Everyone likes to come up with a list of new rules. There are the New rules of Marketing and PR, the New Rules of Web Development, and the list goes on. A couple of weeks ago, Ankesh, Grouptivity’s president and CEO, came up with the 5 New Rules of Content Sharing that I thought were worth sharing with our blog audience – so here they are:

1. Comprehensive:
   Content sharing tool must be comprehensive and provide multiple ways for users to sharing content including at least the top three content sharing mechanisms: email, bookmarking, cut-and-paste.
2. Social:
   Content lives in a social context and shared content should be able to drive conversation and community around it. Content cannot live as an island but needs discussion and community to drive it!
3. Personalized:
   Today’s users should be able to personalize the content sharing experience. One size doesn’t fit them all! Online users have a broad range of interests and tasks and content sharing tools and services should take that into account.
4. SEO:
   Shared content needs to, whenever possible, to optimized for search engines so that it can be easily found. Backlinks and permalinks should also be used to allow readers to return to the source of the content and have a permanent reference to it. Obvious benefits to content publishers include return traffic.
5. Monetizable:
   We have all learned that there is no free lunch on the web. Content should be monetizable if we expect quality and continuity of content! Content sharing should take this into account.