Who needs the press to make sure a press release gets the word out?

This morning I learned that Vocus, the public relations services company, has acquired email marketer iContact.

That Vocus would add email marketing to its portfolio is interesting enough, but for now, let’s focus on how I found out about the acquisition.

Not too long ago, I would have read about it in the business section of my daily newspaper, in my weekly edition of PRWeek or in my RSS feeds.

The business section of my daily newspaper has shrunk to the point that there’s no room for such reporting in the print edition. Increasingly, we’re seeing paywalls blocking online content from all but paying subscribers. As more and more… Read More »

Curating company news: Time for company content curation to grow up

There’s plenty of evidence that business is adopting content curation, but the practice hasn’t been around long enough for organizations to innovate more targeted, results-focused uses.

Business takes many of its lessons from how everyone else makes use of social tools. To start applying content curation, communicators need to pay attention to how others are using the crop of curation tools that have found acceptance online. There are dozens of free tools, but Storify is the one that has demonstrated one of curation’s emerging strengths:

Curating news that the media isn’t covering can lead to media coverage. And, by extension, it can… Read More »

FIR Speakers and Speeches: October 2011—Shel Holtz on Content Curation

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Shel Holtz delivered a presentation at the Ragan Communications conference titled, “Communicating Your Company Story—Inside and Out,” held October 3-5, 2011 at Southwest Airlines headquarters in Dallas, Texas. The presentation was part of the Employee Communications track, one of three tracks available to conference attendees. You can follow along with the PowerPoint visuals in the SlideShare presentation below.

The recording… Read More »

Guest post: Curating news about the company for the intranet

During a recent talk on content curation, I showed a page from American Electric Power’s intranet that included news about the company from external sources. Several in the audience wondered how the communicators at AEP curated that content, so I asked Internal Communications Director William Amurgis for a quick rundown. Instead, he replied with an email that was good enough to be a blog post—and William gave me his permission to turn it into one.

by William Amurgis
Director, Internal Communications, American Electric Power

We’ve explored automated feeds over the years, and found them to be either too inclusive (too many redundant or… Read More »

Google’s acquisition of ZAGAT is all about original content

Media, social and mainstream alike, are abuzz with Google’s acquisition of ZAGAT, which was a curator of diners’ reviews of restaurants (along with hotels, theatears, golf courses andmore) before the World Wide Web existed. According to Local, Maps and Location Services VP marissa Mayer, writing on the official Google blog:

Zagat will be a cornerstone of our local offering—delighting people with their impressive array of reviews, ratings and insights, while enabling people everywhere to find extraordinary (and ordinary) experiences around the corner and around the world.

What this comes down to is original content. In their letter… Read More »

Freda Kahlo, personal judgement and content curation

I was taken aback by a statement in an Editors Weblog piece about Storify, my tool of choice (so far) for curating coneftent. The post asserts…

Storify’s main flaw lies in the fact that it is intensely reliant on the curator, the Storify account user, who ultimately makes judgments about what information is valid and appropriate to be included, like any standard blogging process. As there is no way of enforcing any idea of balanced, objective journalism on Spotify, this could, potentially, klead to very subjective accounts of global events. It falls to individuals and news organizations to enforce journalistc standards upon themselves.…

Read More »

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