Over at her blog, PR pro Kellye Crane shares why she doesn’t like the content sharing platform Triberr. It’s an alternate view to ones shared by Gini Dietrich and Shonali Burke. It’s an interesting read, and offers some good points on why it’s not for folks like Kellye.
However, there’s one thing that stands out in both the post and some of the comments – the (perceived) misunderstanding that Triberr is an evil thing that takes away transparency and authenticity, and makes social media less social.
Because tools don’t take away anything – people do.
Triberr – much like anything that automates your social media streams – has a bunch of options that allows you to curate how you feed blog posts into your Twitter stream. This means you can automatically share people you would anyway, or have a manual setting to moderate before you curate. You can also delete posts you don’t feel are useful to your followers.
So, basically, any annoyance someone has with Triberr – or similar tools – is really an annoyance with the person and how they’re sharing content.
But then that’s where the funny thing about content sharing comes in.
It’s primarily about the content you enjoyed.
That’s why you share – because you enjoyed it, and feel it deserves a wider audience. That’s not to say that your followers or connections will enjoy it too. You hope they will, but they might think you’ve lost your marbles for sharing something that is banal (to them).
But that doesn’t really matter. Because you enjoyed it, and your share is a thank you to the writer, not your connections.
So with that in mind, is any kind of sharing – automated or otherwise – less authentic or social because someone doesn’t like how it’s being shared?
Or are we missing the point on content sharing a little, and thinking it should always be for our benefit, when it’s simply because someone enjoyed something someone else wrote?
image: Azrasta
