On Social Knowledge: What’s Interesting vs. What’s Relevant

Twitter, Facebook and social media allow users to snoop on each other’s social graphs and see what they are reading. I’ve been doing that, as I was comparing some of the products that surface popular stories from friends and followers.

What I’m seeing is that we’re all reading the same thing. What’s popular is rising for all of us. So, if you are reading what everyone else is reading, where is our edge?

Social News = Incomplete Professional News
I think there are 2 types of reading segments: 1) the social and 2) the deeply relevant. The social will come from friends and social graphs, but you’ll need to use more serious tools to wring deeply relevant intelligence from non-social channels (hint: Eqentia).

Let’s face it. Do you need to see that something is re-tweeted 1000 times before it gets your attention? Yes, there’s a ton of interesting stuff out there that’s getting surfaced by friends, but is it all relevant? If you’re an expert in a certain field, you don’t need others to tell you what’s important for you. You want to draw your own conclusions. Yes, it’s popular. But is it totally relevant for me? And will it get me ahead?

Social news reading is great for discovery. But it will never be comprehensive, because discovery is a hit and miss process. In the long term, not every one of us is inherently as open and share-friendly as online social etiquette have some of us seemingly take for granted. To think that your competitors will share intelligence with you on social channels is totally ludicrous.

Granted,- social news reading has replaced the serendipitous nature of newspapers, albeit with a dash of personalization. When we used to pick-up the newspaper, we didn’t know what we were going to read. That was the state of discovery then. But when you need to catch-up on competitive intelligence or on what’s happening with your clients and industry, you can’t leave that very important task to serendipitous fate or happenstance.

Social news reading will not replace professional news, news that matter for your business, for your job, for your performance and that affect your salary. But social news can be a critical augmentation of our daily sensory needs and radars.

As a professional, you’re going to demand a lot more than social news for your daily dose of intelligence. If you don’t, your awe of the joys of social discovery might be letting you forget about wanting to see the knowledge nuggets that others won’t.

Related articles

• Microsoft tries to get into the social news game with Project Emporia (thenextweb.com)
• PostPost: A Social Paper for Facebook Users (techland.time.com)
• This is Not Social Media News – Pet Edition (theantisocialmedia.com)
• Signal, Curation, Discovery (battellemedia.com)
• A Revolutionary Social Media News Website Emerges (prweb.com)