Are you a content creator or a content sharer?

Made Essential Reading on 21 January 2010 Felix Hemsley

Social Media has empowered everyone to become a journalist; everyone has the power to broadcast to the web, through a whole multitude of channels, and to give authority to others who are creating the original content. In an arena where content is king, surely everyone is wanting to create their own material and build their own kudos! Well, no, actually. General consensus is that only 1 person out of every 100 actively engaged persons in Social Media will actually create original content, a further 9 will expand on this or reiterate it, whilst the remaining 90 people will solely read and learn from this content.

So, how can these 90 people be empowered to participate in the proliferation of content. Well, put simply, through sharing or voting mechanics. By enabling anonymous voting, even the most reserved of individuals is able to put their opinion across and can relate to results through that participation. This mechanic can then go to the next level. By giving content a solid rating that piece will be treated with more authority within certain platforms, especially those delivering ‘hot topics’ to the viewer, such as social bookmarking sites.

This is all well and good, but only really promotes that singular piece of editorial or media in that singular location. It is here that the re-tweet function has really earned its salt. Whilst this does attribute the re-tweeter to the content, it remains a low involvement activity but allows information to ripple across social media, increasing the authority of the original author or creator. Clearly facebook has also identified this as an area they want to work on, highlighted by the announcement of their re-tweet feature simply called ‘via’. Both of these features allow individuals to state their personal feelings by actively putting others content forward.

However, (that’s right, you knew that was coming) there is an increasing awareness that by re-tweeting / re-purposing content, individuals are associating themselves with the thoughts and ideas therein. I’ve certainly noticed that as time has gone on I am far more selective over the content that I re-tweet, considering the fact that simply because I found it of interest doesn’t necessarily mean that I want to be associated with it.