Share with Care
Posted on 27. Apr, 2009 by Jason Chan in Social Media, Strategy
A recent post on Mashable got me wondering about the effect of diluting proprietary intellectual property when it’s shared through social networks, Twitter and the like. It used to be that quality of original thought determined whether or not you were making a valuable contribution, particularly in academia. This was valued above all else – and it generally still is – but today, what you decide to share and what idea you encourage through reposting, linking, retweeting and such, is another facet of value. Shifting from being strictly content creators to being content curators and sharers as well is a new responsibility that falls in our laps.
The question now is, what goes into determining the quality of what you share? I would say it involves the following:
Timeliness: Spread content that is fresh in people’s minds. It doesn’t need to be minutes after it happens, but do try to share it if it’s made the news or has reached critical mass on blogs/Twitter. A week after it hits the web is probably too late for anyone to care about.
Quality: Try to do a bit of due diligence before randomly re-tweeting or passing along blog posts. It behooves you to at least read to what’s being linked to if only to see if the link still works. Making sure it’s “safe for work” is also part of good sharing etiquette. Unless of course, you want to punk your audience.
Frequency: Regular posting is also important. Aim to share something good once/day for a couple of reasons. First, it keeps you in the minds of others, but also because it becomes habitual for you. If you’re on the web enough, there should be no shortage of valuable content to share and the hard part is actually editing it down to the few impactful items.
Relevance: Please, please, please describe why someone should be clicking on a link to a piece of content be it a blog post, news article, image or video. A dozen or so words to contextualize something will often save a lot of time and frustration.
There are probably more criteria I could add, but let’s use these for starters.
