There are many applications for curation. PR and social media teams can add tremendous value by acting as a filter and finding the diamonds in the rough of all the Web noise: content that is timely and relevant, and can be used to inform marketing and help feed social media channels.
One obvious application for curation is the curated news site, and the best examples I can think of are Drudge Report and Huffington Post. The NY Times had an excellent article last week: How The Drudge Report has Stayed on Top (I learned about it through a list that is another example of curation, the NY Times weekly roundup of the most popular articles that appears on Saturday in the business section; and in this very post I am curating the original article by sharing the link and commenting).
At 14 years old, the Drudge Report predates the eras of social media and Web 2.0 – yet I was blown away by reading about the site's enduring influence. It draws about 12-14 million unique visitors per month. The article posed a question about drivers of traffic to major news sites and said:
Using data from the Nielsen Company to examine the top 21 news sites on the Web, the report suggests that Mr. Drudge, once thought of as a hothouse flower of the Lewinsky scandal, is now more powerful in driving news than the half-billion folks on Facebook.
So how does Drudge Report continue to remain so popular? And what can marketers leran from its success to build curated news sites that draw and refer significant traffic? Here are some tips from the articlle (iexcerpts are in italics).
Find the Hot Story, Craft a headline that Pops
…he is, as Gabriel Snyder, who has done Web news for Gawker, Newsweek and now The Atlantic, told me,“the best wire editor on the planet. He can look into a huge stream of news, find the hot story and put an irresistible headline on it.”
Use Pictures, and a Blend of Highbrow and Lowbrow
Underneath [a recent article] there were tons of links, news and pictures (Mr. Drudge has a real knack for photo editing) with all kinds of irresistible marginalia: “Desperate Americans Buy Kidneys from Peru Poor” was just above an article about what a prolific e-mailer Osama bin Laden was in spite of his lack of access to the Internet.
No Frills Retro Design Minimizes Distraction, Highlights Content
“The genius of Drudge is the simplicity of the layout,” said Matt Labash, a writer for The Weekly Standard. “Everyone else who tries to knock him off complicates that. There’s no tabs. There’s no jumps. There’s hardly any clutter…”…
Behemoth aggregators like Yahoo News and The Huffington Post have become more like fun houses that are easy to get into and tough to get out of… But on The Drudge Report, there is just a delicious but bare-bones headline, there for the clicking. It’s the opposite of sticky, which means his links actually kick up significant traffic for other sites.
