<nettime> David Armano: Why Social Sharing is bigger than Facebook or Twitter

["Patrice Riemens" <patrice@xs4all.nl>]

(came thru a pvt cc list)

(Btw a good friend told me the other day that a fairly famous - in 'our
circles' - social/edu activist has abandonned e-mail altogether and only
communicates thru FaceBook...)



Why Social Sharing Is Bigger than Facebook and Twitter
by David Armano  

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.


[David Armano is a Senior Vice President at Edelman Digital, the
interactive arm of global communications firm Edelman. He is an active
practitioner and thinker in the worlds of digital marketing, experience
design, and the social web. You can follow him on Twitter.]







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