Automated Content Curation is one of the cheapest ways of "creating" content known to the geeky man. This automated process of stealing other content creators work, publishing their summaries (or first couple of intriguing paragraphs) and then promoting your website with their articles on it is down right wrong and should get you Blacklisted on Google.
Publishing and promoting others content on your website to make yourself seem more authoritative on a subject is smelly. Like gym socks smelly. Rubbed on a wet dog and then gnawed on by a stray cat. If you are into that kind of thing, check out Curata.
Curata will "curate" all of the stories from other hard working content creators that actually have meaningful things to say, and post their articles on your website in summary form. According to Curata, this makes you look like a "thought leader in your industry and will help improve your organic search engine rankings". I have asked several representatives of Curata how this helps improve organic search, but have had no answer. My guess is that they assume people will link to your summary of the original content creators work that is hosted on your website. Giving you the inbound link and screwing the content creator out of any SEO juice. Way to go "thought leader."
There are content curation systems that do work, like www.alltop.com. But alltop.com actually spends time and writes their own summary for articles. They hire a staff of human writers to write their own summaries of each article that they link to and publish. I'm willing to bet that it takes them more than 19 minutes a day to build their presence. This is the process of human curation. Which, although I am still not a huge fan of, is way better than automated content curation.
To summarize:
If you are using an automated content curation system to promote your website and make your brand look like a thought leader, you should probably either start praying to internet gods or start putting some human touch behind your curtaion practices.
Creating remarkable content and becoming a thought leader in an industry doesn't happen in 19 minutes a day. It happens over time with a dedicated content creation strategy fueled by social media engagement.
If you must engage in content curation, please first make sure that you do it manually, request the permission of the article authors, and frequently promote the other authors in your social media channels. After all, you owe everything to them because without em, you got nothing.
Photo credit: county_boy_shane
