What should you look for in a Content Curation tool?

Content Curation is a step up to bookmarking and sharing content on the Internet.

There are two separate and yet equally important phases to content curation, discovery and sharing!

To stay objective with the review of our own tools, I have chose this post by Robin Good, where he defines the criteria for selecting the right curation solution.

KBucket and Kurator feature set

We offer 2 curation tools.  KBrowser is a Firefox extension and Kurator is the Chrome extension.

KBrowser, offers a totally new interface for the browser, for pinning and grouping your tabs.

KBrowser offers special folders called curation folders for curating your research.

Kurator is a Chrome add-on, that enhances you bookmark manager and let’s you curate articles into curation folders.

Both solutions let you organize and share your content via KBucket pages.

Import and Export Functions

Curators have a need to import and export either their own research (from other platforms) or that of others, into their system to save time. 

Our tool is currently able to import RSS feeds and export XML, Curation folders as portal files.

Importing is important when you are collaborating with other’s and want to share research among yourselves.

Exporting, is essential for sharing your content with your co-workers, but also with the larger public.

KBucket is how we publish our curated content to the web.

Both Kurator and KBrowser support this feature.

How many ways are available to organize your content?

The answers here, apply to KBrowser and Kurator for curating information and KBucket for hosting the curated content.

The reason Robin asks for these features is apparent once you start curating. 

Curation is a process.  You start with an idea and a purpose like curating articles on content marketing, or curating the US election. 

But once you get started, you often find that your needs change. 

For example, you may decide that you want to add new channels to your content marketing like SEO, inbound marketing, or paid marketing.

You research is fluid, and your ideas on how to organize your content will change all the time.

Its really important to have the flexibility to easily re-organize as you grow!

What are the search capabilities?

Curators as researchers need powerful tools for searching the web and their own content.

Here I believe we have a distinct advantage over competing tools. 

I don’t believe any one tool can master all the different searchers required by all curators.

I think it’s more important to give users the flexibility to integrate access to their favorite tools, rather than try to compete with every vendor in the market.

KBrowser offers some powerful capabilities to organizing access to your favorite tools, and accessing each in its own window.

With Kurator, your can organize your tools in a special folder for quick access.

What is your Content Discovery process

Discovery is obviously an important part of the curation process.

Again, I feel its more important to integrate access to your best tools, instead of trying to compete with every tool out there.

Depending on the type of curation you will have different needs.

As a content marketer, you will probably be using tools like ahrefs, nuzzel, buzzsumo, or drum up, but as a journalist, you may just want access to tens of news sites, setup alerts, or use services like LexisNexis, or Factiva to perform your research.

Our tools make it easy to integrate access to any tool of your choice and organize it the way you work.

These questions are simply an introduction to what you should consider when curating content.

Editing, Formatting and sharing your content

So far we have looked at the discovery process, but what are the considerations for sharing content.

The following table deals with questions of editing content during the curation process.

This table deals with your shared curated content.

Conclusion

Curation is a creative endeavor.  Flexibility is paramount. There is no one tool out there that can offer the best discovery in every domain.  That’s why we offer a system that let’s you integrate access to your desired tools.

Most of us today work with multiple sites at the same time to complete tasks. Its not uncommon for users to open tens of tabs and access multiple sites to execute on a single task.

Furthermore, curation project grow, and it is vital that curated content is indexable and navigable to provide the desired value.

KBrowser, Kurator, and KBucket are all designed to offer the curator flexibility and ease of use.