Content Curation has been a hot focus area for me recently both in my digital marketing class and in our digital marketing consulting. So, last week when I came across a new content curation software called Rallyverse thanks to Douglas Kerr’s post about “Feeding the Content Beast,” I was immediately interested to find out more.

I was able to chat with one of Rallyverse’s three co-founders and VP of Business Development, Gabe Bevilacqua | @gabe_bevilacqua. Gabe, a former Microsoft exec, joined forces with Joe Doran and Guy Dassa a little over a year ago to take the simple idea that “content is your ad” and turn it into a business.

Brands Use Content Curation To Tell Their Unique Stories

The basic idea behind Rallyverse is pretty simple: rather than navigating the broad stream of information overload, Rallyverse narrows the stream to relevant content for its users and tees that content up for publication. “Unlike traditional advertising, creative social media engagement is about branding…it’s about allowing brands to tell their stories” Bevilacqua said.

Rallyverse provides the tools to get any organization curating content quickly and easily. The software is unique in that it has its own spidering service and popularity index of articles. Not only is the curator seeing the most popular content, the software learns based on their decisions with the goal to eventually be able to auto-publish.

In today’s marketing, speed is the name of this game, and from the marketing perspective, there are “millions of people, millions of sources and millions of pages.” This software allows curators and/or editors to find relevant content fast and pass onto their following quickly.

Content Curation Cuts the Noise

In the giant rushing river of constant data, networks are creating their own systems to filter the streams. For example, Bevilacqua said, “Facebook is curating content through Edgerank.” But while algorithms can filter some of the noise, an equation can never replace the decision structure, commentary and personality of a human filter, which supports my notion that you, the content curator, are the content that you curate. Your personal or corporate brand is the content that you publish to your “following.”

Effective content curation allows brands to match “relevant content with the needs of the audience and explore untapped consumer opportunities,” Bevilacqua said. While information growth is following Moore’s Law, consumers are likely to tune out sources that are adding more noise at a moment’s notice because there simply isn’t the bandwidth to consume any more useless content.

The days of simply sharing links are drawing to a close, Bevilacqua quite pointedly said “If you don’t engage, you are just a human bot.” Spitting out links without voice and personality is pointless. Each unique audience is looking for importance in what you share, so taking the time to think then share pays rich dividends of trust.

Content Curation vs. Search

Obviously, social as a whole is rivaling and sometimes beating search as a top referral to websites. So, I asked Bevilacqua what the future of social and search looked like. “It’s not either or” he said, “there is a natural relationship between search and social…social helps search and search helps social.” He really emphasized the point that the Internet is moving from and index to a stream, which I found to challenge the traditional metaphor of the relationship between the two.

Final Observations

Most of this article focuses on more of the theoretical aspect of curation, marketing and the future of social. In addition, I demo’d the product and found it to be an excellent enterprise solution. Here are a few notes and screencaps:

• The content collection funnel is customized and proprietary. In other words, the engine isn’t build on the top of hundreds of Google Alerts.
• Like Paper.li, the Rallydeck promotes content to the top of the curation funnel that is most trafficked. Again this is custom to Rallyverse.
• Based on user selection and publication, the software learns patterns of editorial choice and filters content accordingly.
• This is an enterprise software so the minimum entry point is pretty steep, but the cost benefit is realized in the time savings of using the software.

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