Today’s “Social” and “Professional” Sites are Bad Netizens! So What Do We Do?

Two decades ago, I asked: Are You Being a Good Netizen because odds were if you were reading Sourcing Innovation (or, at the time, e-Sourcing Form or Spend Matters or one of the other sites offering you best practice advice and free insights on a daily basis) you were a consultant, service, or software provider. And while that wasn’t a bad thing, it also wasn’t a good thing.

The reason: the people who needed to be reading these independent sites the most were the actual procurement and sourcing professionals that these sites were created to serve. People who didn’t have regular access to high-priced best practice consultants, training course, or local professional groups to learn from. People who were thrust into the Island of Misfit Toys with little or no experience. People who needed real help, especially when it came to understanding the root of their problem, what processes and knowledge were needed to address them, and how to identify the right technology, and then solution provider, to help them.

People who, once they understood what they needed, would happily invite the consultancy or solution provider for a briefing or demo once they understood what that provider had to offer — yet few, (and sometimes) if any, consultancies or solution providers would tell their customers about the great resources that would not only help the customer, but the consultancy or solution provider. They weren’t good netizens, even when it would cost them nothing and only help them in the end. (And, frankly, helping a customer understand you’re not the right provider for them and saving you months of sales cycle effort only for the customer to walk away when the light-bulb turned on is a good thing — you want to spend your time with potential customers whom your solution is right for, because, once those customers get a taste of that solution, they’ll never let it go. While it’s true that organizations never want to change tech because of the time, effort, and cost required, it’s ten times true for tech that actually works that users like — they will fight tooth-and-nail to keep it, and when it’s a department/low-enough cost solution, even if corporate mandates something new, that department or user will still renew a license on a P-Card to keep it.)

Back before the social and professional networks were a big thing, the average buyer had no source of information beyond the country’s professional organization, the highly redacted analyst and consultancy sites, and whatever Google would serve them. That was not nearly enough.

But then the social and professional sites came along, and, for a while, things started to get better. Peers could inform each other of third party and independent sites that had free knowledge for the taking. And for a while, that’s what happened.

But then things changed, especially with the two most popular and commonly used sites (and, more or less, the only two sites that remain), when their focus shifted from enabling people to connect and learn to extracting money from their users any way they could, tweaking the algorithms to only advertise paid content or content from their most popular posters and favouring the few that regurgitate the mainstream hype over the independent thinkers trying to move knowledge, or at least the conversation, forward.

They’re not good netizens, and it’s hard for people who need good content to find the content they want.

Used to be you could Google, but now that “AI summary” is injected by default, the sources, and real information gets buried.

So we’re back to the early 2000s, where the only solution is for providers to stop pushing the hype and start sharing the knowledge again. There aren’t many sites left from when SI started (with Jon W. Hansen‘s Procurement Insights now being the 2nd oldest blog), but others have arisen — but how many people know about them?

(Including those who might follow the authors on LinkedIn and maybe see every third or fifth post. We’re talking about

and others. How many people really know about these sites? The answer: Not enough.)

So, pretend it’s the early noughts and go back to sharing human to human what’s really useful and what really matters. Otherwise, you’ll just end up getting dragged down to the lowest common denominator as a result of all the derivative Gen-AI garbage posts that now clog your social and professional media feeds.