Originally posted at Harvard Business Review
The digital landscape is being reshaped by the news that Facebook is opening up its social graph. Twitter, too, has made waves by acquiring companies that made third-party services for Twitter.
But if you take a closer look, this is part of a more macro trend
that transcends two social platforms--despite their emerging dominance.
That macro trend is ubiquitous sharing: What are you doing? Where are
you doing it? Who are you doing it with? What do you like? These used
to be things we kept to ourselves or shared with our friends and
family. Now we're willing to broadcast them to whomever is willing to
listen.
Social media has led to "social sharing," the broadcasting of our
thoughts and activities. It's not a fad. It's a sociological
phenomenon, accelerating at light speed. The latest incarnation of
social sharing: A platform called Blippy
allows you to connect to your social system and share what you bought
and how much you spent at retailers like Target, Netflix, Amazon, and
Zappos, to name a few. Not only can you log-in to these services
quickly from an existing social network, but you can share across
multiple networks. Knowing what people are buying when, and how much
they're willing to spend is creating a feeding frenzy among marketers
looking for the ripple effect.
Not even the drumbeat of privacy concerns seems able to slow down the trend. It was recently reported that Blippy members' credit card information was showing up in Google's search results.
Blippy is still going strong though. We are becoming ever more willing
to share ever more information with the world. Here just a few
implications to consider when it comes to the changing face of sharing
in a social age.
Data Gathering. The more we know about an
individual, the easier it is to sell something. Someone will amass
socially shared data (this is where Facebook is placing bets) and
businesses will tap it for profit. Google's integration of archived tweets
reveals that even real time data can be sorted and mined. A business
may not own the data from all of the sharing, but it's likely they will
want it.
Knowledge Sharing & Collaboration. Conflating internal and external social sharing could profoundly affect how we work. Newer internal platforms such as Chatter
from Salesforce not only borrow from the Facebook school of platform
design, but they also integrate with external networks such as Twitter.
The future of social sharing for the large organization could be making
the two worlds come together in a secure fashion for the enterprise.
Content Distribution. Social sharing becomes the
ultimate form of distribution. Any business or individual who produces
digital content in any form will be tweaking how easily the content can
be shared, whether by adding a "like" button or designing the content
itself to be sharable.
Social Currency. Sharing on the social web acts as
a form of currency. Sharing useful information that might help someone
within your network scores you points and builds equity. Finding a deal
and sharing that with others can put you in someone's favor, and maybe
then they will find you a deal. It's important to recognize that all
this sharing isn't some useless impulse. There are reasons why people
are willing to share so much. Creative expression is part of it but
also, there's often a benefit, value, to the individual who shares.
Social sharing is a major behavioral shift, the most important so
far of the 21st century. And the information we choose to share with
friends, co-workers and even strangers, is re-defining the idea of
what's private and public before our very eyes.
