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Content isn't Social, You Are

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The term social content has been getting some airplay of late. In my opinion it is a marketing term describing something that has been around for a while. Let’s dissect the term for a minute.

Jesse Wilkins gave a few differentiators in his response to Chris Walker’s article on the topic. I’m going to run through them quickly.

• Co-creation: People have been co-authoring content for generations. Doing it using a wiki doesn’t change anything. I’ve been co-creating things in Word for over a decade.
• Aggregation: Streams of activities or a Tweet stream.  Really this is just a form of structured content. You can manage this in a database field or as an XML document. You just have to decide how to store it.
• Fragmentation: A tweet may not have meaning without the rest of the stream. Context is key. Sounds like an email thread. This is really tied to Aggregation in my opinion. Nothing new here.
• Metadata: Jesse starts to talk about Geolocation and other aspects that provide context. Sounds like different metadata fields to me.
• Finishedness: You mean like a draft document? If I’m working on a proposal it isn’t worth keeping until it is finished.

These aren’t new concepts. Yes, there are new ways of generating the content and information. It is also being created in new formats. It doesn’t matter. We didn’t create new techniques or practices when we started using Word instead of WordPerfect. It is the same thing.

And kill the word Social here. If it is truly social content, it isn’t business relevant. The business outputs are collaborative. If I “Like” someone’s idea on how to make money, it isn’t social; it is a registration of agreement. The difference is that it is gathered online and not in a meeting.

We are in the business of managing content and information, regardless of source. We learned how to manage email as records, this is the same. I can see terms like Activity Stream Content and Wiki Content as they may have some storage/versioning tricks to capturing, but it isn’t hard and it isn’t necessarily social.

After all, I’ve been getting emails at work for social matters at work since the 90s. If you haven’t gotten a “Birthday Cake in the kitchen” email then nobody likes you anyway.

Comments

Re: "Social" "Content"

Submitted by Jesse Wilkins July 07, 2011 - 10:24 AM

Hi Laurence,

In brief I agree that they aren't new concepts. My point, which I clearly need to flesh out some here, is that there are some storage/versioning issues which are more challenging. The immediate example for me is our last one, "finishedness". When is a wiki finished? I agree that there are some clear examples of finishedness for example when a wiki is used to produce a document. And for most organizations the document would be saved and the wiki might be completely wiped. But not always. Here's another example - is your blog post finished? Well, the post is, but the comments may continue to roll in for a while. Short of setting a somewhat arbitrary deadline of, say, 30 days, I don't know that you can say that it's finished. This is particularly important in the context of the public sector, where there is often a positive requirement to keep just about everything due to open records/FOIA laws.

Email has the same issue to some extent, but in my mind there is a pretty significant difference in finishedness and in aggregation between an email, for example, and a Facebook page/group with constant activity including posts, replies, and Likes. And that's further exacerbated by its being managed by a third party so it's not as simple as exporting an XML stream even when the API supports it (someone has to write code).

I know the term is problematic but just as there is a real difference in how you manage relational database records vs. standalone documents, and between textual documents and images to lesser extent, there is a difference in how you manage discussions, conversations, and the other things that go along with many of these types of tools.

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Social is an action word

Submitted by Christian Buckley July 07, 2011 - 12:56 PM

I don't take much stock in the term "social content" -- it's just window dressing, just as most self-proclaimed "social media experts" are nothing more than today's version of the early 1990's "desktop publishing expert." Social is an action you take in response to content: it is a way to flag, tag, correlate, expand upon, connect others to, and discuss an artifact. Content is the object, social is the action. Maybe its just a semantic point to most people, but I see them as separate, distinct things.

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"new" means many things

Submitted by Chris Riley, ECMp, IOAp July 07, 2011 - 1:34 PM

There is a lot of "new" technology that has proof of use in the past. The "Cloud" is the best example of this. The client-server relationship is how the computer world started. I would argue that "new" does not always mean new technology. It may mean the evolution of a technology as reached a point where it's understood and adopted. I believe what is meant by social media / collaboration is worlds colliding and in the end making something very new.

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Client Server first?

Submitted by Laurence Hart July 07, 2011 - 2:51 PM

Does the word mainframe ring a bell? VAX?

Tiddly bits aside, I disagree. I think electronic collaboration is just evolving to the next step. There are new types of artifacts. Blogs and wikis have been added to discussion threads, calendars, and data tables. The business problem is the same, the tools have evolved.

What is colliding is that consumer IT innovation is now out-pacing enterprise innovation. That is making all the difference.

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This post and comment(s) reflect the personal perspectives of community members, and not necessarily those of their employers or of AIIM International