I’ve been covering curated content for three weeks now, including reviews of Storify, Tumblr and Pinterest, Scoop.it, Paper.li vs Tweeted Times and Pearltrees. Clearly, programmers and web innovators are seeing the potential and direction of the curated content market; there’s a lot more than just what’s been reviewed so far. Here’s a final wrap up on the best of curated content platforms for you to dig into.

Top Content Curators

Because video is content too for the new generation, Redux has come along to offer content curators a way to check out videos in your topic of choice. You can then create your own channel to curate on, which helps attract an audience. From a marketing perspective, if you’re a beginner with videos, I’d spend the time researching what’s out there before attracting a crowd to other people’s videos. The rule of thumb is to first establish yourself, then give recognition where it’s due (which in the new age of digital communities, goes a long way towards getting you noticed by new “tribes” of people).

In marketing, it’s critical to know what the next big story is. The most sought after way to do that was to browse daily channels on the web and to plug in Google Alerts. But there’s only so much that can do for you. Web surfing is very time consuming and you’re likely seeing stories that have already gotten major traction – making it tougher if not obsolete for you to spend time on it. Google Alerts, on the other hand, often searches too narrow or too wide: you either don’t have enough info or you have too much. So along comes lynk.ly, making our collective business lives a lot easier. Lynk.ly predicts popular stories in social media channels before they become mainstream/viral. The downside is that the results can be pretty random. Whether you decide to use lynk.ly should really depend on whether your company has a creative license.

Other top content curators include eqentia, daylife, storyful and onespot. But all these channels don’t really stream content back into your site. LOUD3R does. However, the downside is that you have to pay for the service. Though if your business is centered around media and information, it might be worth the buck.

Top Curated Publications

There’s turning Twitter results into a magazine, and then there’s turning it into your own blog with MyTweetMag. It’s designed beautifully and is simple to use. After (1) registering your twitter account, you can (2) appoint others as co-editors (great for team collaborations), (3) filter Twitter links with a hashtag, (4) edit your magazine and (5) embed the stream into your website/homepage. The fact that you can weave this into your homepage is what really makes it appealing – after all, the goal with web marketing is getting traffic back to your site. This way you can have your proverbial cake and eat it too. I also recommend browsing the existing magazines based on topics to see what others in your field are up to.

Further competition in the field includes shareist (in beta), Feedly, Story Crawler and Qrait.

Top Curating Tools

My favorite tool would have to be netvibes, which acts as a fusion between curated content filters and your own PA. Netvibes defines itself by being a “dashboard (for) everything” – letting you craft a unique web experience by pulling content to one dashboard. You can lasso web articles, google search results, photos/videos and even emails with netvibes. Very cool indeed…and very useful since the number one problem in market research is finding a way to collect data intelligently without it being all over the place.

Before diving into netvibes, I recommend checking out curata, which does the same thing.

Can’t Live Without

Anyone in marketing though, especially in research, needs to use Instapaper, which saves all the interesting links you come across but don’t have the time to read. Your saved links can be accessed later when you have free time. The newspaper style arrangement, accessible on your Kindle, makes it just as unique as it is practical.

If you’re into neat bookmarking tools, you might also want to check out Diigo (beta). A social media oriented version can be found in trunk.ly. And if to date you’ve been heavily reliant on Google Alerts, you need to check out Summify and YourVersion, which offer similar but more streamlined service.

作者簡介:

by Shireen Qudosi

Shireen Qudosi is Benchmark Email's Online Marketing Specialist and Small Business Advocate. An Orange County based writer, Shireen specializes in online marketing and public relations. She has written for over 75 publications and has launched nine successful new media campaigns to date. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Denver Post, the Oklahoman and Green Air Radio, among others.