The Curation Economy and The 3C’s of Information Commerce | Brian Solis

Several years ago I had the privilege of working with Steve Rosenbaum, author of Curation Nation. Back then Steve was already vested in the future of online curation and his grande conquête was playing out with Magnify.net, a realtime video curation network. At the time, he was also a staple at some of the tech industry’s most renown conferences sharing his vision for social, video, and curated content. As Steve was completing his new book, he asked if I would write the foreword. At the time I was finalizing the new version of Engage! and as a result, I couldn’t make his deadline. But nonetheless, I was inspired to write an honorary foreword that I’ve held onto to celebrate the official release of Steve’s new book.

I share this digital foreword with you here…

The Curation Economy and The 3C’s of Information Commerce

I always appreciate when a very complex and important subject is simplified to ease understanding. Curation is no exception. The truth is that for several years there were two kinds of people in social media, those who create content and those who consume it. Historically, creators were among the digital elite, the so-called digerati, as only a small percentage was actively dedicated to creating. But there’s a world wide web out there and everyday people consuming social content dramatically outnumber the digerati.

Forrester Research tracked how people adopt and use social technologies through its Technographics research. In 2010, Forrester observed that almost 70% of people using social media simply consumed content. They did not comment. They did not post. They kept the information they found online to themselves. My personal research would later show that if something was worthy of sharing, email served as the distribution of choice over any form of public sharing.

Creating original content, consistently over time, is daunting. While content platforms are designed to make publishing uncomplicated, these tools still required time, understanding and also a tremendous amount of energy spent on audience building. The sacrifice hardly warranted the return. After all, it’s very unrewarding to spend time creating something special over and over only to have it constantly debut to crickets. To join the ranks of the digerati or even that of content creator required a substantial investment, one that most could not afford.