Curating content isn’t something that we normally associate with business. Heck, curating content isn’t something that I normally associate with anything. But let’s talk about it- informatics are growing in importance for businesses small and large, every single day.
Before we get into this, I should point out that I’m hoping to join Thoora on a temporary basis to fill in for their community manager, who’s going on maternity leave shortly (yay!). As part of my tryout, the company COO asked me to write a short descriptive article (not specifically for my, or any, blog) on Thoora’s potential role in the workplace. I could just as easily have emailed the article to him, but after really diving into Thoora’s features over the past few days, I decided to post the article here because I feel the service has significant value to offer the small business community.
Shall we begin?
The internet is a raging nightmare of stuff, too large for any of us to digest individually- videos, pictures, tweets, posts, IMs, and written words in a hundred languages and a million contextual situations. Back in ’94, the web was a simple place with only a handful of big content publishers. Now, not so much.
We no longer find the news, the news finds us.
Problem is- with the massive wash of content now available online (some 30 petabytes will be accessed this month alone), it’s getting real tough to find what you’re looking for on your own terms. Simple keyword searches return some relevant results and other not-so-relevant results. Enter Thoora.
The concept behind Thoora is a simple, yet powerful one: management of keyword results by real people. The platform features a smooth social layer, allowing individuals to share the topics they curate through their own social networking accounts and feeds, essentially contributing to the personal authority conversation in a very relevant way.
Great, but why does that matter for business?
Environmental scanning.
The big boys of the corporate world have been throwing money at research firms for decades in order to stay on top of market and industry trends. This helped to ensure the dominance of large MNCs. Since the rest of us don’t have much in the budget to spend on outsourcing market research, we tend to handle it on our own. Using Thoora to filter the vast quantity of information on the web allows a single person (or team) to effectively curate relevant information- which Thoora then uses to refine the search results that it delivers. The algorithms in use are very intuitive; I found increasingly relevant information being returned after sifting through and rating a single page of search results.
Not only does Thoora quickly begin to deliver increasingly relevant search results, it can also serve as a single content access point- quite valuable in ensuring that a department or working group is consistently on the same page regarding industry news.
But, don’t take my word for it- go try it our for yourself. If you’re into mobile technology like I am, also check out Chul Lee’s curated topic on the subject.