Like many people, I was glued to my computer and smart phone much of last Saturday monitoring news of the massive earthquake in Chile and awaiting, with morbid anticipation, the possibility that it could trigger deadly tidal waves in other parts of the world.

As the predicted 4 PM arrival of the first tsunami on Hawaii’s shores approached, I turned my attention mainly to Twitter. Three years ago, it probably would have been CNN or the New York Times, but Twitter brought a dimension to the coverage that I couldn’t get anywhere else: thousands of perspectives from around the world.

A tsunami is a visual event, a fact made clear to us more than five years ago when videos of the tragic waves that swept across Indonesia were posted on YouTube. News junkie that I am, I wanted to see the events in Hawaii in as close to real time as possible.

Instead of clicking around to various websites or hunkering down with one and hoping for the best, I was able to monitor a constant stream of advice from people pointing their followers to WebCams, live news coverage and reports from observers at the site. Most of these sources would have been unknown to me if it weren’t for Twitter. It was like having 1,000 eyes watching the media for me. Thankfully, the fears turned out to be unfounded.

No media organization would have delivered this many options for monitoring events. In fact, media organizations are hard-wired to do the opposite; an NBC affiliate would no sooner send viewers to a CBS station than a Ford dealer would send a prospective customer to buy a Toyota. But when the collective eyes of a geographically dispersed crowd are put to work without a competitive agenda, they can deliver a tapestry of views unlike anything we’ve ever seen.

Curative Value

This story dramatized to me one of the realities of new media landscape that I think will have huge implications in the future: curation is an increasingly important part of the information value chain. Wiktionary defines curation as “The act of  organizing and maintaining a collection of artworks or artifacts,” but today the term applies equally well to information. Think of it: a decade ago we had relatively few sources of news about what was going on in the world. Even in the first decade of the Internet, we still relied mainly on traditional media for the story.

Today, three billion people carry around pocket-sized devices with built-in cameras, many capable of capturing full motion video. Some can even upload videos in minutes to a server. It won’t be long before wireless live WebCams are ubiquitous.

No longer is our problem lack of information; it’s that we’re drowning in information. That’s why curation is so important. Trusted curators who point us to the most valuable sources of information for our interests will become the new power brokers. Matt Drudge figured this out many years ago and a host of popular aggregators like BoingBoing.net, Digg.com, Metafilter and Fark.com have been building upon it with great success for more than five years.

Twitter adds a new dimension because it introduces so many new voices to the process. But Twitter is also imperfect; its great shortcoming is that no one can possibly keep up with it all. Another opportunity for curation.

Marketers should take this trend into account. Creating new content is important, but an equally valuable service is curating content from other sources. This demands a whole different set of skills as well as a new delivery channel. It also means ditching the “not invented here” mindset that prevents content creators from acknowledging other sources.

In a cacophony of voices, the leader is the one who can make sense of the din. That’s a role that any editor — or business — can play.

As the social media gold rush has accelerated over the last two years,a lot of marketing consultants have signed up for a Facebook account, launched a Twitter stream and declared themselves to be social media experts. But knowing the basics of how to use the tools is nothing like knowing how to create and promote engaging content that attracts the constituents you need and deploy it in the right places.

Social Media Group of Dundas, Ontario (near Toronto) was creating social media campaigns long before they were fashionable. Founder Maggie Fox (right) is one of the sharpest strategists I know in this area. You don’t sign up clients like these unless you know your stuff. That’s one reason I asked her to contribute an essay to my latest book.

Last week, Social Media Group delivered a document into the public domain that any organization that’s evaluating marketing agencies in this realm should read. The Social Media Request for Proposal (SMRFP) template lists questions you can ask prospective agencies to separate the brains from the bozos. An important part of the template asks about experience with specific social media channels. This is important because client organizations increasingly need to spread their activities across a range of platforms in order to reach customers and business partners where they already live.

I’ll admit my eyes bugged out a bit when I first looked at this document. It’s exhaustive. But I don’t think the point is to bend an agency over a barrel to answer every single question. Choose the questions that are most relevant to your situation because nearly every possible question is here.

Any agency that fancies itself to be a social media expert should get to work answering these questions now. I have a feeling that they’re going to keep seeing them in client pitches for some time to come.

Maggie did a good interview with Shel Holtz last week explaining the purpose of the template. There are no licensing terms. Grab it and go.

I just posted an entry on the ShopTab blog about why social media is The Small Business Owner’s Unfair Advantage. Let me know what you think!

Last night I attended the public launch of Book of Odds, a website that fulfills a need that I’m not sure exists with an operating model that’s reminiscent of the early days of the Web.

Book of Odds is about the likelihoods of everyday life. It can tell you, for example, that the odds that a white female will die from an accidental drug overdose in a year are one in 25,360 or that a major league baseball player hits for the cycle about as often as a pitcher throws a no-hitter.

Interesting stuff, and if Book of Odds were a doctoral thesis, I’d say bravo. But this is a company with a significant investment behind it. “For the past three years, away from the eyes of the world, we have logged over 50 man-years to produce what we believe is the missing dictionary,” wrote president and founder Amram Shapiro in an invitation to the event.

Fifty man-years is at least a $2 million investment by my calculation. It has produced an impressive resource that is unfortunately built on a top-down model that is rapidly passing from the earth. Book of Odds’ more than 100,000 statistics are the work of “talented researchers from top universities,” according to the FAQ page. Whereas most Web startups today are built on a crowdsourced or do-it-yourself model, Book of Odds has opted to make decisions about what it believes visitors need to know.

It has also invested in dozens of original articles created by professional writers who presumably don’t work for glory. There’s a staff, offices and the company is hiring. Who’s paying for all this?

That’s not clear. Book of Odds is privately funded. Marketing manager Ian Stanczyk told me the business is based on advertising and sales of branded merchandise. For example, you can have any odds statement emblazoned on a t-shirt. Assuming the venture has already burned through at least $3 million in startup costs, it’s going to need to sell a lot of t-shirts. Meanwhile, ad-based business models are a tougher sell than media stocks these days amid the glut of inventory.

Will They Come?

Equally baffling to me is the question of where the audience will come from. Book of Odds has some interesting information, but little that I would call essential or even compelling. Deriving value from its more than 100,000 statements requires an appreciation of the contextual and predictive value of statistics. I suspect that only a tiny percentage of the mathematically challenged American public will be up to the task.

I asked Stanczyk what market research the company had done to establish a need for its service. He couldn’t cite any, but he noted, “How many times have you asked yourself, ‘What are the odds of that?’” To be honest, not that often, and when I have, I’ve rarely felt an urge to rush to the computer to find out.

There’s no question that we need more tools to understand the statistics that continually assault us. A resource that mined public databases to create context from raw numbers could have great value. I would think that 50 man-years invested in building such a tool could yield something really useful. I’m not sure that Book of Odds is it.

I don’t mean to be too hard on the company, and I’ve certainly been wrong before. After all, I thought Meetup was a dumb idea when I first heard it. There is clearly passion behind Book of Odds, and the company’s About and FAQ pages suggest an almost academic rigor to its mission. The founders have created an impressive public resource that they’re giving away for free and they deserve our gratitude.

But the media geek in me says that this is a newspaper launching in an age of blogs, a 1999 business started a decade too late. The company will have to overcome big challenges to become a viable business. Fortunately, its staff is well-equipped to calculate the odds.