The Arbour Media Blog

One of the oldest gimmicks in marketing and academe is to try and make an old idea seem new and different by dressing it up new words.

The point to the exercise is, of course, that if the marketeer/salesperson/huckster/PhD candidate can convince you something is new and different, then it’s easier to sell it to you—it and all the tools, accessories, and training that go with it.

One example: The Heath brothers added duct tape to Aristotle’s more than 2000-year-old Rhetoric and got Made to Stick. The old idea is that there are some tested ways to be persuasive and if you study and learn them you’ll be more persuasive. The Heath’s repackaging of rhetoric led to a best-seller (and, yes, they’ll sell you the Made-to-Stick training).

Now comes along the idea of video curation.

What’s video curation, you ask?

As near as we can tell it’s aggregation of of video at a website by someone with enough expertise about the subject matter of the videos to judge the accurate from inaccurate, the true from the false.

We need video curation, we are told, because we are confronted with so much information these days we just need help sorting out the wheat from the chaff.

Of course there is a book and website, Curation Nation, that explains how this idea is the solution to the “Data Deluge” (alliteration is important in Curation Nation) is now essential to business and how it will make you rich, or at least help you not succumb to the competition.

Of course the author of the book, Steven Rosenbaum (“a passionate advocate for the power of curation to return balance to our lives, a new ‘human powered’ focus to the web” we are told on the book’s website) will be happy to come speak to your organization or at your event.

Of course there are curation tools and services to buy. There are now even curation platforms.

“Curation” is a current business buzz word and a growing industry, it appears.

What’s the old idea here?

Editors and experts are useful people to have hanging about. They can sort out and organize information based on the credibility and authority of its sources. “Curation” is good because, other things being equal, it’s better to pay attention to information that’s true more than information that’s not.

Implicit in this old idea is another: if you want to attract attention in a way that will build long-term relationships and trust, take care that what you say is credible and can withstand editorial scrutiny.

Truth is multiplier.