Curate – to take charge of or organize.

The DigitalEYE Media team wants to share some insight into this curious word.

Content curation is the method through which millions of social networking users collect and analyze information and turn it into ‘intelligence.’”  

Curating content basically means that – out of all the content you find on the Social Web – you pass on what you consider to be the most valuable information to your network. Curation involves finding, storing, enhancing, publishing and otherwise making it easier to share valuable news and information assets, including opinions and recommendations about brands.

Social intelligence gathering meets content curation in real-time platforms like StoryCrawler, designed to search and gather user-relevant news and information across social media, news articles, blogs, RSS feeds and search engines.  The application’s content curation feature is intended to help users quickly find content for republication on Web and mobile platforms.

StoryCrawler’s proprietary algorithm analyzes content being shared online. Each piece of content is given a score based on how viral it has become. This analysis of crowd-sourced content can provide additional insight into what’s trending online.

“Social intelligence has to move from quantity to quality,” said Sree Nagarajan, founder and CEO of Colligent, Inc., Redmond, Wash., a social network data collection, research and analysis company.

“Nowadays every brand has a million fans. As the race continues, more and more fans are approximating the general population and diluting the uniqueness that brands stand for,” said Nagarajan.  “Focus needs to be realigned to engagement – commenting, photo posting, retweeting and so on – not just casual affinity with likes or follows.”

Social Intelligence Software Tools

In Nov. 2009, NetSuite launched InsideView for NetSuite, a product the company called the “first entry” into what it described as the “social intelligence software” market.    InsideView pulled data from social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn into its CRM and ERP apps.   Today, newcomers have joined the party.  Other company names that show up on Google searches for “social intelligence” include:

1. Awareness, a provider of on-demand social marketing management software (SMMS), markets The Social Intelligence Dashboard.
2. Claritics provides social gaming and social commerce analytics as a service using a SaaS model. Users embed Claritics Restful APIs into social applications to gather the raw app level events that are processed to deliver actionable analytics.
3. Crimson Hexagon, a social intelligence company supporting media, financial services, advertising, government and public affairs organizations, markets the ForSight™ platform.
4. DataSift is a data analysis company that provides developers and third parties with access to Twitter, Facebook and other social data sources.  A re-syndicator of real-time Twitter data, DataSift is focused on producing state-of-the-art data-filtering technology.
5. Gnip is a company that gathers public social media data such as posts to Facebook fan pages and tweets from dozens of social media sources.  Gnip, which delivers analysis on more than 90 billion social media activities each month, has partnered with Tumblr to pull in social data from Tumblr’s 50 million plus blogs.
6. Telligent Analytics is an enterprise collaboration and community software company that reports on social activity, allowing users to identify top contributors, evaluate networks and track user participation. It also surfaces key performance indicators (KPIs) like time-to-solution, answer rates, most viewed pages and most popular downloads.     

Part I: Social Intelligence—BI Meets Social Media Data

Part II: Social Intelligence—Gathering Social Media Data

Part III: Social Intelligence Drives the Shaping of Online Content