When you are doing an interdisciplinary study of social technologies across four countries, it is important to focus on the connections between otherwise unrelated factors, and it is useful to develop a framework to look for these connections.
Here’s the framework we have been using for our research on social media in BRIC countries –
The outer circle is the national context, which comprises of the five interconnected Cs of computing devices, connectivity, culture, content and capabilities. The inner circle is the social media ecosystem itself. Our research, which looks at the connections between the two, has three layers –
Layer 1: The role of the national context in social media adoption
Layer 2: The dynamics of the social media ecosystem
Layer 3: The role of social media in changing the social context
Finally, the national contexts we are looking at are the four BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and United States (as a reference point).
My young friend Harshil Karia — who has recently started social media agency Foxymoron — recently asked me if there is too much content out there, if we have become so focused on creating (often duplicate) content that we have forgotten how to listen.
Well, I’m someone who believe that there can never be too much content. It’s a god things that so many of us are creating so much content, and here are three reasons why –
- The Wisdom of Crowds: The more people link to, vote on, tag, or share a piece of content, the more visible it becomes. When we engage with content online, we endorse it, make it easier for others to discover it. So, in fact, every click does count.
- The Value of Mashups: There is as much value in creating connections between existing pieces of content, mashing them up, as in creating totally original content. When we create mashups, we reveal underlying layers of understanding that were not visible before.
By a factor of three, what you do is not nearly as important as how it makes people feel.
If you define ‘what you do’ as ‘content’ and ‘how it makes people feel’ as ‘delivery’, the rule doesn’t hold. Great content with bad delivery is a waste, but bad content with great delivery is often worse; you cannot deliver what you don’t have.
However, if you factor in the ‘intent’ to makes people feel good, the rule does hold, almost all the time.
What do you do when you have the intent, but are limited by undifferentiated content and delivery? You act as the ‘filter’; instead of selling to people the solution available with you, you lead them to the solution that is most suitable for them.
What’s true for business is often true for blogging too. Focus on making your readers feel good, and blogging nirvana will follow.
