Every sales speaker and every sales convention is singing the same theme – in order to be effective in gaining new customers and keeping the customers you have you must give them what they need, and that is help. Jill Konrath coined the phrase “crazy-busy” to describe buyers and their daily routines. If you are able to help lighten their load a bit, you just might win a new customer.
There is a lot of information streaming through the social web. Tens of thousands of Tweets, white papers, blogs, YouTube videos and the like are created every day. The challenge is being able to filter the data and format it so it is easy to read, be able to archive it for future reference and be available in multiple formats based on where want to access the information.
Content Curation might be worth taking a look at. It has been said that content curation is the antidote for information overload.
Respected analyst and author Patricia Seybold has gone so far as to call content curation “The Next Big Thing” back in January. She states “Information over-supply and customers’ short attention spans have created the perfect storm for a new genre of tools. Our customers are swimming in a sea of undifferentiated, unfiltered information. Every brand owner wants to provide authoritative information on the topics our customers care about. But our own internal experts now vie with third-party experts, passionate fans, uninformed bigots, and a cacophony of noise for customers’ scarce attention. It’s not enough to provide authoritative information on our Web sites. We also need our content to turn up everywhere our customers hang out. And we can’t rely only on our own internally-generated content. Customers trust third-party sources and each other more than they do the brand owner.”
Storify.com is one of the leaders in this new genre of tools. Storify provides an easy to use, flexible tool that allows you to gather information that you feel is relevant to your customers from sources across the web, and package into a format that is helpful for your prospects and customers.
I liken it to having a file folder or bookmark where I put information I come across that I think my customers would appreciate. Storify provides a way to organize all that information, add your own commentary if desired, and distribute in an easy to read format. Storify is the glue that brings all these social media elements together easily. By using their search interface and doing some simple drag and dropping, you can create information in an easy to read format, using any content that is online and publicly available. Every element you drag in keeps the original links live, so you don’t have to worry about attribution. The interface is easy to use and the result is simple and clean.
With Storify, you are provided a multitude of information sources to pull from including:
- Flickr
- YouTube
- Storify
- URL’s
- Slideshare
You can become THE information source for your industry with your prospects and customers.
Storify is one of the most flexible and innovative curation web tools that I have found. I have been using it regularly since early March to capture the core information from significant events in the Sales 2.0 world including Sales 2.0 Conference Day 1 and Day 2 Recap and Jill Konrath’s Sales Productivity Summit with Daily Recaps for Day 1 and Day 2. Those recaps have been read by thousands of interested readers,
Storify is currently in a beta stage and is available by invitation only. They have provided readers of Fill the Funnel with 100 invitations. If you are interested in trying Storify for yourself, browse to Storify.com and enter“sfy57” after clicking on the “Have an invite link?” They will go quick, so act now.
If you would like to see Storify in action, and to learn a few best practices, register for a brief 30 minute webinar being held on Thursday, March 31 at 1:00 pm EDT/10:00 am PDT
Additional resources to learn more about content curation:
- How Storify works-as told through Storify
- Why Content Curation Is Here To Stay
- LinkedIn Is About To Make Headlines