Media have changed in ways that now make aggregation essential in order to cut through the overwhelming volume of noise out there and concentrate on content that is relevant to your audience. It offers an opportunity to create real value to your clients by doing the job for them and providing content from your industry that is relevant, interesting and beneficial. There are now some great sites and apps such as Pinterest and Flipboard that potentially point the way of web use in the future. To really benefit from these opportunities it is still essential to have a clear and concise strategy outlining what you are trying to achieve so that you do not allow the technology to drive the process and end up with a jumble of confused content. Here are a couple of things to think about before you start looking at the options:
1. Automated or human-driven?
The easiest way to get into aggregation may simply be to create an automated feed of the latest headlines from other news sources. That brings new information to your site and doesn’t add any workload.
But it’s far more useful to involve human editors as it provides that extra filtration that it is very difficult to automatically replicate.
2. When and where will you post aggregated items?
There are two ways to approach this: Mix individual aggregated items in with your other news reports, or create a separate blog or other space dedicated to external content. We are recommending to a couple of clients that they should create a quarterly update. Campaign Monitor has recently launched an aggregation service taking content from relevant blogs and eBlasting it via "newsletter" to the mailing list at predetermined times.
3. Choose what to aggregate.
Valuable aggregation does two things well: It discovers relevant news stories and highlights the most relevant parts of those stories.
The most valuable sources to aggregate are ones your audience may not otherwise read. Think of news sources that may be smaller or less widely read than yours, or that cover a different topic or geography. Try to identify sources whose coverage is tangential to yours — close enough to be relevant once in a while, but not so similar that your readers probably read it already.
How can you do this? The best tools are to subscribe to RSS feeds for key sites and then cast a wider net by subscribing to Google News Alerts for important keywords.
4. Should you simply link or summarise?
This may be the most debated aspect of aggregation strategy.
Aggregation that sends readers directly to the original piece is fairly uncontroversial. More controversial are summarised aggregated stories that provide little reason to read the original version. If you take this approach, the business advantage is that more readers spend more time previewing, sharing and discussing the content on your site instead of the original site.
5. How do you decide among multiple sources?
For some stories, there will be several sources you could choose to aggregate. You should think through in advance how to handle this. Go with the first story? Go with the most complete story?
If each contains some unique information, the best option would be to link to all of them from one place. It’s best to link within the story text in a way that the reader knows what each source is contributing.
6. How can you empower your users?
Once you begin a good aggregation strategy, your site will attract loyal users who appreciate it. Some of them will want to help.
If you have the development resources to customise your site, you can add features to enable users to suggest stories to aggregate or vote for which ones should be featured prominently.
