My friend Mike Weiksner pointed out an interesting set of observations about the important role that “shared links” are increasingly having. More and more, people come across links to information not because they searched for it, but because someone shared it with them.

The article is by Fred Wilson, a New York City-based venture capitalist. Embedded in a series of points is this observation:

When I take a step back and look at my own behavior, I also have a hard time denying the fact that my media consumption habits and behaviors have changed in the last 18-24 months.  I’m getting more and more of my information from the people I’m connected to through email, IM, RSS, Facebook, and Twitter.  Also, the nature of the searching I’m doing now is much more targeted and specific.  I won’t search as much for content or something that’s happening now because I’ve probably already received the link from someone I know or follow.  The links that are relevant to me and timely find their way to me these days with remarkable efficiency.

(The italics are mine.) That observation seems right on, if I look at my own behavior too. I have long been an inveterate news-and-information consumer. I had a short list of sites that I was almost constantly reviewing. I go to them with little frequency these days, instead relying on a network of people I know to pass things along to me. This “corwd-sourced” early warning system by and large keeps me ahead of the curve. It’s uncanny.

What does this mean for a nonprofit or community based organization? You need a strategy to get this link-sharing to happen in order to spread your messages. There appears to be a sea change beginning (especially if you add in demographic analyses), where people rely more and more on information coming to them from trusted connections — not because they read it in a newspaper.

Of interest in the article is that 25% of the sharing that this VC’s company is watching (which is not the whole Web) gets shared by e-mail, a very old school means of sharing. Twitter and other social media account for just 9% of link sharing. So we’re not talking a Twitter or Facebook strategy here, we’re talking email and blogs.