Yay! Instagram launched web profiles, and mine, as you can see, is dominated by food! Which meant that I was completely blown by what Zomato did with the Instagram API at Zomato.xxx. If you haven’t seen it yet, now would be a good time. Try to have a full meal before you take a look. One of the bugs in this version is that it makes people hungry. I don’t see them fixing that bug soon! 😉
It’s not really an original thought, since I’ve seen at least one fashion brand use hashtags on  Instagram and Twitter to generate photos, but that doesn’t really take away anything, since the execution is extremely good.
I wrote about the reemergence of branded content last week. One way is to create your own content, the scalability of which is debatable, unless that is one of the organisation’s core competency and priority. The other way is curation. Like I have mentioned on the blog before, curation is a great way for brands to engage with content producers and at the same time, provide  great content to those who consume it. It’s not really creation vs curation, but more of their respective share in the strategy.
On the execution front, crowdsourcing works best if you make it as easy as possible for the for the content producer. In Zomato’s case, adding a #zomato to the food snaps I load on Instagram is hardly a task. The simpler the task is, and the more it is an add-on behaviour than a new one, the lesser the need for incentive. The cooler it is, the more people would want to be a part of it. It distributes itself.
In a traditional media dominated era, more money was spent on distribution than creation. Now content is marketing and with owned platforms, and earned and ‘sponsored’ media on social platforms, the costs of distribution have fallen. There’s a lot being written about content strategy for brands from a creation perspective, but the costs of distribution fall even further in curation because content creators would want to show off their work. The hope is that brands will spend at least a part of the money they’re saving, into creating platforms, processes, tools etc that make it easy for the user to create and share ‘branded’ content.
until next time, co-curation is for later 🙂