Thought Leadership will drive companies to become leading librarians in their categories: Part II

Thought Leadership Times Blog (Jan 31 2010)

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  1. Thought Leadership will drive companies to become leading librarians in their categories: Part II

    In Part I of this discussion, I discussed the concept of the mostly forgotten role of the Librarian, as information processor, in the marketing process.  Exploring how librarians added value to organizations could highlight ways to managing the information deluge that currently encompasses B2B marketing executives.  In Part II, I will explain how marketers, as Librarians, can curate information into manageable, relevant information resources for their prospects, customers and even their industry.  It is my view that those marketers who effectively maintain relevant, comprehensive, resources of information for their prospects will deliver compelling Thought Leadership and drive more business to their sales teams.

    The role of the Librarian, as curator, is a very specific information processing role.  That role is to identify, collect, and share information that will be most relevant to searching patrons.

     Identify  

    The best librarians have access to hundreds, if not thousands, of information resources that deliver ongoing, real-time information on specific topics of interest to information patrons.  In Internet time, these will include RSS feeds, podcasts, saved searches and search filters that deliver relevant information for easy processing and sharing.

    Organize  

    Librarians must consume the information the curate in order interpret and best understand how the relevant information fits within their patrons’ information needs.  This means understanding the structure of content and the meaning of the content.  Expert librarians will be able to quickly process hundreds of documents of content, daily.  Some expert librarians would use tools that would organize content, automatically tag, deliver summaries, and rank content as needed.  

    Share

    This may be possibly the easiest aspect of the curating role of the librarian.  Sharing requires that information is easily available for patrons to acquire and use, as they need.  The Internet makes it very easy to publish resources online.  There are many tools that help support his.  However, the best marketing librarians will be able to both deliver quality search as well as be able to highlight the relationships between all information collected.  In this way, patrons can understand how all relevant information may fit together.  

    Curating in the Internet age is not difficult since there are many tools to help identify, organize, and share relevant content.  However, not all content curators of B2B information will be considered the leading industry resources for their companies.  Only those B2B marketing executives that successfully curate the most comprehensive information of their prospects will rise to the leading role of industry leader.

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