Social Media Tail Chasing

Blogger: Larry Cannell

First it was Paul Boultin at Wired saying “Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004” and now Steve Gillmor is telling us “It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter.” A couple of years from now the next big thing will obsolete Twitter and so on, and so on. For an IT strategist these are the types of headlines that give you heartburn. Not only because they are trashing an existing technology (that you may be trying to justify) but because it hypes a new “next big thing.”

From a journalist’s perspective I suppose they are correct. For Boultin maybe the blogosphere is getting a little crowded:

“Today, a search for, say, Barack Obama's latest speech will deliver a Wikipedia page, a Fox News article, and a few entries from professionally run sites like Politico.com. The odds of your clever entry appearing high on the list? Basically zero.”

But, do you think the 70+ million blogs are all competing for attention on stories about Barack Obama? Not a chance. Many of these people could care less about building an audience that competes with Wikipedia or Politico and are simply sharing ideas with people who have similar interests or ideas.

It’s a little more difficult to understand Gillmor’s reasoning about the death of RSS at the hands of Twitter. He points to RSS feeds that do not carry the full text of a blog post as something that “carved out a large percentage of the value of the day’s news.” Gillmor then goes on to wax poetic (seriously, he quotes Bob Dylan) about the “race for realtime” where Twitter can get news out quicker than an RSS feed. Well, OK, for a journalist I suppose realtime news is important. But does it make that much difference if you read feedback about the latest Obama news conference a few hours later?

I am not saying any of these technologies are bad or that the next big thing isn’t, well, the next big thing. But excitement for many of these emerging social tools can start building from these same journalists. As an IT professional, what can you do with this social media tail chasing? First, you can be skeptical of anything that is over hyped (or anything that is totally trashed) as much as these technologies have been. Second, you need to stay focused on understanding your enterprise’s needs better than anyone else. Only then can you truly assess whether the next big thing can make a difference.

By the way, my report “Making Smart Choices for Online Workplaces” was recently published. It provides a framework and approach for assessing how these and other technologies can improve online work environments and knowledgebases. I’ll also be talking about this subject at Catalyst North America in July. I hope to see you there!

Comments

[John Moore]

The post regarding the death of RSS completely missed the mark. RSS is extremely extensible and will certainly be here in 5+ years. See my blog post response to a similar article:

http://johnfmoore.wordpress.com/2009/05/05/rss-is-not-dead-in-fact-its-just-getting-started/

John Moore