Hope all of our readers had a wonderful holiday season. Over the New Year weekend, had occasion to read an interesting article in MIT's Technology Review concerning the "law of social sharing." Apparently propounded by Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, the law predicts that "every year, for the foreseeable future, the amount of information you share on the Web will double." Those familiar with the history of computing will undoubtedly catch the allusion to "Moore's Law" conceived of by Gordon Moore, a founder of Intel, who famously predicted that, every two years, the number of transistors that can be fitted onto a chip of any given area, for the same price, will double. No one ever accused Mark Zuckerberg of lacking ambition.
The Web is rapidly being reshaped and redefined by social sharing of content, and Facebook has certainly facilitated that trend with its ubiquitous "Like" buttons, and new technology that allows apps and Web sites to automatically share your activity via Facebook as you browse. Internet titans such as Google and Salesforce.com have jumped on the bandwagon with social sharing features being added to their own applications.
Of course, as the article points out, the exponential growth of social sharing cannot continue forever - people have only a limited number of hours today to devote to social sharing, and will naturally filter out the more inane updates, and focus on those most important to them.
Still, for legal marketers, Zuckerberg's Law merits consideration - does your firm's website, and its blogs and email newsletters, include a social sharing tool? It can be as simple as incorporating an "Add This" icon. If not, that's definitely a feature to add in 2012. To be sure, most people won't care about your latest alert concerning, say, a new IRS regulation addressing some arcane international tax issue. But for the few clients who do, you'd be well advised to give them access to tools that let them share that and other firm content with their like-minded peers.
Click here to read the full MIT article.
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