Three considerations to gain control of content overload

Over on Mashable Business blogger and VP for digital media at MTV Dermot McCormack lays out what he calls the 3 Commandments for the Next Online Content Leaders. I gave it a look-see as creating, applying, organizing and transferring knowledge has been a formula that made Topsarge Business Solutions the company it is today and we often tout that content is king. I used to be wary when some were quick to note a “new paradigm” or how transferring information and knowledge has gone through a “change” when usually all they were selling was a software/format/tool change, with little by the way of something new.

Well Mr. McCormack correctly identifies what I have been emphasizing to my customers …and that leaders and managers are drowning in a sea of data. Finding the wheat from the chaff, that is managing content that is relevant to me at this moment, has become a herculean task that knowledge managers are often being expected to solve. Just today in another forum I read a discussion thread from a counterpart apologizing for earlier assertions that KM professionals must manage actionable knowledge. His revelation was that knowledge cannot be actionable, but that is to be explored deeper on in a future blog post. The take-away is that I concur with McCormack’s assertion that thanks to phone camera’s, apps, desktop publications, podcasts and other such content creation tools, anyone can (and does) create content.

Content Overload Management

So, in reviewing his 3 commandments he lays out three important elements that managers and leaders must consider:

• Build Authority – how accurate is the message, the messenger, and what is their reputation? Are they credible?
• Curate – Surveys show social networks are positive influencers, followers often trust their friends recommendations. Don’t always jump at he default recommendation, listen to your networks for advice.
• Provide context – You cannot determine if content is important to you without context. Context provides you the “so what,” or the meaning of particular aspects of the content.

Though I would suggest that most good community managers would recognize those activities as ways to maintain a healthy community, they are worth reconsidering and relooking if we are using them in evaluating intranet portals and in organizational communities. There are new elements of collaboration in that it is much more social and personnel, and the immediacy of those relationships due to smart phones and the “always on” wired generation. McCormick reminds us of these fundamental requirements, and we must continue to relook and evaluate how we use them all.

Dan Elder
Topsarge Business Solutions
@dandotelder