As Does the Museum Curator, So Does the Savvy Marketer – Interview with Pawan Deshpande, CEO of Curata

At this year’s White House Correspondent’s Dinner, President Obama made a remark to Arianna Huffington. He quipped, “I’d be remiss if I didn’t congratulate the Huffington Post on their Pulitzer Prize. You deserve it, Arianna. There’s no one else out there linking to the kinds of hard-hitting journalism that HuffPo is linking to every single day.”

The President’s comments were in jest of course, but more than that, he made an observation about the current state of effective journalism. The Huffington Post earned its award by developing a following of devoted readers. The kind of readership that led the website to rack up more than a billion page views in December of 2011. One of the secrets to the site’s massive traffic numbers is the sheer volume of stories and blog posts it publishes–over 1,000 every day. This is all curated content.

Like a museum curator does to artwork, the Huffington Post is doing to compelling content. But the proven practice isn’t limited to companies the magnitude of $315 million AOL acquisitions. Even the little guy can curate and create his own stellar collection of engaging stories with the help of good tools.

Curata is a content curation solution that automates the tedious tasks of searching, organizing, and publishing content, while still delivering the centralized control of evaluating, contextualizing, and publishing it. I met with the company’s founder and CEO, Pawan Deshpande, at the Content Marketing Strategies Conference,hosted by Dlvr.it. His technology is helping companies in today’s online world do what The Huffington Post example proves effective. “In a recent survey we conducted with nearly 400 marketing professionals,” Deshpande says, “we found the majority were challenged by creating original content (66%) and having enough time to do it (99%).”

Content aggregation and particularly curation are two skills that modern internet marketers need the most. But with limited time and resources, the task can be challenging. Curata enables marketers to find, organize and share existing online content from third parties. Deshpande explains, “Users can publish original content via email newsletters, a blog, microsites, widgets, feeds and social media channels all in the time it takes them to have their morning coffee.”This is effective for building readership, as brands that are publishing relevant, contextual content establish themselves as the go-to resources on a specific topic.

Today’s readers are overwhelmed by the vast ocean of content available, and good content curation enables them to get to what they’re looking for, in a single location. That’s part of the reason curation is such an effective marketing strategy for today’s brand leaders. Everything you’re seeking to read in single location, delivered by a tool that collects everything a marketer would want to publish in a single location.

Curata has a simple, intuitive interface and is easily integrated into a company’s existing web presence. Curata sets itself apart in its ability to enable marketers to find, organize and share the best most relevant content online in an extremely efficient workflow. Deshpande assures, “Behind the scenes, we have a rich content processing pipeline for procuring, analyzing and sharing content that minimizes the overhead of content curation for our customers.”

Curata wasn’t originally designed for marketers. In fact, when Deshpande started the company back in 2007 out of graduate school at MIT, his idea was to enable anyone to build personal websites on subjects about which they were passionate. He recollects, “My “ah-ha” moment was realizing that that it was marketers, not the everyday individual who were starved for content.” This eventually led to developing Curata technology as it functions today – a solution for marketers to engage with their target market through curated content.Curata is now offering a free trial to learn and experience what it’s like to curate content on behalf of their brand. Users can start curating content within 10 minutes by following a simple setup process. And if you really want to get good at it, you can download the company’s free eBook: 5 Simple Steps to Becoming a Content Curation Rockstar.

So give content curation a try. As President Obama sardonically said of the Pulitzer Prize winning Huffington Post, “And you don’t pay them [for the articles]– it’s a great business model.”