Are Social Media tools the bane of content management's existence?

Social media, most call it a buzz word and it may be, but it is a different way of sharing information than before. Social media tools such as blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, photo sharing sites, entertainment platforms are used not only for communication but collaboration, multimedia sharing, sharing reviews and opinions, entertainment platforms, and integrating information. It's the new way people work.

If content management is the process of identifying, capturing, classifying and storing content so that it can be easily accessed by others and if social media is the new way of capturing and sharing information then Houston...we might have a problem.

Organizations now realize the impact of social media tools on information sharing within the organization. Major organizations have blogging staff, CEOs have personal blogs they populate regularly. It helps them disseminate information to their customers, potential customers, investors and media and it is a means for them to get feedback unfiltered and unsolicited. Many of these blogs have important information, information you can refer to later but how and where do you store it? Blogs are not the only tool companies are using to share information. Internally they are using wikis, collaboration sites, social networking sites, and even opinion sites to gauge what their customers are saying about them. With all these disparate applications in use, each sharing valuable content how should a company or should a company make an attempt at storing and sharing some of this information with others?

One viewpoint is to carefully analyze the kind of information being shared. Some information is perishable. It is valuable only to the two people sharing it at the time it is shared in. Gleaned and rewritten and stored out of context not only is that information useless but might also be dangerous if decisions are based on it without contextual knowledge. Recognize those kinds of information and let them be. Part of having a usable content management system is knowing what not to put in it. No doubt you might lose out on a couple of valuable nuggets that you could have stored, that someone could have captured and maybe even benefited from, but in the big scheme of things the payoff wouldn't be worth the effort.

For all other "harvestable" information, the most efficient way to capture the information is to assign someone to do it and that someone is NOT the author. Gather some base metrics of what it takes to harvest and formulate a piece of reusable content from the social media tools in use. Use those base metrics to figure out how many people you need or how many man hours you need to glean the information. Yes there is some process work in there too. Like the content has to be cleaned and formulated and in the end vetted by the author before it's posted on the company site for employee use but this process is far more simplistic than the one you would have to create to encourage the author to create the piece of content because their core competency is not writing, it's being an engineer or a chemist or an architect and encouraging them to write reusable content will take at least twice as long and they see no value to themselves in doing it. Yes, they will freely share the information with their peers but that's because they are learning as much from their peers as they are sharing but when you ask them to formulate a piece of content into a reusable artifact suddenly you might as well be talking Greek.

So it raises the argument whether organizations should have content management at all? For now, Yes! because our tools are not cohesive enough for us to be able to find all information about a topic regardless of the tool it was shared in. We are not savvy enough yet to automatically create institutional histories of work done in the past, we have just started getting comfortable sharing but our technology is not sophisticated enough to know on its own what is and isn't valuable to others in the company. All these things are very possible, and likely even exist but they haven't hit mainstream yet and until then we need to identify, capture, classify, store and disseminate information for our organizations.