Christopher S. Penn : Awaken Your Superhero » New media

How to distill content curation for real impact

Christopher S Penn — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 12:51:16 +0000

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

Christopher S Penn — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 14:10:32 +0000

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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#the5 for the week ending November 12, 2010

Christopher S Penn — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 00:59:16 +0000

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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Back issues: personal newsletter, August/September 2010

Christopher S Penn — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 06:56:41 +0000

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.

August/September 2010 Issue

A job hunting tip: send your resume to any company that’s posted on a paid job board. Why? Simple: companies that pay cash money to a job board have a dire need that they must fill no matter what. That means they’re growing or at least needing to keep fully staffed. However, only the most dire of needs get paid job postings. Guess what? There are probably a dozen other jobs at that company that are not worth paying money for but are still open. Hit up the email address in the job posting and ask them to forward on your resume to the appropriate hiring manager.

Neat Stuff

There’s been a rash of neat and useful tools lately, and I mean that in a good way, not in a “requires anti-fungal cream” way. Here’s a couple I think are worth your time.

My favorite Twitter client got itself all OAuth’d up, ttytter. This is the bee’s knees if you are a highly technical person – command-line Twitter client. Its memory footprint is smaller than most other software’s manuals, and it’s incredible to be able to use Twitter when you want it without the annoyance of other apps bugging you. Bonus: won’t cost you a dime, though if you’re not a nerd, it may cost you your sanity.
Want to talk about design and user patterns that have power? Yahoo’s Design Pattern Library has been around for years and is probably one of the most neglected but useful idea libraries on the Internet. Now Techcrunch has summarized SCVNGR’s game mechanics library. Put the two together and you’ve got a recipe for addiction for any product or service.
A few people have asked me about the theme I’m using on my blog. It’s called Minimal, and is available from Elegant Themes. It’s $39/year for any of their themes (which is handy if you change themes as often as I do).
The final plug I have, and I can’t pimp this enough, is David Maister’s book Strategy and the Fat Smoker. If you ever want to truly understand strategy at the executive level and not just what crappy business school textbooks or “social media gurus” (losers) mistake for strategy, you must read this book. I promise you’ll walk away much wiser and much more ready to discuss strategy at the highest levels of business.

Stuff For You

What’s been popular among my stuff? This list. By the way, I generate this by looking in Google Analytics at Content > Top Content and looking at the last 30 days. This is a helpful way to generate “best of” lists that requires no subjective opinions. The data tells you what people like about your stuff.

I recently did a productivity video explaining GTD, Inbox Zero, and 10-2-5 on my blog. It’s a fast video that covers a lot of ground in less than 6 minutes. Go watch it if you’re interested in these systems to get more out of your workday. They’ve saved my coworkers dozens of hours so far.
No longer lend your strength to that which you wish to be free from. I mused about some of the recent battles in pop culture and politics, and offer a gentle suggestion to the battlers going at it.
Rain makes for an interesting analogy in sales and marketing. Here’s Social Rain, part 1 and part 2.
I’ve fallen in love with Adobe’s eLearning suite of tools and have made some pretty awesome stuff with them. Last month I mentioned the 21st century email marketing webinar I did. Now it’s available on-demand for free, and the eLearning suite did a great job of making it truly on demand. Enjoy.

Stuff You Did

In the spirit of you get what you pay for, I’m paying it forward to the people who share my newsletter with your networks. This issue, I’m profiling two people who moved the needle in the previous edition. Steve Garfield brought in the most new eyeballs (134), while Irene Duma brought the most action with clickthroughs (140).

If there’s a guy in Boston who can be said to fully and wholly grasp video blogging and video on the Web, it’s Steve Garfield. Founder of Boston Media Makers, Rocketboom correspondent since the early days, and author of Get Seen, he’s a legend in New England and beyond. Check him out over atSteveGarfield.com and @stevegarfield on Twitter.

Irene Duma is the founder of Strange Duck Media, a new media marketing firm based in St. John’s, Newfoundland. For those geographically challenged, that’s in Canada. I met her at PodCamp Toronto way back in 2007 and she made me laugh back then. Check out her writing, marketing, and comedy atIreneDuma.com and @ireneduma on Twitter.

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Back issues: personal newsletter, July 2010

Christopher S Penn — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 06:53:48 +0000

July 2010 Issue

If you want serious long term results boosted to your personal network, find something of value to forward to a friend every single day. One of my favorite resources is HelpAReporter.com, which sends out media inquiries from reporters to marketing and PR folks three times a day. It costs you nothing to subscribe to it except disk space.

The golden play is this: get each issue. Scan it quickly. Find someone in your personal professional network to forward just a single query to every day. If you do this, you’ll very quickly become the hub of your social network and stay on the radar of anyone you think is important to stay in touch with. It’ll show that you are thinking about them by providing legitimate value without pitching a product to them.

This little routine takes 5-10 minutes a day but reaps HUGE rewards over the long term.

Neat Stuff

There’s been a rash of neat and useful tools lately, and I mean that in a good way, not in a “requires anti-fungal cream” way. Here’s a couple I think are worth your time.

Have you stopped in on Google’s Webmaster Tools lately? They’ve fixed up the place nicely and their new link statistics tools kick some serious butt, including telling you which pages on your site/blog have the highest click through rate in search. Pure gold – and free to boot.
I’ve finally gotten religion on Evernote. The ability to write and compose stuff on the fly on mobile devices that automatically gets synced back to my desktop for formatting and cleanup means that newsletters like this, along with blog posts, work, and other content is much easier to do. I’ve found myself outlining a blog post on the iPhone, fleshing out the text on the iPad, and then doing cleanup, linking, and publishing from the MacBook – and because it’s all synced together, it’s a fairly seamless transition. I’m doing fine on the free version, but supposedly the paid version is nice too.
On Avinash Kaushik’s recommendation, I’m trying out Tynt on my personal blog, a utility that supposedly tracks how often your stuff is copied and pasted. I’ll let you know how it goes, but it’s free if you want to try it yourself.

Stuff For You

I asked recently, what content are you sitting on? I found a bunch of stuff in my archives, and I’ll bet you’ve got some amazing stuff too. Go sift around and see what’s worth bringing back in style.
It’s been a fun time lately on the Blue Sky Factory blog. One of my recent favorites is a post I wrote on 3 web analytics tips to help you create better subject lines.
Some marketing lessons from the kitchen. Marketers are constantly having to balance two conflicting priorities, like a chef.
Speaking of kitchens, J. Kenji Lopez wrote an epic, epic piece on reverse engineering McDonald’s french fries. There’s some seriously solid food science in here that will really help you understand this iconic, if unhealthy, food. Nothing gross either.
Oh, I redid my speaking kit recently. You’ll see one of my new tricks in it if you look closely. If you’re a fellow public speaker, you might want to borrow said trick.

Stuff You Did

In the spirit of you get what you pay for, I’m paying it forward to the people who share my newsletter with your networks. This issue, I’m profiling two people who moved the needle. Scott Monty brought in the most new eyeballs (212), while DJ Waldow brought the most action with clickthroughs (105).

Scott Monty is known to just about everyone in corporate social media as the guy at Ford Motor Company. I’ve known him for what seems like a very long time, and in addition to his work at Ford, he’s also a Sherlock Holmes fanatic. He’s also frighteningly good at impersonations. Check him out over atScottMonty.com and @scottmonty on Twitter.

DJ Waldow is the unfortunate soul who has to report to me at Blue Sky Factory. In addition to being the community guy at BSF, he’s an avid dad, blogger, and evangelist for ethical online marketing. You’ll find DJ’s personal stuff at DJWaldow.com and @djwaldow on Twitter.

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Back issues: personal newsletter, June 2010

Christopher S Penn — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 06:48:22 +0000

June 2010 Issue

Two reminders about LinkedIn. First, I forward nearly every employment-related connection request. If you’re looking for work right now or know someone who is, please make sure we’re connected on LinkedIn. As of this writing, I’ve got 5,723 first degree connections. That puts me in touch with 1.7 million people in two degrees. If I can use those connections to help put you or someone you know back to work, ask.

You can connect with me on LinkedIn at cspenn@gmail.com or this URL:

http://ar.gy/cspli

Second reminder. If you’ve heard me speak at a conference, trade show, or event and you enjoyed what you heard, please check my LinkedIn profile for that event and leave me a recommendation. It’s super helpful to make sure I keep showing up at events you’re at – nothing makes a conference organizer more comfortable than seeing recommendations for a potential speaker. I really appreciate your help.

The profile is here: http://ar.gy/cspli

Neat Stuff

There’s been a rash of neat and useful tools lately, and I mean that in a good way, not in a “requires anti-fungal cream” way. Here’s a couple I think are worth your bookmarking.

SpyFu: If you’ve never used SpyFu to check out your competition, you should. You can see what they’re paying for pay per click advertising, see what their ads look like, etc. It’s a terrific insight tool that not enough people know about, and frankly, I’m happy to keep it that way.
Bloomberg’s iPad/iPhone app: I love this thing for the news and market data. Most news is full of celebrity fluff, dogs rescuing kittens, and stuff that doesn’t move the needle. I read Bloomberg because it’s the news that’s going to move money, and money moves a lot of other needles. Their apps are free. Their terminal service, which you don’t need for the apps, is something like $2,000 a month. Search for the app in iTunes.
Open Site Explorer: This is what Google Webmaster Tools should have been, honestly. I use this every time I’m evaluating my own site or a competitor’s site to see what makes a site stronger and where they’re getting their links from. Invaluable. The free version is good enough for casual use, but you have to pay for really in-depth results. Still, the free is probably good enough for you for 90% of your research.

Stuff For You

Are you ready for the Twitpocalypse? On June 30, 2010, Twitter ends basic authentication. Find out what this means for you and your favorite Twitter apps, sites, services, and widgets.
Silly human trick: when the iPad came out, I made a bunch of wallpapers (which are just cropped 1024×1024 images). Took a bunch of old photographs, slapped the magic iPad word on them, and voom! Off they went. If you do any digital photography, hit up your own photo library for some hidden gems you can make all shiny and new with magic Apple pixie dust.
Last issue, I highlighted Rory Sutherland’s TED Global talk. Apparently TED liked him too, so they brought him back for a new talk called Sweat the Small Stuff. I like it, and it gives you some good thinking material.
Over on the work blog, I talked about three email marketing metrics that are worth paying attention to, and a whole bunch that aren’t. If you’re doing any email marketing, it’s worth a read.
Want to motivate a team? This short video, 212 Degrees (YouTube), has become wildly popular in the sales motivation world. It’s worth the three minutes or so of your time, and if your team responds to this kind of motivation, it’s probably worth sharing.
Finally, if you do any kind of web page optimization, you’ll want to check out and print out Search Engine Land’s READY conversion optimization checklist/grid. It’s the best, most compact way to look at page conversion factors that I’ve seen recently.

Stuff You Did

In the spirit of you get what you pay for, I’m paying it forward to the people who share my newsletter with your networks. This issue, I’m profiling two people who moved the needle. Jason Falls brought in the most new eyeballs (167), while Jenn Selke brought the most action with clickthroughs (43).

Jason, if you don’t already know him, is a whip-smart thinker on social media and one of the few people who can actually help you move the needle and make social media work. He’s also absolutely unapologetic about telling you that social media isn’t for you if it’s true. His blog is over at SocialMediaExplorer.com and you can follow him @jasonfalls on Twitter.

Dr. Jenn Selke is one of the leading scientists in coaching, development and behavior, and using vehicles like summer camps to get kids on the right track in life. Her research interests include: job satisfaction and job tenure, brain based education and training, and the use of technology by adolescents and young adults. Very cool stuff. Check her stuff out at JennSelke.com and TheCampDirector.com, and follow her on Twitter @jennselke.

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Back issues: personal newsletter, May 2010

Christopher S Penn — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 06:45:15 +0000

May 2010 Issue

It’s been rather busy these past few weeks since we last touched base. Blue Sky Factory and my personal blog have both been growing by leaps and bounds, with all kinds of great content, some of which I’m sharing here:

If you didn’t catch it earlier, Facebook and Twitter are sending out printable decals to select small businesses to promote their Fan Pages and Twitter accounts. Lots of people I know didn’t get one, so I wrote a Facebook Sign Maker and a Twitter Sign Maker one Sunday afternoon just for fun. Try them out, and if you like them, share them with friends and colleagues.
Have you ever noticed that people skimp on the strangest things? I wrote this after moving into a new office complex that didn’t have a coffee machine but had a laughably expensive printer/copier.
The morning economics numbers tweets are back, for those that missed them. You can get these tweets by following me.
Two TED talks you really should watch. The first is by Sir Ken Robinson on revolutionizing education. If you’re a parent who cares at all about the education your kids receive, watch the video. The second is an uproariously funny talk by ad man Rory Sutherland on intangible value. Some good brain food between the laughs.
My good friend and Warcraft guildmate Bryce Moore finally got around to opening a photo gallery. Go buy some of his prints. They’re well worth it.

Stuff You Did

In the spirit of you get what you pay for, I’m paying it forward to the people who share my newsletter with your networks. This issue, I’m profiling Mr. Mike Maddaloni. Last issue, he shared this newsletter with his network and brought in 28 extra readers.

Check out Mike’s blog at TheHotIron.com (“The Hot Iron strives to present unique content and perspective on business, technology and other topics”) and follow him on Twitter @thehotiron.

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Back issues: personal newsletter, April 2010

Christopher S Penn — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 12:44:50 +0000

April 2010 Issue

It’s been rather busy these past few months since we last touched base. I’m now over at Blue Sky Factory as the Vice President of Strategy and Innovation, which has given me a chance to create a lot more content, be speaking more often, and be generally doing more stuff. I thought I’d share some of the free resources I’ve created in case you’d like to partake of them and missed them on the blog (hence the title of the newsletter):

Power up your Twitter! A 4 minute video tying a few tools together for improved Twitter presence.
Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing eBook. A 29 page book I did with John Wall, my Marketing Over Coffee co-host. We did this as a special for Blue Sky Factory, but you can freely download it without registration at John’s blog now that the 30 day exclusive is over.
Optimization Summit session. I recorded the video of my presentation at the Optimization Summit on getting more juice out of your email marketing.
Why Personal Brand is Essential to Corporate Marketing Success. Probably the most popular of recent personal blog posts I’ve written lately. See if you agree in the comments.
How to Prepare for Facebook’s Project Titan. Probably the most popular of recent work blog posts. Again, see if you agree in the comments.

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Why I’m a little thankful for Facebook Groups

Christopher S Penn — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 13:30:22 +0000

Facebook’s latest implementation, Groups, has some quirks that are mildly irritating, such as the ability to add people without their consent and then flood their inboxes with unwelcome mail – a classic definition of spam if there ever was one. I will let other people with more influence and larger axes complain about the feature, because I wanted to say something else:

Thank you.

Not to Facebook, but to the many of you who have added me to a variety of groups. Why am I saying thank you? Because as badly implemented as Facebook’s technology has been, it has been revelatory.

It has been revelatory in the number of people who thought of me, unasked, as valuable enough to at least warrant inclusion in their newly formed groups.

It has been truly revelatory to see the variety of groups I’ve been invited to. The fact that so many have been about new media, marketing, and social tells me what you think I am proficient at, and I am greatly pleased that it is in alignment with what I try to provide value in.

These little things let me know that I’m doing stuff that matters to you, a sort of unsolicited testimonial, and for that I thank you. While I won’t use Facebook’s features until they fix the issues with them (no longer lend your strength to that which you wish to be free from), I thank you nonetheless.

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Marketing White Belt

Basics for Digital Marketers
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Watch me speak:

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I recommend:

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The obligation of the content creator

Christopher S Penn — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 10:51:11 +0000

How long does it take to scan a tweet? To read a blog post? To listen to a podcast? To watch a video?

Perhaps seconds. Perhaps minutes. Depending on what your content is and how much of it you create, you could be asking your friends, followers, and fans to give up incredible amounts of their lives to you. Think about it:

This is blog post #2,085. If it takes you 5 minutes to read a blog post, you may have given me as much as 174 hours of your life, or a full week and change.
I’m at tweet #23,461. At 5 seconds a tweet, that’s still 32 hours or more than a full day of your life that you’ve given me.
If you listen to my podcast, Marketing over Coffee, you’ve invested 69 hours or almost 3 days of your life.

That’s a lot of time you may have given me. I have an obligation as a content creator to provide something that is worth that time, because that 275 hours is time you could have spent doing something else, listening to someone else, paying attention to something more worthwhile. Instead, you’ve willingly invested that in me (thank you!), and as a result, I have an obligation to honor that commitment to you by providing you with stuff that’s useful, helpful, enjoyable, and hopefully powerful.

Guess what? If you are a content creator in social media, you have that same obligation. Your fans, followers, and friends that invest time in you are giving up, even if just for a little while, pieces of their lives. Your obligation to them is to give them what they came for and then some, provide them the value they want, whether it’s humor, business, marketing, porn, absurdity, religion… whatever it is that they value and have come to you for, your responsibility is to provide it and then some.

One of the biggest lies in social media is that it’s free. While bandwidth costs are negligible and devices amortize out over time to pennies a day, the one thing that grows more valuable every day is time. Social media is not free. Social media costs you as a content creator the time it takes you to create, and it costs everyone who listens to you the time it takes them to enjoy what you’ve created.

Our shared imperative, yours and mine, then, is to not waste people’s time with mediocre stuff. Every time we hit the publish button, we owe it to those folks willing to give up massive parts of their lives (a little bit at a time) to make it worth their while. Before you push out the next piece of content, ask yourself if it’s really worthwhile, and if it’s not, sharpen your pencil and hack at it until it is. That’s the only way to repay the debt we have incurred from our fans who are lending us their incredibly valuable time.

Is your content worth the lives it’s consuming?

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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.