The Challenges of Social Sharing, Why I Worry More About Relevancy Than Privacy
Social sharing is a major behavioral shift. We are constantly answering questions like “Where are you? What are you doing? What are you buying?”
Sharing information allows one to show their personality, and connect and collaborate with others across the globe based on a mutual interest in a topic. In our hyper connected and information filled world, finding and sharing great content targeted at specific groups or audiences, is a skill that is increasingly important.
Even news publications, who sell online advertising by getting traffic to their site, are looking to increase the amount of offsite links included in news stories. Everyone is jumping on the curation bandwagon.
Ok, so now that we agree on that, here come the challenges–
If you’re a brand how do you share and create content that keeps the interest and attention of all of your customers?
What is the right mix of news, press releases, and content from other sources that will keep your audience on the edge of their seat?
Oh, you also have to mix in replies to customer service requests and intelligent banter with your current and potential customers?
This whole social sharing thing is starting to sound a bit more challenging.
From a personal perspective, you have many friends with a variety of interests. How do you appease all of them with a Tweet, or by sharing a blog post on Google Reader or Facebook?
Regardless of the larger privacy issues of the social web (What you want the world to potentially see, and what you do not), the question of relevancy is becoming increasingly important.
How do you control what you want some friends to see and not others?
In all honesty I’m less worried about Facebook having control over my data, then I am about clogging a high school friend’s FB stream who has little interest in me or digital culture.
How do we solve these issues with social sharing?
I think that individuals are going to become more aware of their sharing, and group both friends and information by topic and interest.
How cool would it be to just share an article about soccer only with your friends who cared about soccer? Have a deal that you found in Chicago? Easily share that deal exclusively with people who are currently in Chicago, and no one else. Just as brands and media companies alike have had to increasingly focus on targeting and relevancy, people will begin to do this with personal accounts and information.
What are the larger implications?
Every individual will begin to think like a media company, asking themselves questions like, “who in my network should I share this piece of content with? How do I make this quip or joke interesting to the majority of people who are reading my streams?
So here’s my question for you, if each individual begins to think of themselves as a media channel, how does that affect behavior? Will it change the way we interact with the world around us?
Posts that inspired this:
Confusing *a* Public with *the* Public
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