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How to distill content curation for real impact

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Jun 29, 2011 in Blogging, Education, New media, Social media, Strategy | 5 comments

How do you cope with the flood of information that swamps your inbox, blog reader, and mobile device every day?

How do you find and isolate all the good stuff, separate the wheat from the chaff, and use the information you’re receiving to actually move the needle?

The same way that you get the good stuff out of crude oil, weak brews, and perfume herbs: distillation. If you slept through high school chemistry class (or were interested in an entirely different kind of chemistry, as many of my peers were), distillation is the process of heating a raw material to extract a chemical based on its boiling point, then condensing the distilled product separately. Cognac, for example, is distilled wine from high-quality ugni blanc grapes. It’s distilled twice in copper pots, then aged for two years before being sold for consumption.

The same process that works for cognac works for content curation. It’s not enough just to subscribe to a bunch of blogs and read a bunch of tweets, not if you want to take all of the information you receive daily and make it useful. Here’s the process I use on a daily and weekly basis; feel free to modify or adapt it for your own needs.

I start every day with my blog reader on the iPad. I’ve subscribed to about 2500 different blogs across a spectrum of topics, and each day I hit the main topic areas, such as economics, marketing, social media, development, etc. I skim through rapidly, looking for bits of information and data that catch my eye, read into articles that do, and then share them via Google Reader. I do this specifically on the iPad because it lets me focus better on just reading the news with no other distractions.

If that were all I did, I’d still be swamped with information, since I share 20-30 different articles a day, if not more. The first distillation pass is what I cull out for #the5 on Twitter every day. Of those 20-30 articles, which 5 of them are the most worth sharing? Some days, that’s easy. Some days, that’s a very tough call. But forcing myself to distill out only 5 different pieces of information makes me focus on the stuff that’s truly important to me, stuff that I’d want to really remember. One of my general rules of thumb for stuff in #the5 is that if I didn’t learn something, I don’t share it.

The second pass of distillation occurs weekly, as I prep each Tuesday night for a recording of Marketing Over Coffee. I actually subscribe to my own #the5 tweets as a separate RSS feed so that I can see just the most important articles of the week that I thought were good enough to share. I’ll star key items in that feed so that I have a very compact list of stuff that should be headline discussion topics and then bring those with me every Wednesday morning when John Wall and I record the show.

The final stage of distillation, the stage where I know something has got to be kept or else, is when I take distilled items out of this process and put them into reference tools like Evernote or Instapaper, ensuring that I have them on hand for when I need to reference them later.

This three-phase process wasn’t automatic or something immediately contrived. It just evolved that way as the amount of information thrown at me increased, and this was a handy way of filtering it down until only the gems were left. It’s probably not right for you and your information processing style, but I hope it gives you some ideas and inspires you to try multiple levels of content curation to distill out the things that you really need or want to remember and learn.

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You can share too much

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Jan 26, 2011 in Awakening, New media, Social media | 10 comments

There’s an old adage that one death is a tragedy but a million deaths is a statistic. One masterpiece on the wall is a study, but a wall full of masterpieces is expensive wallpaper. One diamond is a beauty, but a table full of diamonds obscures the brightness of any one. We lose the ability to discern effectively when we’re swamped.

As it is with life, so it is with new media. When you share a link, it’s useful, worth looking at, worth paying attention to. When you share 129 of them? It’s just so much more noise, even if every one of them is a diamond.

What we value in the information overload age isn’t more information but curation, selection, distillation.

There’s a reason why I do #the5 – it forces me to take a careful look at everything that’s of value in front of me and pick the 5 things among them that are the most valuable. You don’t need #the25 or #the450, and chances are you wouldn’t read it anyway. I wouldn’t.

If you want to be known for something in social media, be known as someone who has the good stuff and who packages it up neatly. You’ll make more short lists of people to be followed than someone just vomiting every shiny object that crosses their desk.

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Marketing White Belt

Basics for Digital Marketers
is now on Amazon & B&N

Watch me speak:

Attend virtually!

I recommend:

for Twitter audience building.

#the5 for the week ending November 12, 2010

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Nov 13, 2010 in Blogging, Facebook, New media, Twitter | 0 comments

I tweet out #the5 regularly on weekday mornings. It's a list of the 5 things in my various channels that I think are worth paying attention to, usually culled from thousands of blogs and tweets in my Google Reader. Folks have asked in the past if they could somehow get these tweets in another fashion, but every Twitter/Wordpress plugin I've seen makes a mangled, annoying mess of processing the Twitterstream, so until there's a better option, I'll just throw out this digest. If you'd like to get these before the summary, just follow me on Twitter.

#the5: @julien tells you why every business is a machine: http://bit.ly/crZeu6
#the5: @mashable: For Employees, Facebook Counts as Free Speech http://bit.ly/au02Gc
#the5: @matthewebel tells America to stop waiting on Obama and fix your own damn economy: http://bit.ly/azQxXW
#the5: @mitchjoel on becoming a better speaker: http://bit.ly/9h34mj
#the5: @revenews: 10 Reasons SEO Didn’t Work For You http://bit.ly/bBoutG
#the5: @seomoz crushes it again with helpful link building tips for your personal blog: http://bit.ly/ceMqY8
#the5: @seomoz killer post on how to get community link building going: http://bit.ly/arPbCz
#the5: @shoemoney gives you part 3 on selling information products online. Damn useful: http://bit.ly/9MdLqe
#the5: Der Spiegel on the American economic nightmare: http://bit.ly/a6DIBO
#the5: Do you have the will to focus? http://bit.ly/b9qUff
#the5: Gevlon on how a few bad apples can ruin a team: http://bit.ly/aWar0a
#the5: Google sponsoring free WiFi on some flights during the holidays: http://tcrn.ch/blPOXD
#the5: HBR on how to avoid burnout by focusing on your team http://bit.ly/akLK0y
#the5: Heavy insider dumping at Cisco indicates infrastructure economy problems? http://bit.ly/dxMyQz
#the5: I tell you exactly when the best time to send email is. Try it: http://bit.ly/9GjEYH
#the5: Mashable on the billion dollar eBook market: http://bit.ly/bArnr5
#the5: One of mine, committing to the cut http://bit.ly/cL3ApC
#the5: One of mine, first steps on the path to exceptional: http://bit.ly/d7jEHs
#the5: Revenews on the 10 Reasons SEO Didn’t Work For You http://bit.ly/bBoutG
#the5: Twitter Places on the way shortly? http://selnd.com/cPOK0u

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Click here to read my blog on Google Currents on your mobile!

Marketing White Belt

Basics for Digital Marketers
is now on Amazon & B&N

Watch me speak:

Attend virtually!

I recommend:

for Twitter audience building.

Back issues: personal newsletter, August/September 2010

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Oct 18, 2010 in Blogging, New media | 0 comments

I just realized I never got around to posting the relevant content from the back issues of my personal newsletter, so over the next couple of days, we’ll get everyone caught up. Some of the stuff won’t make it here because it’s woefully out of date (like events) so it’ll just be the pieces that are still relevant. If you’d like to get the newsletter when it’s actually released, just click here to subscribe.