One of my favorite business books is The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. This book really opened my mind as far as group think goes. It showed that under certain circumstances that the crowd was actually smarter than any individual person on a subject or topic (product reviews etc). Yet under different circumstances the crowd could easily lead you blindly over a cliff (subprime loans etc).
Given that group think can be beneficial, a great way to research a product or service is to use the immediate feedback of Twitter to help you access a very vocal crowd.
Crowdsourcing With Twitter
You can do this in a couple of ways.
The first way is to use Twitter Search to find keywords about your individual item.
Twitter has a great search feature that lets you filter by attitude to find positive reviews and negative reviews by using the happy or sad face characters.You can use a question mark to filter for results that ask a question.
If you want to exclude a term from your results just use a minus sign in front of the term.
Using search may give you reasonable results but for real feedback you may want to ask your followers a specific question and see their answers.
New York Times author David Pogue has a great article today on the subject of Crowdsourcing with Twitter. He asked his Twitter followers for their best tech-product enhancement ideas. The results were quick, to the point, and very revealing.
After reading David’s article it became apparent that using Twitter may be the fastest way to find out what people think about a product or service. Imagine almost instantaneous feedback on the latest gadget right at your fingertips. This is the power of Twitter.
Question: Have You Ever Tried Crowdsourcing with Twitter?
