My favorite book this week is Curation Nation

The last sentence in chapter 4: Curation is the future of consumer conversation. Curated content is a buzz word in magazines and newspaper, but far more than that, marketers find that their brands can longer tell their story in a massive one way voice.

Customer conversations about their product are happening in big, public, uncontrolled ways. Brands no longer control their own story, mass media is turned up side down.

Lessens to be learned
“Dell sucks” – do the search on Google. Try your own company too.

Negative talk can be gathered and amplified as blogs such as Jarvis’s handful of personal blog posts that turned into a full- fledged platform of consumer unhappiness and anger with Dell. Another example is ComcastMustDie.com which had 10 000 visitors and 1000 comments the first 2 months of the site’s operation. Comcast started to listen!

Brands can’t dictate their entire brand story; it will be influenced by good and bad customer stories. The only choice is to aggregate and organize – curate the brand and customers stories.

Learn the lesson of listening
Shut up and pay attention to what is being said about your brand. After all the people on the receiving end have their online voice, they are collaborators, participants and members of a community. Then engage proactively by curating the content.

The best?
Pepsi listen to what people say and give voice to their perspectives through public voting on grant projects and inviting its core customers in planning brand and product innovation, Mountan Dew Voltage is a result of this approach and is regarded as one of the most successful launches in PepsiCo’s history. Their strategy is to crowd source an aggregation of suggestions, feedback and complaints.

Watchdog group
Crowd content without curation tend to drive and amplify negative voices, but when you add a human editoral layer, a curational perspective that organize gathered content and community participation, you will get results.


No doubt, balanced communities curated to be about honest feedback and customer solutions will emerge as a new and powerful force in consumer and brand interactions.

And that was only chapter 4...