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Citizens!

Source: L’Express Styles

Social Media is more and more freed from a limited “solid” space. If forums still seem to be like those old good “real” cafés where people go, online conversations are now rocketting in any channel. And it starts becoming an issue  when you really become…public. More and more people are (we)bloggers anyway, because the way they comment, read, share, is linked to a public profile, which somehow generates new conversations. If my bro’ reads my post, and shares it on Facebook, some of his friends will start commenting, making fun maybe, intensely reacting, and will ask him some clues or precisions: it’s finally pretty rare when perfect strangers go to a blog and comment to the original owner. I’m more and more convinced that you need a kind of legitimacy to expose your name, and your views, on someone’s personal space.

So as curation is the new way to keep pervasive conversations valuable, manageable and “answerable”. You already had to consider Facebook as a people CRM: you need to consider online conversations also in your CRM.

I’ve recently installed backtype & a lot of Connect-like tools on blogs: it’s pretty incredible as the contents that you now produce leverage conversations in very diverse communities. This kind of tools allows you not only to track the “buzz” you’re creating, but to curate at your central hub what the reactions are, very far away from your very first social identity. For instance, I had not chosen to be present a lot on Twitter, but as the people who react are on the microblogging platform, I needed to make sure not to forget these guys. Forgetting interested people would be like losing value, at the end. These guys own my reputation, discuss it, make it live. improve it too!

And that’s probably what is now at stake, as content creators:

• the diverse channels of communication are more and more social: people talk to other people about you where they want the conversations to happen. Twitter maybe, but why not on a Facebook wall, why not on another social space?
• the thing is not to be present where the conversations are rising, but to be accessible. Seth Godin is not on Twitter, but his views ARE accessible because of the way people link their conversations related to Seth to his own blog! The conversationalists do the job for Seth
• curating conversations is the key first asset to give some sense in a very long-term approach: any “post” is now a way to stick all the related comments & reactions which happened just after the publication but also when new people arrive on it, through the post itself or a related reaction. Once you’ve “stuck” the generated conversation, you can probably give even more sense through tools like Pearltrees, which will help you define in a more structured way some topics. If I had to summarize my blogging value chain, based on Citizen L.:
  - reading & experience – desire to write a post – writing of a post with sources & inspirations – publication – reactions & conversations management inhouse and in other social channels – updates – curation in its category of interest – aggregation of other interesting points of views – conversations about this curation inhouse and in other social channels – new desire to write a post

In a world where RT (ReTweet) is the new IT Bag, trends are the new currency. I like Business Insider statement:

“As more and more technologies implement trends as an automated way to alert users of what’s popular, expect to hear more about trend curation, which will only enhance the value of trends”.