Sooner or later we all end up having our own instance of a Social Media mashup. Our Interconnection Map will, hopefully, fulfill our needs and evolve with us and with time. However, no matter how complex it is, it will only address our more basic integration or automation needs.
The attention economy and relationships in the on-line world are heavily driven or influenced by the content we share. Unfortunately, content curation can be very time consuming. In other words, if we have to fight for audience attention, it is very likely that we start pushing our available resources to the limits:
- maybe we are focused on some knowledge areas, but let many others uncovered.
- perhaps we don’t cover some topics deeply enough.
- we may not have so much time and don’t update quickly enough.
- maybe our network and social influence is limited.
- …
Additionally, everyone has the ability to deploy his own mashup in order to automate his social activity. So, unless you start paying for automation services or come up with a very clever Service Interconnection Design, at the end of the day, almost everyone is more or less on the same situation.
The question is, then, if there is any strategy that we can explore in order to make a difference. And the answer lays, in my humble opinion, in collaboration and cooperation.
There are many different patterns where different parties can contribute to higher order structure. Here are some you can try:
- Delegation. In this scheme different parties contribute and collaborate with different content sources to feed a set of Target Services.
- Moderation and Routing. In this case, you leverage Google Reader labels to manually decide which content goes through your mashup (approval, filtering) and/or route it to the appropriate Target Service.
These are simple examples with only two mashups involved. But, of course, it can get as complicated as you wish or need. In any case, the pattern is always the same:
different Social Media mashups get structured in different hierarchical layers playing different collaboration roles in a non-exclusive way.
What’s interesting here is that the differentiating factor is not the technology, but the members of the collaboration network, their mutual relationships and how well do they manage/govern their own mashups.
As you can see there is a whole world of possibilities behind these solutions. And, as in the case of your own Interconnection Map, you just need to find your way. Maybe, you are already doing it! 😀
Well, this is it! What do you think about it?
Image source: http://bit.ly/PVdV8t
