Social Network and People

One thing that has been changed by the social networks is the relationship with the content we found on the Internet.

All the Social Networks (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, G+) shares a common feature: they enable the reader to follow the author of the content and not the category of the content.

Before Facebook the main way to get news was to follow blogs and website content-specific, most of the time clearly categorized (Technology, Finance, Health, Sport, etc). This was the power of the niches, because one reader with an RSS feed had the ability to subscribe only to single category of a blog or of a newspaper.

The categorization structure still exists in every newspaper published online, but now people are following other people and not content. It is good to have everything categorized, but sometimes could be useful to have the same visibility of the structure for the people who wrote the content.

This change leads to two major consequences:

• Readers will get more and more content not useful, at least until the writer doesn’t write only about one specific field, like it happen on Facebook. (By the way, I think that Facebook should enable the option to receive notification on specific events that happens to our friends, like if someone is in the city we live now, if someone starts a new job and so on).
• Will be easier than ever to reconstruct incoherence between different articles and posts written by the same author. Internet will never forget anything and our past will be easy to reconstruct.

In my opinion this is a clear trend and will foster the leadership capabilities of everyone, but will also offer new challenges for the content and relationship management in companies and medias.

A customer doesn’t want to read a corporate blog anymore, when he has the opportunity to read a “personal” blog from the engineer, the founder, the big data analyst, the marketer and so on. It’s more human and creates more empathy, but people come and go, so can be a risky approach to let your employee became the leader of your customers and the voice of your company.