Janet Clarey has a great post about the topic of determining authenticity in social media. She gives a great example of how messages (in particular tweets) can be taken out of context by folks applying traditional methods to interpreting dialogue to conversations going on in social media spaces.
The fact that someone tweeting about whack-a-mole, or going over some arbitrary number number of tweets, really is meaningless without understanding the social network context in which the tweets are occurring.
(I just have to stop and laugh at that sentence. It just sounds funny!)
Janet linked to this video Jay Cross took at the eLearning Guild’s DevLearn09 conference. Jay took a video of the panel as he participated. Mark Oehlert led the conversation, in this video Michelle Lentz and Aaron Silvers comment on the topic of reputation, authenticity, and credibility.
Big takeaways for me:
- The way to prove your reputation, authenticity, and credibility is to share. To be active on your network, so if someone tries to speak on your behalf your network will be able to recognize the fraud
- Recognizing credibility is no longer about the degrees we have, but what we have shared with our networks to build trust. This can be successes and failures (which is scary for Enterprises!)
- I have to speak up for the SMEs, I think SMEs would be happy to have a chance to be actually recognized as the real experts. (Or not – maybe they don’t want anyone to know so they aren’t overwhelmed with requests for help – but this is a totally different topic.)
- How do we teach people how to understand and interpret social media conversations, so that they can recognize expertise in a network? Do we create systems to help people (example given was rating Amazon raters).
- Be authentic. That is actually my goal – hopefully if we ever meet face to face you’ll see I’m the same way in person that I am online.
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