Customers as Curators: Going Beyond Simple Reviews

My magazine reading is almost exclusively limited to what's offered in my Next Issue subscription. If you're not familiar with Next Issue, it's an all-you-can-read e-zine service featuring more than 140 titles. Sports Illustrated, BusinessWeek and Wired are just a few of the magazines I read in my $14.99/month subscription.

I recently received an interesting email from Next Issue and it got me thinking about how customers are evolving into content curators. Every customer won't do this, but a significant enough number will and it will lead to new forms of content discovery and consumption.

The email I got from Next Issue can be seen here. You'll notice that a Next Issue employee shares a link to her favorite stories on the outdoors in that email. I'm not exactly the outdoorsy type but even I was intrigued enough to click and read the recommendations. Why?

I've gotten so numb to all the automated, algorithmic recommendations in emails and on websites (e.g., "those who bought x also bought y") that I was curious to learn more. It just goes to show that human curation can still trump computerized curation.

Then there's the passion factor. Recommendations from an actual person have a more genuine feel than the sanitized, generic messages we're so used to seeing. Whatever your hobbies and interests are, you can probably create a more credible, click-worthy reading list than even the most sophisticated computer algorithm.

And let's face it: We are a lazy society, so we want others to vet articles, books, blogs, etc., before we waste our precious time on them. If Next Issue sends me a recommended reading list, even if it's based on my reading habits, it feels empty, void of any soul. But if that same list comes from an actual person, even an employee of the company, it has more credibility.

This all means that a publisher's most enthusiastic readers can potentially become on of its most influential sales and marketing resources. It's an opportunity for those readers to share their passion with others while also helping the publisher increase engagement.

This is the next evolutionary step for product reviews written by customers like you and me. Rather than having reviews sit passively on a website, waiting for prospective customers to arrive, they can be spun into active narratives, encouraging deeper engagement from existing readers/subscribers.

It's all about the personal curation though, and having a name and face accompany the message. It's also an opportunity for a publisher's biggest fans to take on a new role, but only for those publishers who are willing to give up some of their precious content curation control.