Share, and Show You Care
This blog is about making information more useful, so it may seem out of place to talk about sharing. But this post is about sharing information, and the act of thoughtful and generous information sharing is fundamental to making information more useful for all of us. Selfless sharing also has side benefits like improving the size and strength of your social networks and increasing happiness, but let’s first focus on how information sharing allows us to take control of the information that matters.
We have said it before, but consider all of the information being produced on a daily basis. Only a very small fraction of that information is going to be relevant to any one of us. Who has the time to find the important and relevant bits? Individually, we don’t stand a chance. There are lots of ways we can try (many of which are discussed on the blog), but a single person just can’t keep up. The answer is to look at what we can do collectively. All together, we can consume and filter a lot of information, and the act of sharing is what enables everyone to benefit. Of course, all sharing is not equal.
Effective Sharing
The effectiveness of sharing is proportional to the level of personalization, thoughtfulness, and selflessness. These three things are very important.
First, lets consider personalization by breaking information sharing down into three different types:
- Sharing publicly – this is sharing information in a public forum like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or on a blog. Sharing information this way is generally not very personal. The most effective public information sharing usually comes from people who consistently share good information on a particular topic. By doing this, they build up followers who are like-minded and interested in the same information. In a way, this makes their public information sharing more personal.
- Sharing to a group – sharing information to a [relatively small and like-minded] group is more personal than sharing publicly, and is typically done in some sort of online forum, email distribution, or newsletter. Groups share common characteristics, and information sharing can be personalized to be more useful to people with these same characteristics.
- Sharing to an individual - sharing one-on-one to another individual is as personal as it gets. Emails, twitter DMs, phone calls, and face-to-face conversations are examples of individual information sharing. By knowing exactly who you are sharing information with, it can be extremely targeted and personal (and hence, more useful).
By the way, the opposite of personalized information sharing is information spamming. Constantly spewing information can cause more harm than good. Think of personalization as a filter, not a fire hose.
Next, let’s see how thoughtfulness and selflessness lead to effective information sharing. Thoughtfulness implies thinking about how shared information will impact the people you are sharing with. Randomly spamming people with information that has no relevance to them is not useful. However, information that is carefully considered and deemed useful can be of tremendous benefit. This is where the benefits of sharing goes into overdrive, and it requires us to constantly think about how the information we are consuming can impact others. In addition to thoughtfulness, it is important that sharing information is a selfless act – meaning that it is an act of generosity, not for personal gain. When you start keeping score, or you adopt a tit-for-tat mentality, you are no longer acting selflessly.
The fact is that everyone wins when we all share information that is personalized, thoughtful, and selfless. The power of social networks is unleashed, and we become a collective group of information filters for one another.
Take Personal Action
To improve the effectiveness of your information sharing (and we all have some room for improvement), you must take personal action. What can you, as an individual, do to enable collective information sharing? For starters, try to do more of the following: Read more →
