In a recent interview with Jeff Nolan of Get Satisfaction, interviewer Brian Solis, one of the more prominent thought leaders in new media, stated that:
“With Twitter and Facebook and every other network that defines the statusphere, we are conditioned to publish and consume content at a rapid fire pace. In many ways, we compete for attention at every moment – all in 140 character bursts at a time (well 120 if we hope our words are to be retweeted.) I believe brevity fuels a hunger for depth.”
He’s right of course. The questions are how and when do you provide this depth? After all, if you’re a business looking to leverage the benefits of social media your research (or in-house/external expertise) should have convinced you of the need for quality content. It’s not enough to share. You have to share things of interest (to your customers/clients/investors/stakeholders) and with a quagmire of content already on the Web it had better be useful, informative and worth their time to look at.
The time constraints that come into play during content creation have given rise to the creation vs curation debate that has been going on for a while now. If you’re not familiar with the debate there are plenty of articles that cover it. Perhaps check out this recent post that I like by veteran video journalist Michael Rosenblum. It’s quite anti-curation but informative nevertheless.
Rather than get bogged down in the merits of each approach to providing content, I want to offer the advice that I give clients whenever this topic needs to be addressed:
Create when your expertise can shine and curate in all other instances. At all times make sure your content is relevant to the interests and needs of your target audience and, when curating, add value by providing objective commentary, overviews or other elements to save your audience time and help them to digest the info.