Are your Social Media Managers adapting to Social Curation Tools?

First of my two part article on the growing challenge faced by organizations and brands to track & maintain their profile across diverse Social Networks that are mushrooming on the web and how to cope up with it.

Probably a few year ago there used to be only one online social platform required to stay in the loop, personally MySpace & Orkut were my favorite. But then, there came Facebook with better features and it even allowed me to “Poke” my friend apart from the usual stuff of sharing my Photos and Videos with them. After a year Facebook was virtually a capital of the World Wide Web, with addictive applications like Mafia Wars and FarmVille on it (I remember having some half a dozen pink and brown cows). So I abandoned MySpace and Orkut to become a strict Facebook user. It was a wonderful world until last two years ago!

Now there are diverse social networks that specialize in different parts of Social living and users are compelled in creating accounts without disbanding from previous social platforms. I’m sure this increasing number of social platform has become a nightmare of every Chief Marketing Officer / Brand Officers as day by day the chaos is increasing and it’s practically impossible to track every platform. More over users are dealing with a peculiar new challenge that was not experienced before – where to post what and how not to make it repetitive (as repetition of content would degrade its value).

Since such issues like this have begun to arise, it is time we learn to become “Social Mediators” or “Social Curators” – choose either of the term as per you convenience, it’s all the same.

Social Curation/Mediation is the user management of multiple platforms and the difficulties associated with them. Honestly this act of Social Curation or Mediation can only be discussed in theory as until now the actual mediation between different social networks has never ever happened. Like I had mention in the start of this article, until now users have only abandoned one platform to adopt another. But this would not be the scenario going forward, as everybody wants to leverage on the specialty of the diverse Social Networks.

The coming year would see a bullish growth in demand for Social Curation tools and processes that would help users to track & edit their various social profiling in a single window. In a layman’s term these Social Curation tools are a combination of Emails+RSS+Social Media = A Social Mailbox (Yuppie!!)

Some tools like MarketMeSuite, Storify, Projeqt, and likes have already proactively come into the existence knowingly or unknowingly of this challenge, but then there is a long way to go until we hit upon the perfect tool or Service.

These are Web tools which let users easily assemble multiple bits of social multimedia content.  Twitter updates, blog posts, Facebook content, and more can be hauled into a single stream, which in turn can be presented as a collection or story.  Put another way, these tools are another way to create slideshows and digital stories.

In my next post we’d go more into the details of Social Media Curation, its best practices and quality metrics to ensure that your business/brand does not become a victim of Social Media Catastrophe (refer my previous post to know more on this)