Let your trusted network guide you to the best content

I don't ask for much, I only want your trust/And you know it don't come easy. - Ringo Starr, "It Don't Come Easy"

With the amount of content exploding, finding content you need to do your job is not an issue, but finding content you can trust is another story. As social networking tools gain popularity, you can begin to build a trusted network of individuals to help guide you to the right content. In fact, Chris Brogan [1] and Julien Smith [2] have a book coming out next month called Trust Agents [3]. The book looks at "how to use online social tools to build networks of influence and how you can use those networks to positively impact your business." While this book looks at it from the marketer's perspective to find people to carry your message for you on your social networks, the idea of trust agents is a good one and you can also let your own trust agents help you find the content you need to do your job.

Where do you go for good content?

Each week in order to build this newsletter, I need to filter through the week's news for all of the areas we cover in FierceContentManagement. That includes ECM, WCM, Enterprise 2.0, search, compliance and eDiscovery. It's not an easy task, but I have a process to help find what, in my editorial judgment, is the best news to cover in any particular week. How do I do this?

• I subscribe to a variety of feeds and use Google Reader to sort and sift through the news. When I first started editing this newsletter about a year ago, I relied almost entirely on Google Reader for my content, but that's changing.
• Increasingly, people find me because they want me to cover their news. They consider me part of what Brogan and Smith call that network of influence, but that works both ways, and it leads me to my third and increasingly important way to gather information.
• I follow people on Twitter who post about good content in areas that I cover, people like Carl Frappaolo [4] from Information Architected; Alex Howard [5], Associate Editor at SearchCompliance.com [6]; John Newton [7] from Alfresco; and Cheryl McKinnon [8] from Open Text. I've learned that these people and many others post about content that interests me and by following the links they find interesting, I've learned to trust their editorial filters. People like Cheryl and John who work for vendors might have individual biases regarding their products, but it doesn't mean they don't provide links of general interest to anyone looking for good information on content management.

Getting by with a little help from your friends

Using a social network to find information is not unique to me, or something that I set out to do when I started using Twitter. It's a natural outcome of social networking in general. As you go through the process of following people on a service like Twitter, you find individuals you like, and just as with any off-line relationship, you begin to trust their judgment. This kind of process works, by the way, when you bring these tools in-house behind the firewall. The same dynamic applies whether you're using Twitter or tools like Socialtext [9], Yammer [10] or SocialCast [11].

There's simply too much information out there to go it alone. You need to find your network of influences; those agents of trust that Brogan and Smith so aptly named. Your trusted network can help guide you to the content to do your job better, to understand the market you serve and learn about your industry. So who do you trust? Figure it out as I did and let your trusted network help you find the best content. - Ron [12]