If I see one more quote claiming that all companies should jump into social media because its free…I’m going to poke my eyes out.  So when I read this morning’s post on the Future Changes blog I couldn’t help but share the insight.  The quote below…and the heart of the post succinctly depicts the issue with why people think social media is free…and why it is not.  A distribution channel or channel for engagement is only as good as the content being distributed or shared.  Yes the channels are free…the content…especially the most valuable kind is most likely not.  Thank you Stewart Brand.

Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine—too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, ‘intellectual property’, the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.