Reading over various prediction posts about what will be ‘big’ in social media in 2012 I can’t help but chuckle a bit when people talk about curation being the next ‘thing’. Curation on the web is not new, it’s just now more accessible and packaged much better.

Curation has been around since the start of the web. Before fancy browsers like Mosaic if you visited a little site called Yahoo on your Lynx browser this is what you saw.

Reading over the initial focus of Yahoo it was curating the web. Trying to find things of interest and grouping/classifying them together in a common thread.

Fast forward a number of years and the self-publishing revolution of blogs comes into play. Now anybody could curate (I mean publish) content. By anybody I mean the early adopters who harnessed the power of the blog. Sure they published opinions, rants and daily journals, but they also began to meta-edit and curate.

The next steps were sites like Del.icio.us and Ma.gnolia.com (remember that one?). Bookmarking, clipping, curating, whatever you wanted to call it became even easier. Tagging provided another layer of meta-data. An initial list could now be segmented and sorted in different ways. People began to pay attention to not only what people wrote, but what they bookmarked. However, there was always an extra step involved. Bookmarking services didn’t pull in content, you had to visit each site. The list of sites was in a single place, but the content was disjointed.

Blogging and other self-publishing platforms continued to evolve. They became easier to use and more casual users began to embrace them. One of Tumblr’s core elements if the re-blog, not just linking to another page but the ability to re-use content from another user. Now curated content could be viewed in a single thread.

The evolution continued with dedicated services like Storify and Paper.li. Brand’s ears perked up when institutions like the Washington Post began to use Storify to evolve their content models and engage with users.

Of course the ‘hot’ new service today is Pinterest. Users such as my nieces love the ability to create an on-going custom view of their interests and share with their friends. In some ways I reflect back on the explosion of MySpace and the ability for basic users to customize their profile as an extension of their personalities. As much of as web design nightmare as that was it drew in users.

With Pinterest and other services the ability to curate and view content is a smooth and somewhat elegant experience. Add in the social layer and the ability to Tweet, share on Facebook, etc and you have a potent mix. That all fuels tremendous growth and interest.

However the notion that this is something new is a fallacy.

Maybe we’re reaching a tipping point for mass-adoption or curation with Pinterest, but for those of us using Twitter back in 2006, we thought the next year, or the next year would be when it really took off.

Castle on a Clear Day – Walt Disney World, a photo by hyku on Flickr.

Testing out Flickr’s new photo sharing feature.

Update: Hmmm, it works, but the largest photo size option available is 500px, and with this new layout I’ve been using 640, so for now I’ll still do it the old-fashioned way.

Update 3.30.11: Well the acquisition of Radian6 by Salesforce.com certainly ties into this post.

I say this all the time; a brand will ask “How will you measure this program?” our response, “How do you currently measure your existing programs?”

Sometimes we get a good answer, but often it’s not a clear answer. If the organization has an existing methodology in place to measure the effectiveness of programs, why not try to plug into this existing system? It’s not always easy though.

There is no lack of data and tools to document activities on external social networks, but what we focus on is crossing the membrane intact. Going from off-domain to on-domain and aligning the data to give real insights and value.

The internal/existing measurement problem is either rooted in technology, or communication. We often see the communication issue. The corporate communications team isn’t always in constant talks with the analytics team and may not know the depth of measurement available to them.

While the social media industry moves forward with new services and richer analytics, linking them back to internal systems is still a hit or miss proposition. Services like WebTrends and Salesforce are paving the way to link on-domain and off-domain activities into a single view and the hope is more vendors get very serious in this space.

The problem is stated in a simple question: How effective is social media compared to other traditional forms of communication? Let’s try to look at the data….if it’s available. The majority of the time social media wins by default since there is more data available, but it’s not always a fair fight.

This get’s back to my post from yesterday, we work off the data we have available, and not the data we don’t have.

Hey look a SXSW post. No not really. But it does start there.

One of the panels I attended was the “Measuring Social Media – Let’s Get Serious,†session. At Voce we’ve been focusing on measurement as a core program component for a while so it’s been interesting to see the rest of the industry evolve. This evolution is occurring at the service level with a number of different tools available, the agency level and somewhat at the brand level.

During the measurement panel my new colleague at Porter Novelli, Israel Mirsky asked a rather pointed question about data integrity from Twitter. Namely who has the fire-hose of data. Too many services are only using the API, which only provides a sub-set of data, and calling it ‘Twitter’. It’s not a complete data-set. As Israel points out:

The other holy grail for many is cross-platform analytics, that is taking data from all the social media services and mashing them up to make sense of a larger picture. There is no shortage of data, but it is complete and can you trust it? Lastly the goal is to make sense of it all….externally and internally……more on that in a second.

The big news was released yesterday, Voce has been acquired by Porter Novelli. Exciting things ahead!