In comes the digital content curator. I consider myself to be a curator. What that means is that I endeavor to filter and organize quality content from many credible sources in a manner that provides my clients/attorneys with succinct summaries that are most relevant to them. Phew! That’s a mouthful! But the fact is that in an age of information overload, there is no ONE authority source for any topic. There are many credible authority sources for every topic and so as curators our challenge is to filter and organize. And the biggest value in all of that is – it saves the end user hours and hours of time.

I recently did a one hour webinar on digital content curation. You can watch it below.

The brand building and top of mind awareness that can result from a strong social media program are very difficult to measure. Because of that, some firms abandon them and prefer to stay with 100% traditional direct response mass media marketing.

In my opinion that’s a lot of missed opportunity. Social media is here to stay whether or not you can directly measure it. So, for those of you that are embracing new media strategies and learning to navigate this new landscape – bravo to you. You will be standing at the end of the day when your competitors fall as traditional mass media strategies become less and less impactful as compared to online video, social media and mobile campaigns that are embraced by the visionaries.

I was reading a blog post by one of my favorite marketing guru’s Seth Godin this morning and here is what he had to say:

Ralph Lauren is a billion dollar brand. Totally unmeasurable. So are Revlon, LVMH, Donald Trump, Andersen Windows, Lady Gaga and hundreds of other mass market brands.

There are two things you should never do:

1. Try to measure unmeasurable media and use that to make decisions. You’ll get it wrong. Sure, some sophisticated marketers get good hints from their measurements, but it’s still an art, not a science.
2. Compromise on your investment. Small investments in unmeasurable media almost always fail. Go big or stay home.

If you want to read the post you can find it here: Seth Godin Post

If you are unfamiliar with foursquare, you might want to watch the video below where the co-founder of the company explains how he uses foursquare.

There is no blueprint for the ever changing and evolving new media landscape and world of social media and user generated content. We are all figuring it out as we go. I happen to love that kind of an environment. Whether or not you love it as well, I think it’s pretty clear to all of us that the landscape is changing rapidly and those who fear and resist change will struggle to compete.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: [...]
Date: Tue, May 26, 2009 at 9:00 AM
Subject: [NYT Newsroom] From Jon Landman: Jennifer Preston to be Social Media Editor
To: [...]

To the Newsroom:

One of the bracing things about this topsy-turvy media landscape is that you can wake up one morning and find yourself actually doing something you never thought you’d even think about. Take Jennifer Preston. In 25 years in the news biz, she’s been plenty of things: Reporter (cop shop, City Hall, Albany, etc.), editor (political editor, section editor, administrative editor, etc.) and even circulation marketing manager (at New York Newsday). But still, did she ever think she’d wake up one morning as “social media editor”?

No, she didn’t but yes, she did. That morning was this one.

Jennifer is our first social media editor. What’s that? It’s someone who concentrates full-time on expanding the use of social media networks and publishing platforms to improve New York Times journalism and deliver it to readers.

Think of Twitter. Did you know that The New York Times is No. 2 on the Twitterholic.com Top 100 Twitterholics based on Followers? (Behind Ashton Kutcher but ahead of Ellen DeGeneres.) Don’t care? OK, but the point is that an awful lot of people are finding our work not by coming to our homepage or looking at our newspaper but through alerts and recommendations from their friends and colleagues. So we ought to learn how to reach those people effectively and serve them well. At the same time, more of us are using social networks to find sources, contacts and information. Like this guy.

Jennifer will work closely with editors, reporters, bloggers and others to use social tools to find sources, track trends, and break news as well as to gather it. She will help us get comfortable with the techniques, share best practices and guide us on how to more effectively engage a larger share of the audience on sites like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, Digg, and beyond.

A big part of her job will be keeping everyone up to date with the rapid developments taking place on the social media front. She will work closely with social media whizzes in the newsroom and other departments, including Soraya Darabi in marketing, Jake Harris in software and Heather Moore in comment moderation, on how news feeds work and how best to be part of the online conversation. She will also work closely with Dawn Williamson, Derek Gottfrid and others involved in building our own social network, Times People, as we continue to use crowd-sourcing techniques to increase the reach and quality of our work. She will work with Craig Whitney and others to ask and answer the many tricky questions that arise in this context: What is the proper balance between personal and professional? What best practices should we adopt or adapt? How can we do the new stuff in a way that honors the old stuff? Etc.

In a significant way Jennifer will apply the collaborative techniques of social-networking to her own job, because of course we all need to figure this out together.

Jon