Thought Leadership Through Curation

Guess what: You can be an online thought leader without producing your own content.

Many small and medium-sized businesses do not have the staff, the time, or the external resources to actually develop the kinds of materials that can mark them as industry “thought leaders.” They have more mission critical things to do than to write white papers, post new blog content several times a week, or maintain a reference library of original documents in their field. It’s highly possible that you are a leader in that kind of a company.  

What’s the Alternative?

But here’s the good news: there is a highly valuable service that you can provide easily, one that will attract prospective customers and others in your industry to your website, even if you are not creating new content.

And that service is curation. A curator is a custodian or overseer of valuable information or artifacts, such as a person who performs that service for a museum, selecting and displaying valuable things that originated elsewhere.  In the online world of social selling, likewise, a curator is a person or organization who collects the most relevant resources and makes them available in a single place for an interested audience.

Information Glut Makes Curation All the More Useful

Here’s why curating is valuable. We live in a world of information glut. Any of us, as well as our employees and outsource partners, can spend hours of time on internet surfing to find relevant information. And many of us and our employees do not necessarily have the skills or knowledge background to discern which info is reliable and which is simply junk.

So, an industry-specific website that collects (or curates) reliable, verifiable, and useful information provides a great service to your industry. It saves your customers and prospects from having to wade through volumes of information to find the important stuff, and it sends the message that your company knows what is important and has its pulse on the news.

Popular Content for Truck Drivers!

Let me give you an unlikely example. A company that I know in Indianapolis is Driving Ambition.  They are a staffing company providing licensed truck drivers to trucking companies throughout the Midwest. When I was first introduced to them, I did not think of them as an “intellectual property” company. At first or even second glance you would not think of their industry as a social media player, would you? Nevertheless, their website is a world-class example of curation. Blog entries consist of industry information that is relevant to truck drivers and the companies who employ them. Driving Ambition does not need to write new content—they only need to scan the industry landscape and post content coming from industry news and regulatory sources.

If you have not figured out how to embrace social media in your sales process, I recommend curating as an inexpensive method that can add great value to the companies that you would like to attract as followers!

Editor’s Note: Tools like Flipboard, Paper.li or Feedly can help you get started!

By the way, stay on top of multiple channels of information easily with Nimble. Why not take the FREE 14-day Nimble Test Drive?  There is no credit card required, and you’ll be up and running in minutes. Use Nimble to cultivate online relationships.

 

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