Minnesota-based Curation Station hopes to streamline businesses' use of social media
PrintCould there be an "easy button" for managing the sheer plethora of social media content?
Local developers of a new Web-based tool believe they have come up with one that will make the lives of corporate marketers and public affairs executives much easier.
Launched in late January, Curation Station LLC aims to automate the process of gathering and distributing social media content whether it is blogs, online video and audio, photos, Twitter feeds or just plain old news. Curation Station - the product and the company share the same name - was founded by some employees at Hello Viking, a Minneapolis marketing agency. Hello Viking is a reseller of Curation Station, which currently has a couple of customers using its product.
Curation Station is, in large measure, a feed aggregator, and there is no dearth of those in the marketplace: There is the Web-based Google Reader and there are desktop feed readers such as FeedDemon for PCs and NetNewsWire for Macs. But a spokesman for Curation Station, Tim Elliott, contends that none cater to the needs of corporate marketers charged with developing content for a blog, or keeping up-to-date with online chatter about their brands and then deciding what should be shared.
And that niche is where Curation Station intends to play.
Through Curation Station, marketers can gather social media content from all over the Web and create playlists, much like a DJ. Then from those playlists, they can curate what content is worthy to be shared and, with a click of a mouse, publish those curated entries for their own blogs or on any other site of their choice - in fact, the Curation Station box can be customized to look like a webpage; it could also be used to run as a self-contained box (in tech terms, a widget) on a website with a river of social media content.
Beyond RSS feeds
It is in this widget form that a Hello Viking client is using Curation Station. Alexis Hudson Inc., a maker of high-end handbags for women, uses the tool on the company's homepage. Recently, the top entry on the Curation Station widget was a blog entry called "Flat Broke and Fabulous" from the blog Miles of Style, penned by a woman who was so smitten by an Alexis Hudson tote bag that she had it shipped to her friend in America after learning that the company did not ship overseas. She wrote the blog even before her friend had actually mailed her the bag.
Another entry on the Alexis Hudson's Curation Station widget arrived via a direct tweet from an equally giddy handbag aficionado with the Twitter handle @NanFuscoJewelry. The tweet noted how the user craved the $925 Bijou handbag describing it thusly: "Ohh, it's gorgeous! and I love when accessories can be worn multiple ways... "
This combination of blog entries and tweets helps to keep the homepage dynamic, and highlights how customers are interacting with the Alexis Hudson brand.
"This is a good example of a how a brand would use Curation Station," said Tim Elliott.
However, as Curation Station developers have found, brand marketing is not the only application of Curation Station. St. Paul-based public affairs firm Goff & Howard is also working with Curation Station developers to create a slightly tweaked version of the product for its own internal use in monitoring social media communications for some clients.
What appeals to Mike Zipko, an account manager at Goff & Howard, is Curation Station's ability to pull in information from any website that may not offer RSS feeds and the fact that in one click, information can be instantly shared with clients. For instance, let's say Zipko collects a 100 social media items on a particular issue and realizes that 20 of them are useful. Previously, the only way to share that with clients would be through e-mail. Now, with one click he can send that information to a password-protected, encrypted site meant for internal company use.
"We have an effective way to share that with them and it gives us the ability to quickly say, 'Here's what's going on and here's what we think it means, and if you want to take a look at it, here you go. '"
Zipko declined to say for which of his clients he would use Curation Station. Goff & Howard's website lists many clients, including Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota, Minnesota Credit Union Network, Hamline University as well as large national companies like Pfizer and Wal-Mart.
The relatively cheap cost of using Curation Station is another attractive feature - the company charges $700 a month for 5,000 "station loads" - one station load equals every time the Curation Station feature is fired up on the page. In other words, every time a Goff and Howard client load the page containing the Curation Station box, or each time the Alexis Hudson homepage is visited leading to the loading up of the Curation Station widget, that's equivalent to one station load, explained Elliott, the Curation Station spokesman. There is no limit on the number of items making up the widget, however.
Compare that to one of the most recognized tools in social media monitoring and measuring, Radian6, which charges based on the number of users and not traffic. In an October interview with Finance and Commerce, a Radian6 executive said that each user pays $100 per month and businesses pay $500 per month for a topic profile that companies set up to monitor and measure.
"Some of these other services are great, but sometimes the client work that we have may not justify these significant fees," Zipko said, referring to Radian6. "The brand may not be Coca-Cola and the issue made not be a national one; it may be very localized but you still need to be able to create a way to pay attention to what's being discussed. "