The Power of Collective Intelligence - Thought of the Day

"All of us are smarter than any one of us."

Japanese Proverb

Traditional research, Before the Internet (BI), was often best accomplished by someone who had a wide net of contacts to poll about the topic under investigation. Chip can tell you that companies spend millions of dollars developing managed panels of highly selected individuals to help divine the wisdom of the whole from a small, yet statistically significant, number of individual panel members.

The Internet has begun to disintermediate the stronghold that managed panel and market research companies have on helping companies uncover trends within their target markets. The collaborative power of the Internet and ravenous passion for products, politics and past times that the world of Social Media has brought from the underground to the foreground has made the process of doing primary research virtually effortless by traditional standards.

I am a particularly big fan of social answers networks. I previously wrote about the power of some of the social answer networks (link) the Internet (e.g. http://www.linkedin.com/answers, http://answers.yahoo.com/, http://wiki.answers.com/) and talked about how we have used these tools at home to facilitate the age old problem that “Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus.”

If you have a pressing issue or question that is perplexing you, I encourage you to step outside of your comfort zone and try one or all of the aforementioned answer networks. I believe that you will be astounded by the sheer horsepower of the collective network.

A few tips before you get started:

• LinkedIn is best for business questions
• Yahoo! is better for personal issues
• Be very specific about your question. Questions that can be objectively answered get far more responses than open-ended ones.

TOTD has most recently been very focused on the changing nature of the world of marketing and I strongly feel that increased use of the social answers network by the team will help provide some of the answers to the mind-bending issues that we are facing in the marketplace.

Make it a great Wednesday,

Jonathan

Individual commitment to a group effort – that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work." - Vince Lombardi

I keep getting stumped with questions that I cannot answer and it frustrates me. I am a guy and, as many women can attest to, guys are better at solving problems than listening.

My girlfriend had some questions about how we should handle certain situations in our life. Being the guy that I am, I immediately started trying to find the “right” answer. When I tried to answer with a positive spin, she would play devil’s advocate and gave me all of the reasons that the negative was more plausible and vice versa. Does this sound familiar to anyone?

This conversation was not going as well as I would have liked, so I went to my fall-back plan – the Internet and the world of Social Media. I suggested that she consider posing these questions to a greater audience and maybe we would gain some wisdom that I/we could not come up with on our own.

She is pretty innovative and open to new ideas and immediately went online to Yahoo! Answers (http://answers.yahoo.com) and started tapping into the network. Within 30 minutes of asking her first round of questions, she had 16 answers (25% of the answers were very helpful, 50% neutral, and 25% were not helpful.) After reviewing the answers to the first question, she realized that she needed to refine her question so as to dig deeper into the wisdom of this community of answers. The answers she received helped us come up with a mutually agreeable plan of action and ultimately saved us hundreds of dollars in counseling fees – LOL.

Of course, Yahoo! Answers isn’t an infallible source of infinite wisdom. But, as Vince Lombardi says, a group effort usually leads to better, and more well-rounded, results. And Yahoo! Answers opens you up to a pretty large group.

I told Bill Abele about this experience and he said that he was going home that night to try it out; he was hooked.

The beauty of social media is that the tools are right at our fingertips. We just need to be aware of them and their potential applications and be willing to experiment with them to help create outstanding results.

If you have a question that you can’t answer, consider tapping into the power of the Internet. If you can’t figure out where to go with it, give me a call, and I will help you out.


Have a great Friday,

Jonathan