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Week 2

Week 2 - Determine topic, goal and target group

There are basically 2 entry points to get involved with content curation:

Entry point 1 - You want to get involved in a new topic that is important and relevant for your professional / private development You are searching for new information, books, experts, processes, etc. The question arises how you can quickly and efficiently get the right and relevant information and develop competencies.

In this case, it makes sense that in a first step you obtain recommendations on the topic from known and proven informants and knowledge nodes from your own network (analog and digital). This is the first quality filter that you can use yourself quickly and easily.

Based on the recommended content (books, seminars, blogposts, articles, YouTube videos, etc.) you can delve deeper into "your" topic and build up knowledge. By putting together individual knowledge building blocks and generating and sharing something new, such as an online article, video or podcast, you learn quickly, effectively and purposefully. When you share your learning process with others, you learn even faster.

Goals of the Curator:\ Familiarizing yourself with a new topic that is very relevant in your professional or private life, or because there is a new problem that you need to familiarize yourself with quickly and efficiently (possibly also as a team).

Entry point 2 -- You are the expert for "your" topic and want to prepare it for others.\ You have an expertise on a topic, collect information, blogposts, videos and podcasts and pass them on to a community in a filtered and useful way. It is a topic in which you are very knowledgeable. Your knowledge and reputation allow you to judge which content is right, valuable and "worth reading". You do your target group a favor by putting together the right content, putting it into context and recommending it so that they can quickly and effectively inform themselves and develop the topic with you. This can happen internally in a company as well as for a specific target group or colleagues from your networks.

Example www.weiterbildungsblog.de - Weekly trends on continuing education topics with a brief summary and assessment by well-known corporate learning expert Dr. Jochen Robes.

Goals of the Curator: Self-learning by filtering, assessing and further processing information on one's special topic, e.g. in a blog, thus showing one's own expertise and further developing oneself - and at the same time giving other experts or potential customers the opportunity to contact, discuss and exchange ideas and projects.

Kata 3: What is your topic and with whom would you like to share your learning?

Answer the following questions:

  • What kind of curation do you have in mind? Are you an expert or a learner? Why?

  • Do you curate primarily for yourself or for a group of people, a network?

  • If you curate for others, who is your target audience? Can you describe them? What makes your target group tick?

Deepening kata:

Do a target group analysis based on learner personas: Can you characterize one or two people who are typical for this target group? Tip: Use the learner personas template to describe the people individually.   Here is a simple template as a PowerPoint file:

Persona_Vorlage_Deutsch.pptx

Deeper analysis with your target group\ If you want to go one step further, develop a detailed persona draft - the following guide from the startup environment of Gründerszene shows you how this works: https://www.gruenderszene.de/operations/persona-personas-entwickeln

Kata 4: Formulate the goals of your curation.

  • What do you want to achieve?

  • What exactly is your topic?

  • Are you active on social media? Which channels do you feel comfortable on?

  • Where would you start sharing your curated learning experiences?

Good ways to draw attention to your curation on the social Internet are, for example, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest or Xing. Within companies, intranet sites that are well-structured, allow social interaction and are accessible to as many colleagues as possible are suitable, such as enterprise social networks like HCL Connections, Microsoft Yammer, social wikis like Confluence or SharePoint sites.

Example of a goal formulation:

This year I would like to deal intensively with the topic of dealing with "data and data security". So far, I haven't given much thought to what happens to my data and what the consequences might be - but an example from the Süddeutsche Zeitung got me thinking -- here's the link to it: https://www.sueddeutsche.de/digital/smartphone-datenschutz-tipps-android-ios-1.4716498 My goal is to understand and optimize my own digital activities, both at work and in my private life, in terms of data security, and to make my family and colleagues at work sensitive to the issue. I want to formulate my experiences on an external blog (www.medium.com) and share it on the intranet (our enterprise social network Yammer) and on Twitter and Linkedin.

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