
Speaker
realizing that they have to market from a talent perspective and market to retain with marketing, doing a lot of that effort already and having that expertise and so providing that over there. So we see, I think, if we look out to the future,
00:23:40
Speaker
curation is going to be a team effort and team, meaning outside of just the marketing group. And where we see the best is where that outside group is feeding content into marketing. So that when I come in, I mean, wouldn't it be great, right? If you walk in as part of a marketing organization, you've already gotten X number of articles that have been fed in by those subject matter experts. What's better than that, right? And then you can feed that content back as well. And they can use that on their own social profiles.
00:24:10
Speaker
or share it via an email to a prospect that they're trying to close the deal on. And we can remove those just checking in or looping back or how you doing, which are all really mean, why haven't you bought from me yet emails? And instead say, great conversation, two weeks ago, Stacy, I know we were talking about personal branding. Here's a great article that our team was recently talking about that I thought you'd enjoy. And I can paste that link into the email because it's already in a repository.
00:24:39
Speaker
already classified as personal branding. And it's very easy then for me to take that next step. And for me as the
Aligning Sales and Marketing
00:24:45
Speaker
salesperson to say, wow, I really am impressed with what marketing is doing for me as an individual, not just me as part of this larger company takes a lot of that heavy lifting off of them. Absolutely. And I think it creates that synergy between the two where historically, right, sales and marketing have not always seen eye to eye on the best way to approach the market.
00:25:05
Speaker
And by really showing that, yeah, I know, isn't that weird? I mean, you guys I'm sure have never, never experienced that, but.
00:25:13
Speaker
You know, that ability now to not be seen as this department that's slow and takes forever to approve things and gets the article out, but gets it out two months later than when we needed it, to really tap into the sales group who's hearing that voice of the customer every day and allowing them to then feed back articles to marketing. And then marketing can actually take action on that quickly because they have it all set up and there is a place on the website for it. And they can put, you know, a Snipley overlay on it or get it into the next email newsletter.
00:25:43
Speaker
That's a beautiful thing. And certainly that's not the majority of organizations, but I do think many organizations and more and more are either approaching that level of maturity or have it as part of their strategic plan to get to that level.
00:25:57
Speaker
Yeah, I like that idea of using or taking curation and the thought of it to that next level where it becomes not just marketing, but about creating a learning organization where everyone has access to the latest information and are well versed in the industry because they've taken time to share these articles with one another. I think that's definitely the next level.
00:26:23
Speaker
Absolutely. And some great examples where we've seen accounting organizations, for example, where they have an awesome marketing team and they are...
00:26:33
Speaker
I mean, out of this world in terms of knowing how to attack a strategy, implement a strategy, measure impact, determine ROI, but they're not CPAs. And so they have to and are frustrated about having to go through an eight step process of approvals and edits from someone who is billable, right? And doesn't have a lot of time to focus on this because they don't see necessarily the direct value to their work.
00:26:57
Speaker
But we need to get approval from that person because they're the expert. And remember that time three years ago where we shared that article and it turned out that that was a bad article to share and we all got our hands smacked? And so now I'm just going to sit on my hands and do it the conservative way, knowing that it's not the best way.
00:27:14
Speaker
But I'm afraid to share something from a third party especially because I don't know if someone's going to get upset on the third floor or the 20th floor of the organization and it's going to come across that. So can we make that an easier workflow where there's confidence in the group outside of marketing that marketing has the tools they need and there's confidence within marketing that they can actually do what they were brought in to do.
00:27:38
Speaker
And I think, to your point, that's creating that knowledge organization and creating that free flow of ideas that we've always been talking about, but now they don't have to just be our ideas anymore. They can be ideas and learnings that we've gotten from other resources, and those can be just as valuable, if not more valuable, to be sharing.
00:27:58
Speaker
So in your work with different clients for up content, what, have you seen any interesting or unique content curation strategies? I remember one that you pointed out where a customer was curating on behalf of a client on their website, like account-based marketing almost.
00:28:18
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, we're seeing lots of unique ways, which is so much fun, right? There's no organization that's doing it the exact same way and focusing on the exact same way. Because I think, as we know, in this industry that we're in, it's always experimentation all the time.
00:28:34
Speaker
I think some of the most unique and exciting ways have been the organizations that have brought it as an internal effort and aligned it not just with marketing, but with professional development. And so there are a couple of customers that we have that are not just sending out an external email, but also sending out an internal email to the team and saying, hey, here's some great articles that we read this week, guys, that we think you might be interested in. And seeing the sales individuals
00:29:02
Speaker
Grabbing some of those articles and sending it out to their prospects and writing back to marketing. Hey, thanks for sending. This is great stuff I just came across this article last week wanted to send it along back to you and now you've got this loop now marketing getting articles that sales actually enjoys and you know seeing that evolve and flow where
00:29:22
Speaker
This is an organization of a decent size that has an employee advocacy program as well. So those same articles get fed into that program, which hit every employee's phone. And they're getting the adoption and engagement that they would expect and hoped for when they weren't seeing that before because they were just sharing
00:29:39
Speaker
their earnings announcements or press releases or their own blog content. And every employee already knows where to get that if they haven't already gotten three emails that it's out. And so giving this channel is a way for them to really see thought leadership, be part of that informal training process and
00:29:57
Speaker
This group has even brought these articles to the digital screens inside of their corporate locations so that as an employee walking by, I'm not just seeing generic news content flowing across or only when the next pop block is that happened two months ago and hasn't been changed yet. I'm seeing the articles that I can also see on my phone and I can also get inside of my SharePoint site and
00:30:20
Speaker
I think having that same effort that the marketing team is doing and finding those articles, be present in all of these channels, but do it in a way that they don't have to lift that finger and log into each of those channels to update it. It's a button click, and now they're in everything. And each one of those has its own call to action and its own desired next step. And there's ability to analyze those channels. That's really where you start to see immediate ROI, quick ROI, and lasting ROI.
00:30:49
Speaker
So I'm going to switch it up just a little bit. Do you foresee issues with content curation, with laws like the copyright directive coming out of the EU, or do you even anticipate more companies going to tools like up content because of these laws?
Impact of EU Laws on Curation
00:31:08
Speaker
Yeah, really good question. A super exciting area that doesn't certainly have a, this is the way the world's going to work answer. And that's kind of what makes this so exciting. So, you know, EU articles 11 and 13 that I think have been recently renamed to 14 and 16 or something like that. Don't quote me on that because I think they added another article in on the top and it pushed all the numbers down.
00:31:30
Speaker
You know, those are, I think, well-founded in what they're trying to accomplish. And the goal there, right, is to protect the rights of the publisher. And we at UpContent believe in that wholeheartedly. And that's why you'll see that when you're using UpContent, we do not provide the ability to embed the full text of an article on the site.
00:31:53
Speaker
Even if you put the link on there that says this article was originally from Forbes, right? We're going to take you and help you take your visitors to the Forbes article. And certainly there's the Snipley option that you can overlay. But the goal is to ensure that Forbes is seeing that traffic because they're the ones who wrote the article.
00:32:10
Speaker
That's where that author is working and getting paid from, and we need to make sure that we're honoring those rights. So I think in a lot of cases, these are reactionary policies toward bad behavior from organizations in the past. You'll see, and you've seen kind of how Google has come out and kind of educated, quote unquote, the industry about, well, here's what Google News would look like if these articles got implemented as is. So I think the
00:32:40
Speaker
The view in general is that 11 and 13 aren't going to be implemented as they're currently written. There's going to be some middle ground there. And the interesting piece about these is it's no longer in those articles. The goal is that it's not up to the publisher to find the bad behavior and then enforce it, but it's up to the curator to make sure that they're doing it correctly and the liability is more on them and what they're sharing.
00:33:06
Speaker
And I think that's appropriate if we want to have an ability to find all of this information without having to go to each individual site. And so, you know, the balance with publishers for us, again, is hugely important. There are some publishers who are a little bit more down the curve in terms of how they think about what curation tools can help with. And certainly, you know, our voice and view is that there's value to these publications by
00:33:35
Speaker
putting that into the Jackson Marketing Services topics so that you see it where you might not have seen it before and you share it on social where you might not have shared it or it's in your email or it's on your website and they're getting the benefit of traffic coming to them. There are other publishers who are very much a walled garden and you have to have a subscription to come in. You have to come in manually and that's the only way you're going to see the article and we probably can think of some of those as well.
00:34:02
Speaker
our view is that those organizations are missing out on some of this traffic that they would have seen otherwise and
00:34:09
Speaker
for organizations that have and publishers that have the, hey, to read the full article, you need to have a subscription. We think that's great. That's fine. We know that the advertising model for these news organizations is severely strained right now. But we don't believe that because of that strain, you shouldn't allow others to understand what is behind that wall. You should allow us to see, oh, wow, that there's some great stuff back there and that's worthy of subscribing to.
00:34:39
Speaker
not as the curator subscribing in order to get access to that so that everybody else that they're sharing with can ride free on it, but to share that need for a subscription with their audience. And so, again, I think there's a question mark instead of a period at the end of this, but I have full faith and confidence that
00:34:59
Speaker
There is this great relationship that can be done between publishers and the distribution channels. We just need to find what that balance is and know that that balance isn't going to be set in stone once and then never have to move. And I think we can look to the television industry and distributors versus content creators there and seeing that that line continues to move and be pulled in a tug of war to one direction to the other with
00:35:26
Speaker
over the top and what Disney's coming out with and what Netflix is doing and all of those channels. But it's also very important to see that and understand that none of those organizations have been able to currently be successful by just dumping their own stuff in. They also have this blend of original and curated programming that they're getting from other sources. And I think the same thing is going to happen across the web.
00:35:51
Speaker
Yeah, good point. That's true with even entertainment that they have to curate different shows and nobody just wants to see Disney movies all day. At least I don't. Right. Right. Exactly. Exactly. And we've even seen, right? You look at that, right? Netflix, right? They have some great original programming on there, but I would expect
00:36:13
Speaker
Love you, Netflix, that if it was just original Netflix programming, that subscription value would be far lower of a benefit to its subscribers than the fact that them having these other pieces of programming available as well. And so we just need to find that balance. And we're hoping that right now publishers are seeing us as being far more favorable to them and leaning more toward their rights.
00:36:37
Speaker
then maybe they would think quote unquote we need to because they're critical to having that great thought leadership out there and allowing us to provide that context in an unbiased way by showing what the other individuals are saying who may have more authority than we do or at least be less biased than we are perceived to be and use some of that authority to help advance our conversation and our unique perspective.
00:37:01
Speaker
So Scott, are there any other pieces of advice or even warnings that you would give to marketers when it comes to content curation and how they should proceed? I think the
Strategic Use of Curation
00:37:14
Speaker
biggest thing that we've heard and I think, you know,
00:37:17
Speaker
When speaking with you guys, you came with all this already, so it was a much easier conversation. But there's still a thought process of curation as a way to fill the gap and just plug the hole by using other people's content.
00:37:32
Speaker
we think that that's wrong, right? And that's not going to provide the ROI that you're looking for. And so we always talk about curation strategy, not meaning that it's the only strategy that you're employing, but it really needs to be thought about as a strategic process, not just a tactic to resolve kind of short term challenges of we're not getting enough articles out there that we had thought we were going to. So instead of doing original content that we had planned on,
00:37:57
Speaker
We're just going to use curation instead and try to apply the same KPIs that we put on original content to evaluate whether our curated content is working or not. Very different goals, or at least there should be very different goals, in terms of what your curation process is supposed to achieve, as we mentioned, is really focusing on engaging
00:38:21
Speaker
those target customers or target audience members, giving them a reason to keep coming back to you in a consistent way and allowing them to better understand where you're coming from so that the original content that you're developing is far more powerful than if the original content was asked to stand on its own. So really thinking through once again, just like you're doing on the original side,
00:38:46
Speaker
Who are the personas? What are they interested in looking at? And one of the questions we always try to start new conversations with hopeful new customers is what are the articles that you wish your last few prospect calls or conversations, what are the articles you wish they had read before they spoke with you? Because we all have those in mind. I wish they would have known this or I wish they would have thought about this. And those are the articles we then
00:39:11
Speaker
want to curate. And so that's that really approaching it as a strategy, not just something that we hand down to the lowest person on the totem pole and say, Hey, we've got a few open slots in our Twitter posting calendar this week. Can you go find some stuff to fill it up with? Not going to have the same impact. Right. Yeah. I think it's important to have that strategy because it kind of sets the stage for how things are going to happen and flow throughout your whole process. Absolutely.
00:39:40
Speaker
And if you're not careful, you become a hoarder and not a curator of good content. Yes. Yes. And then you're just adding to the noise, right? Right. Because I don't understand why you've picked these articles. You're posting every five minutes, right? Fantastic. I don't know why. I don't know. And you're just cluttering my feet. So you're actually pushing me away from you and helping me come toward you.
00:40:03
Speaker
So we have one more question for you and this is just the fun getting to know you question. If you were CEO, what would you be doing if you could do anything and why?
00:40:15
Speaker
Since I was little, architecture to me has always been fascinating. Whether that blends out to engineering or not, but I think the whole idea of architecting something that has a lifespan, hopefully that's longer than you, and seeing it go from idea to item on paper to actually being a physical, tangible structure, I think is one of the most amazing things that one could do.
00:40:45
Speaker
That would definitely be, if I could wave that one and have to do something else, I'll prefix that. That would be something that would be very interesting. I have
Scott's Personal Insights and Conclusion
00:40:55
Speaker
zero skills and abilities to actually accomplish that, so it would have to wind the dial back a good bit to actually be able to realize that goal, but I think that would be
00:41:06
Speaker
a very interesting responsibility. That's not something you need to agree in. You could just do that without any problem. Oh yeah, just throw it out. I may not live in a house that you built, but you know. That's right. That's right. I can put some, the other day I laid bricks underneath one of those plastic playhouses, right? And I had to make a rectangle and that was as far as my skills can go. A rectangle of bricks that is one layer high. Well, it's the first step. That's right. That's exactly right.
00:41:35
Speaker
Well, Scott, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your expertise on content curation. If our listeners would like to get in touch with you, what's the best way they can reach you? And we'll put this in the show notes as well. That's great. You know, feel free to reach out to me directly at Scott with two T's at upcontent.com.
00:41:55
Speaker
Certainly happy to talk to you whether it's about up content or just going back and forth on your ideas about curation and content and how marketing needs to evolve in the future. I welcome all, all comers. And so it'll be a lot of fun to have those discussions.
00:42:09
Speaker
And you're also on LinkedIn too. They can reach you there. Yes. Yep. Absolutely. On LinkedIn. Um, it's just the normal LinkedIn path slash Scott a Rogerson and Twitter as well, which is also Scott a Rogerson. Uh, so find me on any of those channels, wherever you can find me. I'm, I'm happy to have the conversation. And there you have it folks connect with Scott and reach out to him. If you have any questions or would like to learn more about up content or content curation in general.
00:42:38
Speaker
And as always, we will provide all the links you'll need from this episode in the show notes. All right, Alayna, end of another great episode. Why don't you tell people how they can get in touch with us? There are multiple ways you can get in touch with us. And the first one is Twitter. You can reach Stacey at Stacey underscore Jax. That's S T A C Y underscore J A X. Or you can reach me
00:43:04
Speaker
at Alayna underscore Jax. A-L-A-N-N-A underscore J-A-X. And if you prefer, you can catch us on LinkedIn instead. Just look up our names, Stacey Jackson and Alayna Jackson. And don't forget, you can leave us a voicemail on the Anchor mobile app. We might use your voicemail on next week's show. So thanks everybody for listening in. We'll catch you next week. Bye. Bye.
00:43:37
Speaker
The B2B Make Show is hosted by Stacy Jackson and Elena Jackson of, you guessed it, Jackson Marketing. If you need help with your B2B inbound marketing efforts, visit us at JacksonMarketingServices.com.