I recently read a blog post by Danny Brown where he talked about how social media crowdsourcing is making us lazy. He brings up that instead of asking questions and seeking out the answers ourselves, we are just sending out questions and collecting answers from our social media friends and followers.
I have to admit Danny makes a great point. Social media (In this post, I’m going to use Twitter as my sole example) is a fantastic tool. But, it’s just that a tool. It shouldn’t serve as a one-stop shop for information. There are things that we ask on Twitter that we really could be researching ourselves on Google, in an online encyclopedia, or for heaven’s sake a book.
Thanks to social media, we have more resources and knowledge at our fingertips than ever before. Instead of making us smarter, we are taking it for granted and becoming lazier.
For instance as Danny said, Twitter is ideal for crowdsourcing opinions from a large group of people. For instance, which WordPress theme do you like the best? This is an opinionated question, and you are likely to get quite a few different responses.
While opinions can lead to the truth, they are based solely on personal beliefs not facts. Where people run into trouble is they start using Twitter to answer fact-based questions. Just because you have 10,000 followers, doesn’t mean that you are going to get back “the right answers” to your fact-based questions. A larger number of responses from a vast group of followers may provide valuable insight and steer you in the right direction, but you still need to do the research on your own.
Bottom line:
You simply can’t trust your followers to guide you to the light and answer every question for you.
You wouldn’t buy a house (hopefully) by solely crowdsourcing responses on Twitter? You need to put forth the time and effort to figure out what your preferences and needs are first. Twitter crowdsourced answers may give you some useful information, but you ultimately need to sort through it yourself and figure out what will work and won’t work for your particularly needs.
The same goes for running a business. It’s certainly okay to throw out a question on Twitter about a certain aspect for how to do something. I do it all the time. But, you must realize you are going to get back opinions not facts. You can’t just take the most popular opinion and run with it. You have to sort all your options and figure out which one is best for your own needs.
