Top 10 Reasons Why Content Forwarding As Content Curation Lacks Click-ability!

1. Thank you, dear LinkedIn member, for forwarding me, albeit sometimes indirectly, a great piece of content with its original headline and an embedded link to the complete article – but I wonder if you might have actually read it yourself?

2. If you have indeed read it, you could have prefaced it with a brief summary of the article’s value – something more meaningful than its headline – that would actually compel me to click through and read the article as well?

3. More importantly, as a member of my network, I value your insight so I would like for you to tell me, even if it’s very briefly, why you think this article is worth a read?

4. If LinkedIn simply “forwards” me on average five articles a day from each member in my network, I would have to read hundreds of pieces of content, which you would agree most of us don’t have enough time in a day to do? (Note: given the way LinkedIn’s “three degrees of separation” works, I recognize that this content forwarding might not actually be initiated by one of my connections, but I still get the update in my timeline, anyway. So this article is, in effect, my general plea to all LinkedIn members.)

5. In any case, I must therefore pick and choose to read what I perceive as the very best pieces of content – but sometimes an article’s headline is deceptive, so it would help if LinkedIn members added a succinct preamble to explain why they think a specific piece is a worthwhile read?

6. In fact, a single insightful comment on an article in my LinkedIn Updates timeline often draws my attention to the piece as opposed to its numerous “likes.” In this regard, readers might want to check out an old post of mine, “Top 12 Reasons Why ‘A Comment is worth a thousand Likes.’”

7. So while Jay Baer’s article, “Content Curation – 5 Ways to Succeed… Eventually,” lists some of the key curation musts, he overlooks what I have listed in the points above – the why… is this content worthy of my time?

8. So while Ken Lyons’ article, “26 Free (or Free-to-Try) Content Curation Tools,” provides me valuable knowledge on these mostly automated curation tools, it lacks mentioning the importance of human insight into curated content – again, the why… is this content worthy of my time?

9. Then there are LinkedIn Influencers… even when I don’t follow them, my connections simply might “like” some of their content and it gets funneled into my LinkedIn Updates timeline. My bad… so I sometimes take a peek and there goes a few precious minutes of my mining time for other more worthwhile curated content. And occasionally, it makes me wish that some of these Influencers would, “stick to the knitting,” as Tom Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr. recommended in their classic 1982 book, “In Search of Excellence.”

10. Last but not least, I fully recognize that this is a free country, so I can choose to ignore content that I come across but don’t want to read. Yet, since LinkedIn is a business network, my humble suggestion is that we need to share relevant content with more than an intention to simply inform. Also, in this age of information and content overload, is it not fair to expect your professional network (LinkedIn and connections, et al.) to play a more value-added role than the post office?

Finally, in a July 2011 post, “Top 5 Myths About B2B Inbound Marketing,” I had made reference to a phrase, “character of your content,” using a slight variation of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous phrase. My altered phrase is also valid in today’s frenzied content curation world because it helps to know why the “character of your content” stands out over that of the other content out there. From a content marketing standpoint, it could always be the one that just might turn out to be a game changer? So using a slight variation of President Reagan’s “trust, but verify” phrase, I would like to conclude by saying “Curate away, folks, but justify!”