The Value of Content Curation

AI thought of the day: First, generative AI makes it blazingly fast to generate astonishing amounts of material, written and otherwise. I'm genuinely blown away by its capabilities. Second, that material is initially impressive on the surface .... but on close examination, it turns out to need a lot of coaching and curation to be truly good. This includes lots of finish work to dial it in for your message, goals, and audience. For compliance material, that means coaching, coaxing, and refining to improve the creative quality plus deep expert review to catch the compliance and/or legal nuance. Conclusion: As AI makes content production a commodity, content curation + expert review will become a far more rare and valuable skill.

I use AI to help create content that I share here on LinkedIn. So why should you follow me? Anybody with an LLM can produce content. But the value isn't in the creation — it's in the curation. You should trust that I won't ever share anything that isn't grounded in my ideas and backed by my 25+ years as a marketer and martech specialist. When I work with AI, the core insights are always mine. I'm the one deciding what's worth sharing, what aligns with real-world experience, and what actually works. And this isn't just about LinkedIn posts. It’s a shift in where value lives in the Age of AI. Think about a court reporter. AI could transcribe every word, but we wouldn’t trust that transcript in such a critical use case. In the future, perhaps courts will use AI to help, but we won’t call it the official record until the court reporter puts their name on it and says "this is what happened." Their credibility transforms raw output into a trusted record. Or consider consultants using AI for deep research. The value isn't in producing the report, since AI makes that easy. The value is in their review of the output, their stamp of approval, their willingness to stake their reputation on the findings. In a world of infinite information, people are increasingly "whitelisting" their trusted sources. When an AI can create or summarize any piece of content, nothing beats a trusted source saying "this is worth your time" or an industry influencer vouching for some content. The source of the content becomes as valuable — or more valuable — than the content itself. THE NEW CURRENCY OF CONTENT In the Age of AI, three things matter more than creation speed: 🎯 Taste — knowing what's worthwhile vs. what's just noise 🤝 Trust — the relationship you've built with your audience  ✅ Accountability — putting your name and reputation behind the work As AI creates more generic content, humans will get even better at tuning out the noise. We’ll start following fewer sources, but will follow them more closely. We won’t be evaluating every piece of content independently, we'll be evaluating the source and then trusting their filter. THE TAKEAWAY As AI makes content creation nearly free, human curation becomes priceless. The person willing to say "I stand behind this" becomes the filter in a world drowning in information. The question isn't whether AI will get better at creating content — it will. The question is whether you're building the taste, trust, and expertise that makes your stamp of approval worth following. What's your take? What makes you worth following? #AIContent #ThoughtLeadership #B2BMarketing #ContentStrategy #MarketingTechnology

Taste and framing. Two skills that matter more when anyone can generate copy or code in seconds. LLMs have accelerated output production. Everyone's writing content and shipping products faster than ever. But speed doesn't always equal value. If anything, we're drowning in more noise than signal. My take: two skills are becoming increasingly important in this "age of AI." 1. Taste – the ability to recognize quality and match your output with an intuition about what your audience needs. 2. Framing – the act of establishing context, whether you're setting up a story for readers or crafting a prompt for an LLM. You structure the inputs and the journey that leads to meaningful output. These skills can't be automated (yet?). They come from experience, understanding your space, and caring deeply about the problem you're solving. Over the past two years of running SaaS Weekly, I've developed taste for what makes SaaS content worth reading. Every week (give or take), I hand-pick quality articles and practice framing the content into growth summaries for readers. And recently, I decided to turn my context into code. (pause for dramatic entrance) Introducing the SaaS Archive: a curated database of the best content on how to grow your B2B SaaS business. Three years of newsletter curation, organized and searchable. The site is built with: • Lovable - for the mvp and new features in staging • Cursor - for continuous code edits/refinement in production • Vercel - for hosting and deployment management • Statsig - for analytics and user journeys (plus, cool experiments eventually) It's a pretty good start! Let me know what you think. Linked below.

Are we drowning in a sea of content… or are we just missing the lighthouses? Interviewing Silicon Valley Legend Guy Kawasaki for The Non-Obvious Show inspired me to revisit my approach to social media. During our chat about his social media strategy, Guy shared his direct perspective: "I don't consider myself much of a social media content creator. I consider myself a curator… My role is to find interesting, useful stories that other people have written and promote them." In our digital age, the art of curation is more crucial than ever. When done properly (with full attribution and respect for the original creator!) curation can: ➡️ Cut through the noise, helping people find what matters. ➡️Add valuable context and spur innovation by connecting seemingly separate dots. ➡️ Build trust and credibility by consistently sharing high-quality content. ➡️ Amplify diverse voices, helping important messages reach wider audiences. Guy's focus on curation, despite being a renowned author and speaker, underscores its importance. Even as we strive to create original content, we shouldn't underestimate the value of thoughtfully sharing others' ideas. How about you? Are you more of a creator, a curator, or both? And how might embracing curation change your professional impact?  _________ To listen to the full episode and my interview with Guy, click here:  https://lnkd.in/etkihhXx