This vagueness in the concept has been one of the reasons that last year, Michael Bhaskar published his book titled Curation.

Although many people expect to read about curation tools and technics, he has devoted a major part of his book to the philosophy behind content curation.

Here I have collected some of the most important points of his definition of content curation.

Definition of content curation

In Bhaskar’s words,  curation is where the acts of selecting and arranging add value. .

He also notes some other important aspects of the content curation:

Bhaskar stresses the point that most of the times, the content curator is not an official position in the organizational chart. In fact, it’s more often an emergent property of the organization.

He believes that the curation concept should be considered more seriously as a fundamental value-creating activity in the organizations. Despite the fact that most of the times, there’s not a straight path from the curated content to the financial outcomes.

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It’s strange but true that we have not a precise definition or conceptualization of the term. However, we use it as noun or adjective nearly everywhere in our books and conversations.

What do we mean when we use the term social? Social Sciences. Social Networks. Social Media. Social activities. etc.

The affective turn edited by Patricia Ticineto Clough is one of the most insightful books I have read in this regard.

Besides all collected papers mostly belonging to The Future Project, I love the definition of the term social quoted from Brian Massumi as the opening of quotation of the first chapter:

Each self-reproducing system in this generalized production of order out of chaos combines modulations of what could be called, broadly, the “political” dimension… the “economic” dimension… and contributes in a way that could be called “cultural”…For lack of a better word, the chaotic cofunctioning of the political, economic and cultural dimensions could be dubbed by the “social” – Although all of these designations are fairly arbitrary at this point.

It seems that when there is a complex interrelation between politics, economics and cultures which none of them are recognizable as the most dominant factor, we prefer to use the term social.

Now it’s the time to rethink all the terms and phrases we have used with the word social

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To reach to a definition of content strategy it would be more practical if we think about non-strategic content creation and delivery.

In other words, first I’d try to describe what content strategy is not! 

So, let me start with a list of the most popular symptoms of non-strategic content management. Then it would be much easier to conclude a definition of content strategy.

I would try to describe each of the above points in more details:

 So now it’s easier to make a practical definition of content strategy:

The process of creation, storage and distribution of content based on a well-organized content plan centered around a clear intent and tailored for the specific content audience, monitored and managed based on clear measures of success through the whole content life cycle.

The content strategy is responsible for designing the content identity in terms of structure and style and recommending it to all content generating departments.

Any successful content strategy should be feasible. Not only covering its costs but also generating a sustainable stream of revenue for the whole organization.

But don’t forget that to implement the content strategy, all of the organizational activities should be aligned. This is only possible when there is a formal organizational structure behind. In a small or medium company, it can be managed easily through documentation and regular meetings. But in large organizations, there’s no other choice than assigning someone outside departmental boundaries for coordination of the all content-related activities. The role I already discussed as CCO or Chief Content Officer.

Sure my definition of content strategy is not the only one. Just take a look to the list of content strategy definitions provided by Bussolati. But I had a reason for making my own definition of content strategy. As it seems in most definitions, the concepts of content and strategy  are lost in the digital or web-related terms (Rahel Bailie is a clear exception).

In most of the definitions in the Bussolati list, definition of content strategy is centered around making a better user experience or a better search appearance. Or even in some cases the content concept is explicitly limited to the digital contents.

In future articles, we will take a detailed look at every term I’ve used in my definition of content strategy.

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You retweet an interesting quote from Albert Einstein which I have tweeted last night and will tell me that I have enjoyed the quote and retweeted it. Most of us forget that we are generating some extra contents in this process.

Let’s take a look at the other contents transmitted, besides your favorite quote (you can click on the image to see the larger version):

 Some of the above data such as the bounding box coordinated and may not be so interesting for you. But there are much more amazing data attached to a single 140 character tweet.

The same story holds true for every single piece of content we create. When you like a post on facebook or Instagram, besides this single like, you have generated many other data which the time of action and ip of your connection are just the most obvious ones.

The same happens when you make a pdf or word file on your computer and the author name and creation data and many other data are also written in your file. Even in a single photo you have taken with you camera, there are other information stored, including but not limited to: time of taking the photo, type of the camera and exposure setting.

Metadata can be defined as data about the data as it is stated in wikipedia article about metadata. This term was originated in the 1970s when database and database management became a popular practice. The database was supposed to be filled with data, but database managers had to store some descriptions about that data too.

With the enhancement of digital storage technology and emerging new content types, the concept of metadata received more attention.

NISO has published a very helpful document called understanding metadata and three different types of metadata are introduced there: Descriptive, Structural, and Administrative.

Metadata can be produced manually or automatically. Title of this post is a descriptive metadata I have chosen by myself. Tags I have added to this post (data, metadata, definition) are other descriptive metadata provided by me to ease your access to the other similar content in this blog.

Publish date and post url (http://www.shabanali.com/en/?p=501) are samples of the automatically generated administrative metadata. Table of contents in a book can be considered as manually created structural metadata as it has no new data, but it helps the reader for better understanding of the book structure.

Content strategists prefer to use the term metacontent instead of metadata as a more general term, although metadata is still a much more popular term.

After this introductory article, in future articles I will talk about current metadata trends such as:

• Our faster move toward data explosion as the unavoidable consequence of the automatically generated metadata
• The rise of big data analysis and thirsty analysts looking for metadata everywhere
• The threats of privacy for most of the web users as they are becoming prosumers without any knowledge about by-products of these newly emerged small content factories.

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