Information Explosion of Social Media
Our response to Zack Brandit – Share Your Brand’s Passion forum on LinkedIn
- What path follows the social Media information flow?
- Company’s communication flow has mostly been one sided. Does social media inverse the flow starting it from the consumer side?
- Or does the whole dialogue process introduce a new flow which has no real source or receiver?
I could write a thesis on this, but I’ll try not to…
The world has changed. Until recently, organisations produced information and everyone else read it. The web was an extension of the brand and it was largely a one-way communication process, at best two-way. That is the flow to which the first question refers.
As for the second question, social media does not alter the direction or introduce a new flow, it replaces the flow with an explosion!
Now, if you want to find out about something, you are more likely to seek out Wikipaedia than to consult a corporate website. If you don’t agree with what you read in Wikipaedia, you might amend it. That will get referenced, copied and republished in other places. You will also use Google to seek out relevant forums or blogs. You might ask for information through forums as well.
In short you will seek information on your own terms and change it by publishing opinions about it as you go. You may go further and publish a tweet, a post, a comment on FaceBook etc. In this way the information evolves and moves on, perhaps now with a negative connotation.
So information placed on the web does not stay still. You can drop a comment on a blog which will tag into any number of other blogs. You can find articles, forums or comments which are blog-rolled or bookmarked from all sorts of other sites. Information finds itself being aggregated through RSS feeds into many other places on and off-line. The routes to, from and through the information become impossible to predict and track. It is not flowing from one place to another like a river in two dimensions it is exploding in all directions and not necessarily from a single central point.
Imagine the web-sphere out there as a matrix (which it is). Information can be placed onto the matrix either singley (e.g. on a blog) or plurally (blog + website + newswire + RSS + Twitter + YouTube + etc. + etc) where it automatically explodes across the matrix. It gets indexed by search engines, replicated, copied and changed, republished via RSS, picked up as topics in blogs and forums, commented on further and so on until often contradictory variations of it exist in many places at once.
If it is ‘important’ (or sensational) information the ‘explosion’ will be more powerful and the information will occupy a greater volume of this matrix and will evolve more as more people have opinions, change it and move it on.
There is no clear template for a strategic approach to managing information in this scenario. But as readers now publishers around other information, so publishers should become readers of their own information and find a way to enter into the dialogue it creates.
