I was thinking about the post-truth phenomenon last night and I realised something that hadn’t occurred to me before. In short, it is that when an individual shares an article on social media, part of their own “brand” travels with the link as it is displayed to others in their network and lends credibility to the content. 

We all know the importance of word-of-mouth in consumer marketing which is essentially that by getting people to advocate a product, both awareness and trust can be built with a potential buyer. The product itself is not questioned by the person that reads the product endorsement, all they see is that someone they respect in their network believes that a product is good.  

Logically, a similar process would apply to statements and articles online. The credibility of a statement is not housed in the publisher's brand nearly as much as it is in the individual brands of those that share the content. Hence people do not question whether a political statement is true, any more than you would the assertion that a particular brand of cake-mix makes great brownies. 

Further, the brand of Business-to-Business companies will similarly be being challenged online with the credibility of a company's experts being a pretty direct function of how much their content and statements are shared by others that are liked and respected in their ecosystem.

All of which is a pretty compelling case for professional experts creating shareable, as opposed to searchable, content.