In the old days, before ‘Curate’ was a marketing practice, sharing your competitor’s content was blasphemy. You might read it and discuss it with co-workers. But you would never even imagine sending it to your customers–much less exposing it to thousands of potential customers and prospects through social channels.
Why would I help that *$#%?
That’s still the attitude in some organization. The closer to Enterprise, the more sensitive they will be to sleeping with the enemy. Here a few considerations for doing just that:
1. Consider the curation source. For example, a recent story in the Harvard Business Review was authored by a big fish competitor of a Content Carnivores customer. They were reluctant to enhance the reputation of their competitor any more than it already was by being in this publication. (Note: If the company or author inspires knives and thoughts of malice, of course we won’t recommend sharing.) But in this case, HBR kind of elevates anyone who participates in their content. They also do a terrific job of content marketing by re-distributing them in LinkedIn Pages, Groups and Discussions. Even better, they track their stories and wrap the best up in several email digests and LinkedIn updates and share with a new round of people. Additional benefits might include a little Social Authority, depending on how deep you link this. For example, if the story inspired even a short blog post with the link to the source you start to spider into new organic territory. We might even forget that the original story byline bio in small print at the end was from a dark force!
2. Stand out by standing next to competitors. It’s tough to get the right audience to look at the right piece of content. Why not go to a place where they are already going? In the case of the HBR story, the competitor has sent around a quality story and placed it in a quality online venue. All you need to do now is stand up in that circle and make yourself known. One more thing: be yourself, and if possible, be cooler than they are. But also be genuine, generous and a grateful visitor. There is fine line between adding your cool POV and starting a flame session. Then again, it depends on your strategy.
3. Remember the original spirit of the internet? It was free for everyone. That included opinions. And yes, everyone has one. However, keeping the original spirit of free and open discussion even among competitors makes us all more interesting. It’s pretty simple: You can’t be an opinion leader without voicing your opinion. The easiest way to stand out from your competition is to agree and disagree with them in an online dialogue. There might even be a little shock value. For example, anyone who has curated and shared a competitor’s story has received an email that goes something like:
Take that down immediately!
One could look at that as career suicide. Or one could look at it as a viable way to get internal higher-ups to recognize that there is a content strategy in place.
That said, some companies do not have the stomach for sharing content from competitors. And that is just fine. The internet is awash in free, engaging content–much of it not attached to any competitor or other villainous source. All one needs to do is find the good stuff.