The Social Media News Firehose and How Not To Tame It

Which one do you think is more comprehensive? And which one is more difficult to achieve?

Starting on social is easy. And it’s make us lazy. It’s easy to follow people and let them surface what’s new and interesting. But here comes the hard part: try to properly filter the Twitter stream that’s handed to you. Good luck. The social fire hose is difficult to filter at best, especially on a personal basis. Of course, you have the choice of following fewer people resulting in less noise but also fewer nuggets, so you’ll be missing stuff. And yes, there are professional social monitoring tools, but they are expensive and require constant manipulations.

By starting online, it’s also a firehose but at least it’s easier to filter because you see the whole content, not just the 140 characters. You might think that we can go and get the links and content from Twitter and filter that. But that’s a lot of work. What if, instead, you could dig up the same content before it becomes popular?

If you have competitors to follow, clients to track, issues to follow, events to monitor, interests to stay on top of, try putting that into Twitter or try finding Facebook friends that will tell you when your top client is expanding their operations or an executive has changed their position.

Twitter and Facebook are an augmentation of the news collection process, not a replacement for it. Guess where the vast majority of news articles being shared on Twitter and Facebook are coming from? It’s the online web obviously. In Eqentia’s implementations of vertical news monitoring environment, we have seen only marginal incremental content from social media. It’s the long tail.

Are we spending too many cycles processing the buzz, the chatters, and the raw tweets? Are we in a rats race, sweating to extract the meaningful from the meaningless? I’m not doubting the value of social media, but I wonder if the efforts/results ratio are sustainable. Social media and social networks are connecting people beautifully, but the extent of required content analysis will continuously increase because the fire hose isn’t getting smaller and social graphs aren’t getting simpler.

We’re so obsessed with what’s popular on social media and seem to have forgotten that we can find exactly what’s relevant with the right filters. Using people as filters is good for discovery, but not good enough if you need to be thorough in a particular field. We are being blind sighted by an apparent satisfaction that news about social media and technology is magically surfaced. But the irony is that we’re getting news about social media and technology on social media and using technology, so it’s that incestuous relationship that doesn’t cut the mold.

In my opinion, social media news is not going to take over personalized news consumption when it comes to enterprise-grade, professional level news consumption needs. Social media is great for discovery and for breaking world events or disasters, but otherwise, it’s an augmentation, not a replacement to finding what’s relevant. There is no escaping putting the right filters and triggers in place to get the most relevant content that matters to you. Whether it’s socially popular or not should not the starting point.