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If your social media platform was a parking plaza in an office park you'd be seeing more campaign stickers than vanity plates. The tagline: vote for me. The party line? There is no party -- everyone writing and running on their own tickets. There is no official word. This platform doesn't harbor policies. It holds suggestions and curiosities and even an occasional answer to a pressing and pervasive question. That's assuming the requesters and respondents don't take their interactions offline.

This unfiltered conjecture swamps the interface with dumpster-fuls of information wish lists. But these opening bids to compare assessments, trade war stories, rationalize a strategy, or run some missing numbers are no more real than the fantasies we're chasing. That's where our imaginations run to responses that were never searchable in same enterprise portals we're all fleeing from in the first place. It's the ultimate insult to the crew below deck in the search engine room. They slave away at the rusting ECM controls while our users crowd around the social platforms on the ship deck. Where are they headed exactly? Hard to tell. Let's say for now it's in the direction of social business as the preferred intermediary between organizational content suppliers and producers.

However, a crowded interface does not guarantee a content surplus make any more than a discrete email requires a collaboration space. Brokering the dance between internal buyers and sellers requires us information professionals to focus our efforts on the opportunities that go begging. We need to prioritize (not ignore) the questions that go unanswered. It's the knowledge deficit that persists whether we're shooting blanks in the search gallery or within our expanded social media circles.

So how do we achieve the goal of producing actionable business outcomes both from and for our virtual communities? Do we reach out and all become social? Do we give in and just get Google? These are the two extremes. And both are false choices.

For the last few months  I've had a chance to moonlight as a citizen designer of enterprise social media. The portal's vanished. The navigation is non-existent. The disorientation factor sees no down time. Another omnipresence? Glad-handling -- the art of showing up to have our pictures taken, a.k.a. faces threaded.

Still, I've had a chance to till the content soil by seeding conversations, showcasing instructive exchanges, and codifying the heck out of organizational know-how. That means dispatching group email Q&A sessions to a place outside the in-box. That means surfacing resources when they're needed and putting them in play for: (a) the larger team and (b) follow-on pursuits.

It's one thing to archive an answer to a question you may ask again six months from now in an email folder. It's quite another to architect the calls and responses of communities of practice. This is the transaction that's escaped our firewalls since Microsoft invented the F1 key and raised more questions than any resource could ever service.

The difference now is that an answer is not just a desire. It's the closure to an information request. That's more than an idle curiosity to some of us -- whether we're copied on that request or not.