Content curation tools aid in developing user stories for agile marketing

About Steve Goodman

I'm an experienced marketer, world traveler, photographer, guitar player, blogger and philosopher. Currently unemployed.

Content curation tools aid in developing user stories for agile marketing

Mar 24

on March 24, 2013 at 4:58 pm

At the center of agile marketing methodology is the user story . User stories and maps or other depictions of the buyers journey are used to fuel, focus and inform agilemarketing projects (sprints), keeping them squarely directed toward customers and their requirements.

A good user story for the purposes of agile marketing must include a highly personalized and well articulated statement of needs, wants, and desires presented with as much clarifying context as possible to the marketing team (which may very well include non-marketing personnel from IT, sales and other departments) so that they can rally around developing, adapting and effectively communicating solutions that are highly relevant and perceived as having value and as being a good fit by customers.

Ive noticed quite a few articles and blog posts recommending the use of mind-mapping tools to document and visualize user stories and Id like to suggest another new class of powerful tools that can help aid in the formation, development and sharing of user stories: content curation tools .

Content curation tools allow agile marketing teams to quickly assemble and share collections of highly focused content that is relevant (eveninspirational) to topics for user stories. These tools (see list below) automatically search for and recommend content from blogs, video collections, presentations, news stories, social networks and other websites into highly visual lists of links and abstracted summary information that can then be manually edited, curated, commented on, saved and shared.

A carefully curated collection of articles, posts and tweets can not only help to document user stories, vividly highlighting expressions and conversations about market needs andcustomerrequirements, but they can also be used as a powerful reality-check mechanism tomethodicallyvalidate value propositions and refine adaptive marketing hypotheses that agile marketing experiments are based on. Specifically aggregated anddeliberatelycurated collectionsof content are an extremely effective way to document and distill real-world information that can be used to polish, refine, focus and sharpen user stories, instilling them with the strongest possible sense of authenticity and genuine relevance.

Give it a try and I think youll agree that content curation tools add tremendous value to the process of authoring effective user stories for agile marketing.