More on Tearing Down the Social Media Silos

Yesterday I posted on FastForward, We Need to Tear Down the Social Media Silos. It was partially based on an interesting post by David Chartier, The Future of Social Media: The Walls Come Crumbling Down. He focuses primarily on the consumer Web and writes, “But for the social web to evolve into its final stage and take flight, the walls that separate these services, their users and everything they create will have to come down.”

David then goes on to quote Leo Laporte, a broadcaster who runs the TWiT network. Leo calls the phenomenon "the social silo," and he does not feel it can last much longer. "People are pouring all this content and value into individual sites," says Laporte, "but they aren't going to want to keep dealing with Facebook, and Twitter, and FriendFeed, and whatever is next." I could not agree more. There is more in that FastForward post and I will not repeat it all here. I concluded that the same thing is operating within the enterprise.

In this post I want to offer another Web example and make a request to the application developers. This blog now gets syndicated in a number of sites: Social Media Today, MyVenturePad, Content Management Connection, BlogBurst, my Facebook page, and several other sources including LexisNexis, CanWest, Amazon Kindle, and Newsbank through Newstex. Now most of my posts do not generate a lot of comments. However, sometimes there are comments and they get sprinkled around the different outlets. This last week I got comments on several posts through Facebook for the first time. I make it worse by sometimes cross posting from FastForward or the AppGap to share information with additional audiences.

It would be great to have an application that aggregated all of the comments on a post. This would enable me to see everything in one place and for the commenter to see what others are saying. I am not aware of an application that does this. I think it would be useful and would break down one more set of social silos.

Comments

[Mary Abraham]

Bill -

It looks like both of us had silos on the brain yesterday. As I wrote in my post, the silos can result from the tools and from the way we execute. Perhaps we need to rethink our strategy. If we're broadcasting widely, but not able to engage in conversation as widely, how social is our computing?

Here's my post on silos, Fighting the Farmers: http://aboveandbeyondkm.com/2009/06/fighting-the-farmers.html

- Mary