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Connecting Content:
The Potential of Social Networks for Content Marketing |
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26 January 2004 |
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With the debut of
Orkut, a
new social networking tool sponsored by Google, the
market for closing the "six degrees of separation" between
people continues to heat up. On the professional side,
though, things are at least as interesting in social
networking tools, with players like LinkedIn
providing high-quality business contact networking and
Groove
Networks providing a pro outlook on content and task
sharing. All of this activity on the software and services
side, though, does not seem to be matched by professional
content publishers. Big database subscriptions will
continue to be an important factor for publishing in
professional circles, but the ability to help individuals
to collect and share valued content and its implied
credentials is a factor too important to be missed for the
long run. |
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Our "six degrees of separation" is
getting getting into smaller digits here at Shore as one of our
team members was in the first waves of invitees to join
Orkut, a
new
Friendster-like social networking service under development for Google by
Orkut
Buyukkokten. It is possible to share business contacts in
the Orkut environment in addition to purely social interests, but the work-and-play mix limit
its
potential for serious professional interactions. By contrast,
the LinkedIn
networking service for professionals is all-business, with a
sophisticated capability to locate potential common work
interests through a colleague-to-colleagues network that links
tens of thousands of professionals. This is networking for
hard-core, high-flying executives and professionals looking to
make the most of highly efficient and trusted personal network
connections.
Similar parallels of consumer and professional outlets exist in the file sharing world, where the
wide-open music swapping culture of
Kazaa and others is complemented by software and services
such as the increasingly successful and mature
Groove
Networks, which enables professionals to share files,
workspaces, calendars and other key information and experiences
in secure peer-to-peer and workgroup relationships. While
consumer social network services get many of the headlines,
professional services that are oftentimes far more
sophisticated and robust are growing up in parallel with more
public and publicized services. They grow more slowly and with
less relative fanfare, yet at a fairly certain pace the ability
to develop and manage social networks online on a professional
level is becoming commonplace.
Social network tools for serious professional use are a
surging phenomenon, but the relative strength of these tools
for professionals is almost completely off of the radar for
most publishers of professionally-oriented content. With a
heavy orientation towards licensed database usage, professional
publishers seem to have far less motivation to explore social
networking than music publishers that were sideswiped by the
explosive growth in file sharing networks' ability to
distribute digital content objects effortlessly. But as the
ability to package premium content objects for other kinds of
distribution increases, the ability to sell into online social
networks effectively can only gain in importance. Here are a
few thoughts as to what's important for publishers and
purchasers to bear in mind when looking at how to apply
networking and file sharing tools to professional content:
- The power of the annotated bookshelf. Publishers
inevitably place the most emphasis on trying to maximize the
value of the content packages that they are creating for
clients. But oftentimes it's the value that premium content
purchasers add on top of a publisher's content that makes it
truly useful in specific situations: a note, marginal
comments, action points, related materials and links - the
input of individuals and peers in association with published
content that can be passed back and forth is oftentimes what
makes projects and deals successful. By staying focused on
database-oriented access and control as a way to defend
content value, publishers of professional content miss out on
the opportunity to allow users to repurpose - and re-license
- rights-protected content objects that can be imbedded in
any number of personal devices and storage schemes. Giving
clients the ability to create and expose value on top of
value as they see fit while protecting distribution rights is
one of the key opportunities for social network environments.
- Communal redistribution as a primary channel.
Instead of viewing republishing of content by individuals as
residual income at best or a copyright threat at worst,
social networking may represent one of the most effective
ways to get specific items of professional content into the
hands of its most appreciative audiences. From the humble but
highly effective email forward to file sharing networks,
there is great untapped potential for publishers to place
their content in its most highly valued context possible. As
noted in our
earlier piece on the "Star Wars Kid" phenomenon,
individuals equipped with these publishing tools figured this
out long before commercial publishers ever considered it to
be a phenomenon that would impact their operations. The
ability to query large databases of premium content remains
important, but the ability of trusted peers to collect and
expose recommended content on searchable peer networks will
gain in importance as the overabundance of content sources
demands more intelligent human filtering. In effect we're all
becoming one another's librarians, onpassing our acquired
expertise and content on specific topics.
- Content as credentials. Like an impressive
bookshelf in a town house's window, file sharing networks and
social networking Web pages allow people to announce their
outlook on life via content. But in professional circles it's
hard to find that equivalent for premium content beyond the
vanishing office bookshelf. We may know that someone has a
Bloomberg, Reed or Thomson content package on their desktop
PC as a sign of status, but we really don't know that
specific items they really use at a casual glance: at the end
of the day, it's just a database interface. As digital rights
management begins to enable the effective individual
ownership of published objects, being able to let the right
people know that you have these resources will become an
increasingly important way to convey one's individual outlook
and value to peers. "You are what you can share" is an
outlook that will increase the need to be able to expose and
lend premium content collections to appropriate people as one
wishes - collections that will increasingly represent and
individuals' own works, as well.
As people learn to expose their personal assets online
effectively to current and potential colleagues, premium
content ownership and use will become an increasingly important
part of that mix of personal attributes. Getting workflows
right is today's hot ticket, but as protected vendor databases
begin to be a less effective tool for acquiring and using
content, the importance of helping individuals build up and use
their own unique content assets that they can share with others
in setting of their own choosing will build in importance to
the professional publishing process. The six degrees of content
may become as important as any Orkut-like tool can provide
someone for relationships - a factor that may brew in the
recesses of some Googlish minds.
-
John Blossom
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