SocialMediaBust

If you don’t know Wiki’s are examples of social media used to create user built encyclopedias online, where people like you can participate in generating definitions, meanings, explanations and so forth.

Unfortunately, as noted elsewhere, the quality of the content is variable, as is the case with most social media platforms. Contributing requires no special skills, abilities or knowledge, and contributors to social media platforms are often driven by their personal agendas and biases rather than a desire to adhere to facts and truth.

If you search in Google for “social media”, the first site that comes up is the Wikipedia page. That’s also common. For a number of reasons, the simplest being popularity and incoming links, social media platforms such as Wikipedia, and Facebook often come up at the top.

But...well, oops. As with much on social media if you already know a lot about a subject and you are just looking to tweak your knowledge, these sites are great. If, however, you know very little, you won’t be able to determine what is accurate and what isn’t.

There’s a lot of good stuff on the Wikipedia entry. Then again, there are some logical and factual errors, particularly in the section on comparing social media with “industrial media”.

Specifically:

Permanence - industrial media, once created, cannot be altered (once a magazine article is printed and distributed changes cannot be made to that same article) whereas social media can be altered almost instantaneously by comments or editing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media

This is incorrect. In fact, both social and industrial media content can be modified after the fact by adding to it, or commenting upon it, although social content, because it is “virtual” content can be modified this way on a much faster time scale. Whoever authored this particular section confused a number of factors.

So Who Cares?

In this example, the errors are fairly trivial, but the point is YOU should care.

First, if you get the majority of your information about social media ON social media sites, you are getting a biased, and unedited stream of truths, half-truths and incomplete truths, and outright false information.

Second, as a business person subject to comments made about you, your brand and your product are also susceptible to half-truths and incomplete truths put forward on the social web.

You cannot control the latter, and your ability to address the impact of half truths and falsities is limited.

(This is a preliminary, unedited and unproofed draft segment from "Giving The Business To Social Media, Hype, Hope, Bust, Reality")