Ep. 59. Leadership communication through curation
If sharing really is caring, then the content you share needs to be content you really care about — and content your audience will care about too.
If sharing really is caring, then the content you share needs to be content you really care about — and content your audience will care about too.
Suppose you read a tweet or a Facebook update: an urgent message about something truly vile that a public figure has said. Outraged, you click through… and discover that, actually, what they said is far milder.
Or you click the “About us” link on an organization’s web site… and you’re taken to a rambling, vague philosophical essay. Or you search online on three keywords, click a promising result, and discover the page has nothing, nothing to do with your search terms. Or you tap a link to “Read more” on a mobile web page, and a 30-megabyte PDF begins to download slow-w-w-ly onto your smartphone, sucking the life out of your data plan.
Been there? Me, too — all in the past week — and it left me fuming.
What happened in every case wasn’t just a little wasted time, or a frustrated search, or a dent in my data plan. What happened was a little tiny betrayal.
Because a link isn’t just an URL or a little HTML code. A link is a promise.
On a web page, it’s a promise that if you click or tap here, you’ll go to the page, document or resource that the text inside the anchor tag describes. In a Twitter feed or on a Facebook page, it’s a promise that this link will be worth your while – that it was worth sharing because it’s worth reading.
Breaking that promise means breaking faith with readers and visitors. And the ways people do just that are depressingly numerous:
The result? Some pretty upset people:
[View the story “I hate it when I click a link and it leads to…” on Storify]
The flip side? When someone clicks a link of yours and gets exactly what you promised, it builds trust – the same way that keeping any other promise does. Trust helps to build relationships, and relationships… well, they’re what social networks are built on.
Here are five ways you can be sure you’re keeping those promises:
Sharing links can do a lot of good for you and your audiences. Just remember that when you share content, it reflects on your reputation – for better or worse.
Suppose you read a tweet or a Facebook update: an urgent message about something truly vile that a public figure has said. Outraged, you click through… and discover that, actually, what they said is far milder.
Or you click the “About us” link on …
Not long ago, I saw a reference on Twitter to a clever illustration of either Wolverine or one Batman looking at another. I clicked through to a Tumblr page, where someone had reblogged it from someone else on Tumblr, who had reblogged it from someone …