Lord of Curation Series: Maddie Grant

Our Lord of Curation series presents to you some of the great curators on Scoop.it. They are here to share their insights and advice with you.

Maddie Grant, CAE is the co-author of Open Community: a little book of big ideas for associations navigating thesocial web andHumanize: How People-Centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World. Maddie is also the lead editor for SocialFishing, one of the most visited and respected blogs written for association executives, where she gets to express her viewpoint as a classic Gen-X early adopter and “shiny new toy” addict. As the chief social media strategist for SocialFish, Maddie draws from more than 10 years of experience in marketing, communications, and international business operations to help associations large and small build capacity for using social media to achieve business results.  Find Maddie at www.socialfish.org.

-What is curation to you?

Curation is extremely important to me as an author and a consultant – I see it as a crucial part of my job, to be able to filter the best stuff from the web that is relevant to my social media clients and to the people who are going to be reading my books.  There’s so much out there, and so being skilled at curating digital content is something that will make any social media consultant like me better at what we do and better able to help people find what they need.

-What is your best curating secret?

Read, read, read, and from many different sources.  To keep an element of serendipity in my filtering process – in other words, I spend time basically surfing from one good blog post to another (via an interesting commenter, or a blogroll, or tweets).  Curating is not about posting the same stuff from the same sources all the time.

-How has curation enriched your social media experience?

I’m obsessed with it – I keep finding new topic areas for which I could group things that I read (just wait until I set up more Scoop.it pages!).  As social media matures, and there’s more and more specialization, the things I’m reading are becoming more and more interesting, and it’s only through curating and paying attention to trends in what people are talking about that I can become aware of new places to find great content – as well as get rid of the same old same old sources that were ok for the basics but no longer have any interest.

-Your Scoop.it topic illustrates your passion for humanizing organizations. How did this become one of your interests?

I’ve just written a book called Humanize: How People-Centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World with my co-author Jamie Notter.  Through our work with organizations who are getting started with social media, we realized that while social media has revolutionized the business world in a lot of ways – for example needing to be more transparent, more open, more innovative – our management practices have not changed.  And that’s creating a big clash.  The book is therefore about how we need to move from a machine world to a more human ecosystem.  My Scoop.It on the same topic has been an amazing resource for collecting lots of great blog posts from tons of different sources who are all pointing to the same thing – humanizing business.

The Lord of Curation Series is to be continued next week. Stay tuned!