Every Company Can Be a Media Company

If there's a universal truth in the digital age it's that there's too much content and not enough time to consume it. Naturally, a challenge this large and far reaching is creating opportunities for innovators.

That's where digital curators come in. They separate digital art from junk. Whether they're automated or human powered, wide or narrow in focus, curators save us time. And that's valuable script anyone in business should follow - in any industry.

Scott Beale is one such curator. His company's core business is web hosting. But Laughing Squid is far better known as a curator of interesting, odd and - above all - unique finds in culture, art and technology.

Each day Beale and his team of three full-time curators syndicate 30+ of these gems across a number of platforms. These include Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Tumblr - which Beale describes as "a slower, more visual Twitter."

Beale shared over lunch recently in New York City's Hell's Kitchen that while Laughing Squid generates advertising revenues via The Deck ad network, the hosting business remains the company's bread and butter. And arguably, their dedication to thoughtful curation has helped the Laughing Squid brand grow so much that now it's one of the more popular options for Wordpress hosting.

The lesson here is that any company can potentially benefit by thinking and acting like a media company - as my colleague David Armano describes. However,you don't necessarily need to create original content.

Scott Beale and Laughing Squid are showing how saving people time through curated content can be good for the bottom line. And this approach can and will be replicated by others in the years ahead.