Every new industry seems to invent their own terms for things other people have done for a long time. One example from social networking: Over a decade ago, I ran a site called www.duh-2000.com—a monthly contest to collect the stupidest things being said about the Y2K problem (don’t bother going there now…the site has been gone since the odometer flipped over to 2000…but if you are interested you can browse an archive of it on my personal website). Each month, readers would send in nominations for silly, dumb, uninformed or just plain clueless statements being made about the problem (or the lack thereof). I would usually make some snarky remark about the comment (what, me snarky?) and include a link to the content. As incentive, we offered a small prize to the person that submitted the best entry for the month. (Interestingly enough, when we first started the contest we offered to give the award to the person who said the stupid thing, not the person who submitted the link: we quickly discovered that strategy didn’t generate very many submissions.)
Of course, we didn’t call it this back then, but the process of collecting the “best of” content and making it available as a collection is today often called curation (from the word curator) and is an important tool in social networking.
It is no accident that some of the most popular sites on the web such as Engadget, Gizmodo, Boing Boing, and Ars Technica are curated sites. Editors at these sites search out content that may be of interest to their demographic, write something about it, and then provide a link for people to see the content first-hand. In the last couple of years, some sites have achieved massive popularity by crowdsourcing the curation (Digg and Reddit, for example). Members (instead of moderators) comment on the content and vote on which content should make it to the front page. (To be fair, neither Digg nor Reddit are purely crowdsourced: both employ algorithms and human moderators that influence which popular content goes to the front page and ensure that the content changes regularly.)
Curation is just one aspect of Community Management, which also includes moderation, administration, and a lot of other activities needed to make a social network successful. It is a powerful tool in driving traffic to a community for two reasons. First, it allows the community to function as a centralized aggregation site. Community members interested in a given topic don’t have to search the web for new content each time they want to see “news” related to the community. Second (done correctly) it can drive membership. Members become interested in gaining recognition from the community for submitting interesting content. Given the right conditions, members will actively compete with one another for recognition points, resulting in more timely and higher quality submissions, which in turn drives more readers to the site and so on.
If you have a social media site that isn’t achieving the traffic numbers that you want, one thing you should try is some level of curation. Decide what the members of your community are interested in and have moderators make certain that links to relevant and timely content appears in a prominent spot.
Snarky comments are optional.
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