To believe or not to believe?
The following is a guest post from Jeffrey Cufaude, president and CEO, Ideas Architects. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter @jcufaude.
How do you determine credibility?
This was the question on my mind after participating in an invitation-only session on Monday with author David Nour. David has been working with the ASAE Foundation on research and a new book, Return on Impact: Leadership Strategies for the Age of Connected Relationships.
During some fairly passionate exchanges among the association executives in attendance, the online community's credibility was challenged compared to the association's credibility: "How can you trust what you read from a blogger?" Or "Just because someone has lots of followers doesn't mean they know what they are talking about." Difference of opinion on this topic seemed to vary by both generations and social media usage.
Here's the thing: we've always had connected relationships and we've always turned to our connections for advice. John Seely Brown wrote about this more than 10 years ago in his book, The Social Life of Information, in which he observed Xerox copy repair personnel calling coworkers for insight rather than turning to the company's training manual. We can just connect differently now, and that is disrupted the traditional ways in which information has been exchanged and knowledge has been created.
But credibility was an issue long before Twitter was created and will continue to be long after the next new technology emerges. When you sit in a session at this very meeting and hear a colleague share her take on a particular issue or a peer do a presentation, you filter their assertions for credibility based on whatever criteria you choose to apply. How is that so different than reading a blog post or a Tweet and assessing its validity? After all, we didn't peer review their registration forms for the Annual Meeting to only let in vetted association executives whose every opinion can be treated as universal truth.
So yes, credibility is critical individually, organizationally, and as an association community. But to out-of-hand dismiss the information and the connections created via social media could be an incredible slight and put your own credibility at risk in the eyes of some of the very people you may be trying to engage.
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Comments
My thoughts on this topic are this: we're pretty good, or maybe good isn't the right word so much as we have a lot of experience making assessments about content in the offline world -- right or wrong, we're comfortable with the assessments we make because we've refined how we do through many lessons.
We are much more wary of the human ability to make these assessments online. I purposefully said the "human ability" because this is one of those things that people think they do just fine, but don't believe others can do it at all.
I think assessing online people and content is a skill that continues to evolve and will continue to evolve because the way we communicate online now is different than it was 5 years ago, and it will be different 5 years from now.
I'd say give the old school thinkers a little bit of a break -- not a lot, but a little. It is a new skill that everyone is having to learn.
Posted by: Scott Briscoe | August 9, 2011 11:34 AM
I was struck by one of the younger execs in the session who made the point that a group active online may actually be better at discerning authenticity and credibility since it can be more challenging and they have a lot of practice doing it.
And if the "old school thinkers" want a break, they probably should extend the same courtesy to the other thinkers who feel more confident and comfortble with engaging in the on line community.
Posted by: Jeffrey Cufaude | August 10, 2011 10:25 PM