The Rules of Social Media

My friend Julian started a blog on China’s energy policies just over six months ago. Today, it has garnered a sizable audience and many accolades, including being featured as an editor’s pick by the China Economic Review.

Besides the obvious plug for Julian’s blog, I also want to highlight that this is the beauty of social media and the inherent meritocracy at work in our Web 2.0 world today.

Julian is a very smart guy with a passion in a pretty niche subject (Chinese environmental policy). Just ten years ago, it would of been very tedious for him to create a web site to pen down his thoughts and to gather an audience. Even five years ago, he may have been able to manage his web site using blogging software, but it would still have been difficult to gather a sizable audience within a short amount of time.

Today, with linkbacks, aggregators, blog search engines, communities, social bookmarking and social networks, it is not only easy for Julian to create content, but easy for him to seek out and connect with his audience as well.

In other words, social media allows anyone with something interesting to say to have a very good chance to make oneself heard by others.

Being “interesting” is very important, because another elegant feature of social media in my opinion is its inherent self-regulation and meritocracy mechanisms.

It’s really quite obvious but often overlooked - If Julian writes nonsense, he loses his credibility and his audience, plain and simple. Joe may visit Julian’s blog once, but if Joe can’t relate to Julian’s message or thinks he is full of crap, then Joe will likely not visit Julian’s blog again.

However, if Joe likes the article Julian wrote on biodiesels, chances are that Joe will add Julian’s blog to his feed reader and Julian’s audience has more or less grown permanently by one.

(And even if Julian does lose Joe as a reader the first time, services like Digg and Reddit may still bring Joe back to Julian’s blog for a second or third time without Joe knowing it.)

When I talk to enterprise customers about using social media as a form of bottom-up knowledge management in their organization, they will almost always ask: “how can we govern the quality of the content created by social media?”

What most people don’t realize is that social media generally presents the best, most interesting, or most relevant content to whoever is looking. So not only does it automatically filter the wheat from the chaff, it also does it in a targeted way, because nonsense to Joe may be gospel to Mary.

And as an extension of the above, one can also agree that social media is inherently self-correcting. In the world of social media, no one creates content for a closed community or audience. Therefore, if Julian makes a factual error in his article, his audience will let him hear about it, especially if he has a big audience. And if he doesn’t respond or reciprocate to the feedback, Julian will either a) lose his audience, or b) lose his credibility.

Therefore… surprise, surprise - the quality and accuracy of one’s content is positively correlated to the reach and size of one’s audience.

So to summarize, here are the rules of social media:

Social media allows anyone with something interesting to say to have a very good chance to make oneself heard by others
Social media generally presents the best, most interesting, or most relevant content to whoever is looking
Social media is inherently self-correcting

In the future, perhaps I will explain why social media can be invaluable in an enterprise setting as a means of knowledge management… or if you live in a country whose press freedom is ranked 153rd in the world.