Category: Consulting

“One of my core strengths was to repackage information so others could take action.”  

Robin Hood, Wikipedia and Knowledge Nuggets: How to creatively grow your brand as an expert.

All about content aggregation, curation, composition and circulation.

Or the 4 Cs if you excuse “aggregation.”

Let’s say you do.

And pick up an earlier thread about making LinkedIn work for you.

LinkedIn offers the ability to convert content you’ve been curating into content you can repurpose to share.

Over the arc of my career it finally dawned on me that one of my core strengths was to repackage information so others could take action.

It slowly evolved as I grew from my role as an instructional designer into a chief knowledge officer.

At the heart of it is a process of “knowledge refining and manufacturing.”

Finding knowledge nuggets, refining them, repackaging them and selling them – as training, as consulting, as just-in-time tools, tips and references – at client locations or online.

In all my contracts I retained the rights, so I could build a suite of “repurposed” content customized to needs of the next set of clients without having to completely start over.

Consulting like knowledge management, some say, is a game of “Robin Hood.”

Taking from the rich – your former clients and giving (charging your fee) to the “poor” (those who desperately need your solutions).

Panning for knowledge nuggets wasn’t always as easy as Googling or jumping into the cross-linked curated pages of Wikipedia.

Really Simple Syndication or RSS made mining for nuggets in Internet streams fairly easy.

Once you found a news feed or website, blog or any other content you searched in your browser, you could subscribe to its feed by clicking on the RSS icon.

Like a subscription to “Sports Illustrated” or to any other magazine (remember them?), you received new content in your “reader” as it was published.

Social “bookmarketing” platforms like “Delicious” in the early days (2003) made it easy for you to tag, find and share compelling, entertaining and fascinating content from your RSS feeds.

Tagging replaced having to guess in which file you saved your favorite document to on your desktop, because you could assign multiple tags.

And social bookmarketing allowed you to find sites you that you saved in your work computer’s browser, for instance, but not in your home computer’s.

Delicious, like many “first-mover” companies trying to figure out how to monetize their platform, kept verging on the brink of going out of business, though.

Yahoo bought them (in 2005), but couldn’t figure out how to monetize them.

In the spring of 2011 the YouTube boys – Chad Hurley and Steve Chen — picked them up after leaving Google (AVOS Systems), but fumbled with their efforts.

In May 2014 AVOS sold Delicious to Science Inc.

And, Science like in the childhood game of hot potato, tossed them to Delicious Media who broke the functionality by returning to the original software while using advertising to support it.

We’re still waiting on the return to a functioning app.

New features came and went.

Full Disclosure:  I still have 21,086 articles sitting in Delicious, but to protect my investment in “nugget accumulation” – some say addiction – I’ve resorted to redundancy – spreading where the content resides to multiple “places.”

When Delicious finally goes belly up, I still can access critical “knowledge-products-in-process.”

Google Reader set a standard for aggregating feeds until even Google decided to exit the business.

In 2013 alternative mobile apps and platforms sprung to the top of critics lists —

• Feedly,
• Old Reeder,
• Netvibes,
• Newsblur,
• Digg,
• Swarmiq,
• Vortl,
• Totally.Me and
• Flipboard.

Some made it easy to share to with their social networks and save items to read later.

Others supported smart phones and mobile devices.

Some lacked mobile apps.

A few claimed to learn the types of content you preferred.

Some others skimmed search sites and Facebook and Twitter feeds for you.

There’s a lesson to be learned there.

Whatever it is, it’s just energy sapping and time consuming.

Frequently when you need it the most.

Steps:

(11) Maintain a consistent process of content aggregation, curation, composition, and circulation.

An excerpt from Book Two in “The Knowledge Path Series” dedicated to helping you make more money from a lifestyle businesses you’re truly passionate about.