I was wandering about Robin Good’s website and came across this article he wrote fairly recently on the difference between content curation and content marketing. Since I function as a little of both on a day-to-day basis, I was interested in what he had to say. To summarize the article, Good is basically saying that content curators curate with thought and care while content marketers market with the intention of selling/creating virality speedily. He also implies in the article that in the long run, however, content curators will prevail because of the effort they put into what they do.

While I do agree with his points to a certain extent, I think that the lines between content curation and content marketing are blurring. A lot of companies see the value in investing in quality content, and the people they hire to produce or curate the content do actually care for and love the content they are curating. On the other hand, many content curators (for example bloggers) tend to cross over into marketing once they decide to use content curation as a extra (or even primary) source of income. In fact, as a content marketing, I find his description of a content curator particularly useful in that I think it’s a good idea to always bear the traits of a good content curator in mind so that whether we are just curating for leisure or passion or to market, we are always pushing out useful, well-curated and thoughtful content. This is an ideal situation and it’s of course not always feasible but while I do not agree fully with Good’s arguments, I think there are many useful takeaways in this piece.