This is the report everybody loves to read from top analyst Mary Meekers of VC firm KPCB. @Ally Greer not only digested it but curated from it the top metrics and trends that will impact content curators, educators and marketers.

Combining content creation and content curation is a great way to optimize your content strategy. But in addition to showing that, these 4 awesome examples show how leveraging contributions through a collaborative model can take that even further as in the case of the University of San Francisco. 

My first post on LinkedIn's new publishing platform - which is quite awesome and very straightforward I have to say. 

I found it ironic that in the same week, the same media institution was both awarded the most prestigious prize in journalism and the origin of a misinformed article that went viral.

Not trying to put some blame here but it inspired me a few thoughts on the future of online content and of course content curation.

Does content curation work? How effective is it? What pain points does it solve? 

Beyond our own case studies, we wanted to add to the debate.

Here's what we found out. 

Excellent point made by Mike Bailey that reminds me of an argument also made by Marketo here. And exactly the trend we see happening with more and more of our enterprise clients at Scoop.it: while a lot of companies are still in a command-and-control mode with small marketing teams in charge of every aspect of outbound communication, we see a growing number of organizations realize they need to leverage their employees - and their employees social network - so that their communication becomes much more effective.

As the graph above explains, an employee sharing content to their networks has up to 20x more impact than when the brand does it (when you normalize their number of followers/friends).

Content curation plays a key role here: you not only need to create relevant and engaging content hubs for employees but they need to be easy for them to curate, share and publish from. As often, adoption is key and you need systems where employees can easily take ownership through a rewarding experience which seems to be what's driving more and more demand to use Scoop.it internally within the enterprise. 

We've been analyzing the data from millions of curated pieces and looked at:

- Content curation traffic sources: Search vs Social

- Which social networks bring the most traffic? The best traffic?

- How often should you publish content?

- How's content quality impacting traffic?

- mobile vs desktop

- Social graph vs interest graph

... and what take aways this meant for content curators. 

Enjoy!

And tell us what you think: does it match your own experience?

Find sources, organize them and focus on a precise topic: interesting to read as these are the 3 pillars at the core of any successful content curation workflows.

One piece is missing though: making sure your curated content is part of your content hub where visitors can not only interact with your personal or business brand but also discover the context related to it.

Very inspiring piece which reminds me of the Humanrithm concept we developed at Scoop.it: as technology develops, humans have to adapt.

As great content curators show, when filtering is a process that can be automated, two things happen:

- success comes by using a combination of automation and human judgement (like the amateur chess players who beat the supercomputer in the article)

- there is a shift of value towards building meaningful connexions around content with a human touch.

Messages for all of us humans?

Don't try to be a robot but focus on what makes us humans: relationships. Let's build our communities of interest!

Content curation is about getting visibility to content we care about (after all curator comes from the latin word for 'taking care of'). At Scoop.it, we've taken that as our mission and want to help each and everyone of our users make the most of their content curation activity whatever the niche they have.

So here are 5 tips to do that and leverage some of the features of the platform we've built in that spirit.

And we'd also love to hear about your own tips! 

I love seeing lists like this one by Heidi Cohen or this other one by Barry Feldman: it's a strong sign that content curation is being embraced by more and more people, including a lot of content professionals.

But as these lists tend to be overwhelming, it's also a very interesting reminder of the importance of tools to facilitate the content curation workflow. When Heidi recommends acting as a "trustworthy filter" for instance, this is easier said than done if you don't have a way to easily find relevant content in the first place. 

Content can create great relationships: we meet - at least virtually - a lot of people through the content they write, curate or publish. But content can also be the best way to build on existing relationships in valuable ways that are described in this post. 

One of the 5 ways John Jantsch describes here is content curation and I wanted to elaborate on this.

A model for involving existing relationships and partners in your content strategy is to offer them to join in your content curation efforts. By curating content as a group of partners, you not only spread the workload but also bring additional visibility and networks to your content, therefore  amplifying your impact. This model for collaborative content curation has already been used by some on Scoop.it leveraging the suggestions of the free version or the team feature of the Business and Enterprise versions which offer group content curation. 

Of course the first application of this is within companies where many companies curate as a team. But moving forward, collaborative content curation is an important concept that will spread beyond the boundaries of an organization to become even more powerful as a way to involve all kinds of advocates and partners. 

Since then, publishing-by-curation rapidly turned into an important trend as 1,000,000 freelance professionals, community managers, content marketers, educators, knowledge managers, thought leaders, and more are now using Scoop.it to demonstrate and share their professional expertise, develop visibility for their small or mid-sized businesses or to make the company they work for smarter.

We wanted to thank you all through this post on the Scoop.it blog as well as share some data on the awesome Scoop.it community through this infographic.

Long before Upworthy or BuzzFeed started to explode, the success of TechMeme have been an inspiration to many curators and the envy of many news publishers.

Interestingly, TechMeme evolved from being a fully-automated aggregator to being curated by a team of humans recruited by Rivera and informed by algorithms. "I usually just say "fifty-fifty" when someone really wants to hear a number for automation versus human, but it's actually difficult to quantify." says Rivera when asked about the split between both.

A great case study for humanrithm showing how publishing by curation can empower professionals to become the go-to media in their niche.

Two other interesting observations by Tom Foremski who wrote about companies needing to become media as early as 2005:

- "Independently produced media is trusted but content produced by brands is not." 

- "Every company is a media company but media companies don’t write about themselves."

Maybe because he is a former journalist, Tom has a tendency to think that content = news - which is a restrictive definition in my opinion. We discussed that at the latest meetup on content marketing he organized in San Francisco: of course news need to be objective and brands are biased (as any media by the way but this is a different conversation).

But I pointed out first that good content can also be entertaining or educational and second that using content curation is a great way to circumvent both problems: brands which become media through content curation are relying on independently produced content and don't write about themselves.

Bain & Company shares interesting data and perspectives on how the abundance of content reshapes the relationship between consumers and media producers.

With the abundance of content, value shifts from creation to content curation and brings more bargaining powers to consumers while at the same time creating fascinating opportunities for those who will be able to leverage curation.