Social media creates a mountainous pile of data on a daily basis.  How do you handle this data of followers, subscribers, friends, views and more?  While there are a ton of great tools including Radian6, Techrigy and Crimson Hexigon – I wanted to talk more about overall goals.

So let’s break down the path from a single piece of data as it makes its way to what will hopefully become wisdom within your gray matter.

Data: The straight facts.  These are in and of themselves pretty useless.  I have 3,233 followers on Twitter.  3,000 people read my RSS feed, etc.  So what?  How can these data points really help you?  They can’t, move on.

Information: When you process data, such as putting it in the context of time-lines or relation to competitors, it becomes information.  Now I know that I have 30% more followers or my RSS subscribers have increased by 40%.  This gives perspective and when combined with knowing what new actions that I did to make this happen.  Information enables you to see what is happening around you and make sense of your actions.

Knowledge: Building on these information patterns and applying them to new products and situations takes knowledge.  Knowledge is the the building and understanding of the information over time.  For example; if campaign x increased twitter followers by Y and blog RSS readers by Z, then you have the knowledge to predict likely outcomes of campaigns for new products.

Wisdom:

“Never mistake knowledge for wisdom; one helps you make a living, the other helps you make a life.”

- Sandra Carey

Wisdom, the accumulation of knowledge over time- this is what will set you and your organization apart.   The wisdom that you have – your collection of knowledge- is unique in the entire universe, no other single being has the same collection.  Your solutions and ideas are based on a set of wisdom that is completely unique and valuable on this planet.  How are you using your wisdom, your collection of life experiences to push things to the next level for you and your organization?

I am writing this because I think that social media often gets caught up in the tools.  Wisdom and success is not about the tools.  Tools help us to process the data and information to build knowledge and can accelerate wisdom.  I intentionally used a picture of Data, the humanoid robot from Star Trek.  He knew the most on the ship, but was he the wisest?

How are you leveraging your wisdom to succeed today?

/colin