So the key to social media seems to be content created by users. What Shirky says is that in the olden days, professional writers, journalists, editors, sub-editors, (your mother?) used to filter material before you watched or read it. Other people chose what stuff you would have access to. They decided whether a story was news, and whether it would get ‘air-time’. The government could even slap a ‘D-Notice’ on something (oops, now called a DA-Notice…surely nothing to do with a Duck’s Anatomy?) and the story would never surface.
So now, according to Meerman Scott, Shirky, Scoble, Godin and the other ‘in-crowders’, the real secret to social media is that the strength is in users generating material without the editing/filtering. So if I ‘google’ something, or look a subject up on Wikipedia, the odds are that I will get a mass of data to filter myself, and that the content will have had minimal editing by a ‘professional’.
As news stories break around the world ‘citizen journalists’ are filing the material onto social newtorks or direct to mainstream media channels.
If you story, or video or picture is interesting or quirky enough – who knows, you could gather quite a following!
Go to it!
0 Responses to “User Generated Content”