Content Curation Platforms - who's out there?

Ashley Friedlein Staff
CEO at Econsultancy

10 June 2011 18:55pm

We're seeing an emerging sector of suppliers/platforms which might be described as providing 'content curation' services.

This isn't standard CMS (content management systems) but technologies (often semantic) and processes/workflows to 'suck in' external content in a (semi)automated way based on rules, meaning, or other forms of 'curation'.

Obviously, for publishers initially, but, I suspect, other sectors soon, this can be an effect way to combine the value of editorial with the value of social/syndication to provide a cost-effective way to build a brand and a community around a shared interest/topic.

So we're interested in identifying who the emerging content curation platform specialists are. Below is my initial, short, list but feel free to suggest yourselves/others you know of:

Idio - http://idioplatform.com/
Percolate - http://percolate.com/
StrategyEye - http://www.strategyeye.com/
Curata - http://www.getcurata.com/
ConnectedN - http://www.connectedn.com
UKn Platform - http://ultraknowledge.com/products/ukn-platform/

I'm also interested to know how you understand, describe, or structure, this (sub)sector as the above, arguably, don't do *exactly* the same thing. Is this a sub-sector within CMS? Is it something completely new?
Andrew Davies Gold
Director at idio Ltd

10 June 2011 22:03pm

Great to see a list emerging Ashley.

idio is an Intelligent Content Marketing platform and we see ourselves innovating in the multi-channel marketing sector, delivering a robust and scalable platform to help major brands and publishers to build authority in their market and generate actionable insight from the resulting interactions across web/mobile/social/ads. Yes, we help by aggregating multi-source content that includes external social media sources, but also we connect, structure and exploit internal content sources that are currently silo-ed.

We work not just with publishers (B2B and B2C) but also with major brands in FMCG (eg Unilever, Diageo), life science, and soon telco and banking.

I agree that the above list are not *exactly* the same - StrategyEye, for example, do a great job for publishers focusing on deep, technical verticals. On the other hand, a key focus of ours is to personalise content based on explicit and implicit customer preferences, and we integrate with client CRM/customer databases to do this, and also capture detailed user insight.

In terms of broader sectors.... in the long-term, we are looking at the convergence of ECM (enterprise content management) and CRM, and how enterprise technologies are (rightly) being restructured around the customer. Delivering the right marketing/sales/support/review/opinion content to the right customer at the right time, on the right channel, is a non-trivial issue - and will eventually take us beyond the definition of "Content Curation".

I look forward to the emerging discussion.
Pawan Deshpande
CEO at HiveFire, Inc.

27 June 2011 15:26pm

Sorry here's a revised comment:

Content curation is independent of web CMS's. Content curation is the process of finding, organizing, and sharing the best and most relevant content on a specific topic online. But the sharing does not have to be to websites -- it could be to email, feeds, widgets, social media, or mobile apps. See my post on content curation venues: http://www.contentcurationmarketing.com/articles/30608/content-curation-tools-how-to-pick-the-right-venue/

However, microsites are a popular venue for curated content among our Curata customer base of marketers because they can create a full-fledged experience with curated content as the center piece and can easily because the hub for a specific topic or issue. Also, microsites also do well with respect to SEO because they have dozens, or even hundreds or thousands of subpages. If done well, microsites can also seamlessly juxtaposition original created content with curated content.

Earlier this week, I outlined 12 must haves in any content curation platform http://www.contentcurationmarketing.com/articles/44089/12-content-curation-platform-must-haves/ which may serve as a guide towards determining if a CMS is truely a content curation platform or something else.