It's not about sharing, it's about publishing.

It’s not about sharing, it’s about publishing.

Social media isn’t about sharing. It’s about publishing. Sharing is just the method of publishing that requires the least creativity, originality, time or effort.

And people confusing the incidence of sharing with the importance of publishing in regards to social media, are a large part of why so many of today’s campaigns completely miss the mark.

Publishing has become the predominant form of communication in our networked culture. Facebook is the best example of this: the service is as much about conducting your social life, as it is about recording your social life. By this I mean Facebook incorporates publishing into communication – this is what social media has shown us resonates with people; not sharing, but creating a durable record of a life as it is lived.

This model of behavior explains the major successes of social media: MySpace was a chance to build a record not only of your interests, but of your friends, social interactions, and exchanges. As much as blogging has caught on as a news / editorial format, it’s greatest participation has come from people treating it as an individual, and public journal – a record of a life as it is lived.

Twitter is a perfect example of this: while sharing links is popular, the majority of tweeting is conversational and observational – not ‘this is my lunch’ but ‘this is what I think, how I feel, who I talk to’.

Social media made conversation something indexable, rather than ephemeral. And you’re still talking about sharing.

Sharing is the lowest common denominator of publishing. It’s not creation, and it’s not (always) curation. Sharing is merely trying to build an association between yourself and a piece of found culture, within your audience / peer group. Sharing isn’t about the value of the content, it’s about the meaning the content bestows on the one sharing.

Building a social strategy around sharing, as opposed to around publishing, is limiting your success criteria to whether or not your brand is aspirational for your target. And while sharing can work fantastically if you can create brilliant content, or serve as cultural shorthand for a positive attribute, those are a lot of balls to keep in the air, rather than letting your brand facilitate and encourage the urge to publish.

This comes down to the core point: being shareable is about being interesting and dead easy to distribute. Being publishable is about being relevant to the point of inclusion in someone’s personal narrative, as they edit it.

Sharing is the weakest and least meaningful form of publishing as the concept applies to social media. Look past it.