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Yes, this title is a corny attempt to play on the popular skit from the first Portlandia episode. But the reference got your attention, so let’s proceed… 🙂

I’ll admit it. I love Portlandia. My wife has family from the great state of Oregon and so when I was living in Pullman, WA while getting my Ph.D. at WSU, we traveled to Portland numerous times. I love the city and I can’t help but miss it every time I watch an episode.

A recent blog post on the Portlandia page on the IFC website highlights a New York Times article about chefs feeding chickens high-quality feed in order to produce super tasty chicken. The brief post mocks the issue, using it to share a funny clip from a Portlandia episode where two characters humorously attempt to order a chicken meal at a restaurant but get caught up in the details of how the chicken was raised (asking questions such as, “how big is the area where the chickens are able to roam free?”).

In this case, the folks behind the Portlandia IFC blog do a simple thing very well: they curate content. They take a news story and relate it back to their show in a wonderfully creative and funny way.

Content curation is a great content marketing tool (see my other content marketing posts) for anyone running a social media campaign. Convince and Convert defines content curation as “the art and science of finding and sharing quality content on a specific topic. Curation helps you build an audience. You then have a larger group of people with whom to share your own content, and who can spread the word.” (Check out Convince and Convert’s “5 steps for content curation success…eventually“) . In other words, the social media team monitors the web for relevant content, and uses that content to share it directly with their audience, uses it to create their own content, or relates it back to their own content. Sharing relevant content directly with your audience builds your organization up as a trusted source for information on a subject and is further beneficial because it is hard to constantly come up with new content. It is also useful for new story ideas for creating your own content (like in the chicken example discussed on this posts).

I talk about content curation in my classes but struggle to find great examples to show students just what can be accomplished via curation. I’m glad to have found a fun example that students will hopefully enjoy.

Posting relevant content on IFC/Portlandia website or social media accounts often keeps Portlandia fans engaged with the show, remembering favorite skits, and looking forward to more (such as the new season, season 4 due out next year!). For example, the Facebook Portlandia page often posts single shots with text in a meme style of particularly funny moments from the show.

In my opinion, few do it better than this.

photo of Portland credit: – Paul Horner

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