So, your brand has a Twitter feed, blog, Facebook page, etc.

Do customers want you ambushing their online conversations to talk about the products and services you provide? Probably not. But they will be inclined to let you join their conversation—if you add value.

Welcome to the world of content curation. The process involves finding content—from among the great tides of online information—that you can funnel into your own commentary for the benefit of your audience(s).

How can you wade through it quickly and effectively?

Here are four ideas:

1. Cadmus. Twitter is an amazing tool to find information. Problem is that reading every tweet in your timeline is impossible. Cadmus is a tool that highlights the most popular stories in your network and enables you to filter through the noise on Twitter. Basically, it hands you all the important stories in real time by analyzing your Twitter timeline. Cadmus is fully automated, takes almost no time to set up, and updates itself every time you log in.

2. RSS readers such as Google Reader, MyYahoo, Netvibes. It’s the most obvious tool for finding content, but it’s largely overlooked. If you are an active reader of posts and news online, you probably use an RSS reader to keep track of your favorite sites. Your RSS reader is a pool of information that’s there for the sharing.

3. Storify. This is a clever tool that enables you to collect photos, videos, tweets, and more, make a story out of them, and publish it anywhere. For more information and a good review, read Mathew Ingram’s post, “Storify wants to pull stories from the stream.”

4. E-newsletters. We all have a love/hate relationship with e-mail newsletters, but some of them are pretty great when it comes to providing great content. It’s just a matter of signing up to the right ones in your niche. [Ed.’s note: PR Daily is a great one. Just saying.]

Antonia Harler works at Paratus Communications in London. A version of this story first appeared on the Paratus Communications blog.