In this fourth lesson in the Next Level 7 series, we take a closer look at curation. It’s way more sophisticated and powerful than most people think.
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Transcript
What the world needs now is smart editorial guidance
What the world needs now is smart editorial guidance
Welcome back to Next Level 7, the audio course that reveals what’s working right now for attracting an audience and building a business that works for you. I’m your guide, Brian Clark.
Today we’re going deeper on the idea of curation. Specifically, how sharing other people’s content can help you build your perfect business.
HBO introduced a new tagline in 2019 — Recommended By Humans. Home Box Office is the oldest and longest continuously operating paid television service around, and it ushered in our current golden age of television with programs such as The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and The Wire, and then kept it going with shows like Game of Thrones, True Detective, and Watchmen.
But to say things have gotten super competitive for HBO is an understatement. Streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime offer algorithmically driven on-demand platforms, and Disney Plus and Apple TV are coming on strong.
It’s more than a marketing slogan, though. Recommended By Humans is a tool that provides a colorful canvas you can drag around on your desktop or mobile phone, and features 36 unique video suggestions and over 150 curated recommendations from real HBO fans. They also deliver those recommendations by (surprise!) an email newsletter.
HBO is tapping into the current zeitgeist. And it’s definitely pro-human, anti-algorithm … all for a good reason — it’s what people now want.
Now let’s go beyond streaming TV and look at the broader internet — it’s the most powerful and accessible source of information ever devised. However, the social media aspects of the internet are actually reducing knowledge and wisdom thanks to spurious information and self-reinforcing echo chambers.
Combine that with the drive for eyeballs that results from ad-driven digital media, and the greatest repository of knowledge the world has ever known results in a poverty of intelligence.
In a world of click-bait, fake news, echo chambers, and the emerging issue of video deep fakes, smart people are looking for other trustworthy smart people to tell them what’s worth their time and attention. And that trust eventually translates into who to hire (you) and what to buy (what you recommend and create).
The trust component cannot be overstated. With the crushing amount of dubious data and fake news, the role of trusted editor gives you more prestige, authority, and even celebrity than the usual content marketing route.
Frankly, the world doesn’t need more content. What it needs is more clarity, understanding, and meaning. People need you to separate the wheat from the chaff, the signal from the noise. And that’s why curation is your ticket to success — if done correctly.
You may be thinking at this point, why can’t the machines do this for us? Isn’t artificial intelligence and automation about to put most humans out of work?
You don’t need me to tell you again that relying on algorithms to “curate” content has been a disaster so far. Just look at Facebook, where the algorithm is the reason for the echo chambers that spread disinformation and put a serious dent in democracy.
It’s clear that these algorithms are easily manipulated by devious humans in order to manipulate other humans in ways that wouldn’t happen if an editorially-focused human is in charge.
Curation requires very human qualities like communication, empathy, creativity, strategic thinking, questioning, and even dreaming. We typically refer to these as “soft skills,” and they are the areas that computers can’t handle, but you excel at.
It comes down to judgment and taste, the hallmarks of all great editors and curators. Artificial intelligence doesn’t have those abilities (and it remains to be seen if it ever will), so that’s why humans will work alongside machines to do better work than ever.
In other words, algorithms can aggregate and spot patterns, but they can’t interpret the specific relevance and deeper nuance of an article, podcast, or video lesson to an audience. That’s why people need other people to act as human filters for the technology that editors and curators use to sift through a mountain of information in search of truth and value.
Organizing, collecting, preserving, and making-sense of our collective knowledge is a critical task facing business and humanity in general, right now and well into the future. Algorithms can do a lot to help, but the “last mile requires a human filter.
And that’s an opportunity for you. Because frankly, the first people to make the most of AI curation will be savvy entrepreneurs who act as human curators, not the general public. After all, how many “normal people make use of say, RSS to quickly flow through masses of information to find what’s relevant and true? And that tech has been around for over 20 years!
Human brands that establish themselves now will be trusted for much longer than it takes for artificial intelligence to greatly improve. But there’s a very good possibility that the curation-based business you build today will run itself via AI and automation in the not-so-distant future … with your audience never knowing, and while the business continues paying you exceptionally well.
How’s that for freedom? And there’s so many areas to carve out your spot, it’s mind boggling. Let me give you just one example of the size of this opportunity.
The curation process I use is definitely an entrepreneurial endeavor. That’s because it hits all the key fundamentals audience, offer, and messaging while taking much of the guesswork out.
Because of this, freelancers, consultants, and other client-services professionals may think this process isn’t for them. But that’s not true — and I think from a getting-started standpoint, you’re in a better position. Here’s why.
It’s the thing that seems to bedevil people the most when it comes to attracting an audience — and that’s traffic. And while guest posting, referral programs, subscriber sharing, media coverage, and links from other newsletters and websites are all part of your traffic mix, there’s one technique that is so efficient and so targeted that you can’t ignore it.
And that’s social advertising. Probably Facebook, perhaps LinkedIn — I’m experimenting wherever it makes sense. And the reason why freelancers and consultants have an advantage is that you can easily recoup your advertising spend by landing just a few clients.
Entrepreneurs without a client-based business will either need to defer ROI until a minimum viable audience is achieved, or develop an initial product or service to sell. There are plenty of creative ways to do that too.
There’s a lot to unpack here, but that’s enough to set up this one example of a huge opportunity in curation.
If you have a client services business, you’re often trying to attract the attention of companies within a specialized industry or niche. The key to attracting that attention is to solve a problem for people inside the organization before they hire you.
There’s a movement in corporate education toward content curation. The usual e-learning programs are falling flat as sales teams, managers, and executives begin to realize that the best just-in-time information is already out there on the internet — if they could only find it and ensure that it’s valid.
As fast as things move now, an in-house course on the newest trend in marketing from three years ago is not very helpful today, for example. Curated content is about what’s happening now, and where things are headed.
This is why locating and sharing the best content is more relevant than formal training and e-learning courses — if it can be organized and delivered with context. So, overworked in-house learning and development professionals are trying to do curation themselves.
But their time is severely limited, and their motivation is low. You, on the other hand, can provide this valuable service while marketing for your services. Even better, the audience you build becomes the basis for your own digital business empire.
Whether you’re a client-services person or approaching this from scratch as an entrepreneur, I think you can see the possibilities. And beyond b-to-b, there are plenty of consumer opportunities as well.
But we need to understand how the curation process powers the fundamentals of a 7-Figure Small business. That’s up in the next lesson.
Now go back to the email that sent you here. Complete the homework to get the next lesson right away (otherwise the next lesson will arrive in 24 hours).