Reader to leader: motivating participation

“One click” tools like retweeting and liking content make social participation easy. Harry Hochheiser and Ben Schniederman say “Social networking tools illustrate the importance of leveraging existing social ties to generate perceived community in From Bowling Alone toTweeting Together: Technology-Mediated Social Participation.

It cannot be accidental that they refer to these communities as perceived. I recently posted about the great resource our social media acquaintances are in my algorithm post. However, there is also the dilution of content in our state of information overload.

Hochheiser and Schniederman’s gently claim that these communities we are in are perceived. Because it is so easy to passively interact with those in our social feeds, do we end up crafting communities that truly exist or are they only perceived. Without going too far down the “what is reality” path, what we learn here is that like in traditional media even in social media, leaders emerge.

These leaders emerge from the group of general social media users. Everyone consumes. Those that only consume are often called lurkers. He says, then, some become contributors, collaborators and leaders. They do not define each role and break down the difference between a contributor and collaborator.

My guess is that a collaborator is someone who posts something on Facebook (a contributor). A friend then comments on that post, which makes that friend a collaborator. If the author responds, he then also becomes a collaborator. Once they are in “engaged participation” in the community, say a Facebook Group, or a long thread of posts, they have become a leader.

The reader, the consumer is playing a role s/he’s never played before. The reader is influencing the experience for other readers. They add value to the content written by the author, may that person be writing for CNN or on Facebook.com.

As a collaborator’s reading experience is hyper mediated by contribution, on say, is their reading experience hypermediated across platforms?

It’s possible that leadership on social media platforms has changed the way they read what professional news authors publish. How then, if at all, should journalists change the way they write and collaborate with their readers and collaborators?