Like it or not, the whole world is gravitating towards Facebook. It’s not just your long-lost college roommates and people obsessed with Farmville. The Washington Post now has the Facebook brand on its homepage, and market leaders like Coca-Cola are relying on Facebook to deliver key messages to customer communities.
In fact, I’m willing to predict that the effective use of Facebook is going to surpass search engine optimization as the primary concern of content publishers across the web.
Here’s why:
Facebook has achieved a critical mass when it comes to our online identities and relationships. People don’t want to maintain multiple sets of online “friends” for every content source on the web. So, by acting as the Internet’s primary tool for giving “friends” permission to know who we are, Facebook is grafting a layer of standardized personal identification on the web—something we’ve always known we needed, but didn’t realize would come about in such an organic way.
Just as important, Facebook features such as commenting and the notorious “Like” button now act as the Internet’s primary tool for telling our friends—and content publishers—what we think about the content we encounter online.
This combination of identity and feedback has significant implications for content publishers. For one thing, it solves the problem of anonymous commenting. Publishers can use Facebook to make sure that people interacting with their content are reliably identified—and that those interactions can be tracked in order to understand the perceived value of content to various constituencies.
For another, it drives context-based re-use of content. If a friend whose taste you trust endorses an article or a video, it will mean something to you. You may then also endorse that content with a “like” vote—or post a link to it on your own page. This is what makes content “viral.” And “viral-ness” is ultimately what content publishers are looking to achieve.
The kind of re-use that Facebook promotes correlates closely to the Information Optimization (IO) we want to achieve in our own organizations. If a VP of Marketing “likes” some content, we want to drive re-use of that content by marketers and salespeople—who constitute something similar to a social network.
It is useful for us to turn the comments of identified users into re-usable content as well. After all, it may be important not only to know that the VP of Marketing “liked” some content—but also that an expert engineer shot holes in the assertions contained in that content.
This is not to say that we should all start using Facebook behind our firewalls. Facebook, in fact, is probably not the best platform for our internal IO efforts.
But Facebook is teaching us important lessons about how content gets propagated across communities of interest—and the heart of that lesson is that context can be even more important than search.
IT leaders should therefore start thinking about how identity-based context can be implemented as part of a broader enterprise IO strategy. By increasing visibility into the way users relate to content, we can get much greater business value out of information assets across the enterprise that—as things stand now—have an alarming tendency to be woefully under-utilized.
Tags: commenting, Facebook, Information Optimization, information strategy, Internet content, Internet publishing, IO, IT, online, social tools
This entry was posted
on Monday, May 17th, 2010 at 1:25 pm and is filed under information optimized.
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You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
The Facebook-ing of Web Content
Like it or not, the whole world is gravitating towards Facebook. It’s not just your long-lost college roommates and people obsessed with Farmville. The Washington Post now has the Facebook brand on its homepage, and market leaders like Coca-Cola are relying on Facebook to deliver key messages to customer communities.
In fact, I’m willing to predict that the effective use of Facebook is going to surpass search engine optimization as the primary concern of content publishers across the web.
Here’s why:
Facebook has achieved a critical mass when it comes to our online identities and relationships. People don’t want to maintain multiple sets of online “friends” for every content source on the web. So, by acting as the Internet’s primary tool for giving “friends” permission to know who we are, Facebook is grafting a layer of standardized personal identification on the web—something we’ve always known we needed, but didn’t realize would come about in such an organic way.
Just as important, Facebook features such as commenting and the notorious “Like” button now act as the Internet’s primary tool for telling our friends—and content publishers—what we think about the content we encounter online.
This combination of identity and feedback has significant implications for content publishers. For one thing, it solves the problem of anonymous commenting. Publishers can use Facebook to make sure that people interacting with their content are reliably identified—and that those interactions can be tracked in order to understand the perceived value of content to various constituencies.
For another, it drives context-based re-use of content. If a friend whose taste you trust endorses an article or a video, it will mean something to you. You may then also endorse that content with a “like” vote—or post a link to it on your own page. This is what makes content “viral.” And “viral-ness” is ultimately what content publishers are looking to achieve.
The kind of re-use that Facebook promotes correlates closely to the Information Optimization (IO) we want to achieve in our own organizations. If a VP of Marketing “likes” some content, we want to drive re-use of that content by marketers and salespeople—who constitute something similar to a social network.
It is useful for us to turn the comments of identified users into re-usable content as well. After all, it may be important not only to know that the VP of Marketing “liked” some content—but also that an expert engineer shot holes in the assertions contained in that content.
This is not to say that we should all start using Facebook behind our firewalls. Facebook, in fact, is probably not the best platform for our internal IO efforts.
But Facebook is teaching us important lessons about how content gets propagated across communities of interest—and the heart of that lesson is that context can be even more important than search.
IT leaders should therefore start thinking about how identity-based context can be implemented as part of a broader enterprise IO strategy. By increasing visibility into the way users relate to content, we can get much greater business value out of information assets across the enterprise that—as things stand now—have an alarming tendency to be woefully under-utilized.
Tags: commenting, Facebook, Information Optimization, information strategy, Internet content, Internet publishing, IO, IT, online, social tools
This entry was posted on Monday, May 17th, 2010 at 1:25 pm and is filed under information optimized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.