April 23, 2008
The Foolishness of Crowds
Posted by Kevin | Print This Article
So, social media lets people organize without organizations.
While it’s nice to wrap buzzwords like “social media” around things, this is nothing new; some of us have been dealing with “ad hoc” groups in our industry segments since long before anyone had heard of “blogging” let alone tried to create a whole new genre around it. Websites, listserves, message boards: none of it is quite snazzy enough to count as Web 2.0, but it’s all been pretty easy, cheap, and in some cases quite effective, for a long time now.
There are a couple things about these self-organized groups that pose both challenges for themselves, and for the associations they compete with:
PEOPLE ARE OFTEN WRONG ABOUT A WHOLE LOT OF DIFFERENT THINGS, AND LOVE SHARING THEIR ERRONEOUS ASSUMPTIONS AND JUDGMENTS WITH THEIR PEERS AS IF THEY WERE FACTS.
We’re often forwarded posts from one niche website in our industry (essentially a listserve that costs $50 a month) that have confused us because we are not sure whether to laugh or let our jaws drop. People share ideas and concepts that are outright wrong, in some cases beyond-the-borderline illegal, as if it is gospel.
Myths propagate themselves and pick up steam. Since these people are all essentially peers, working in the same industry, with access to the same communications tool (just click “send”), there is no way for credibility to be assigned. When others speak up and say “hey you’re wrong and what you’re advocating could cost people hundreds of thousands of dollars,” the dissent — if it is noticed at all — becomes a matter of disagreement, as opposed to one person being right, and one person being wrong.
On the one hand, it is frustrating to see members of an industry or profession you serve and love be led astray by (probably) well-meaning yet ill-informed (or, most likely, simply inexperienced) practitioners.
On the other hand, it is nice to be considered the place where people go for the RIGHT answers, and there is competitive advantage to be mined there. It has certainly worked well for us.
PEOPLE HAVE BIG EGOS, AND WILL TRY TO TURN THEIR “DISORGANIZED ORGANIZATIONS” INTO “REAL” ORGANIZATIONS FOR THE PURPOSES OF THEIR OWN AGENDA.
Though I haven’t read the book mentioned by Ben and Jeff, I got a kick out of this quote from the book which Ben placed on his blog:
“The jury is still out on whether any of the current interest in reforming the US health care system will change anything, but if I had to pick between MoveOn and groups like the self-organized strangers in Dallas for having the more profound effect, I’d bet on the ad hoc groups.”
Why do I find this amusing? Because MoveOn started out as — a little email group! They were circulating a petition to try and get Congress to censure Clinton rather than impeach him. (They failed, by the way.) And it turned into — apparently a big old-fashioned evil “organization” beset by these little social media networks.
Personally, I think it’s great that people can band together using the Internet to advocate for something, whether it’s a “Passenger’s Bill of Rights” or a speed bump on their local road. More power to them. I don’t view any of these groups as a threat to associations. If there are people loosely getting together on a single issue that intersects with your interest, then, uh — join them and get to know them and work with them or against them as you see fit. Don’t really see how they are all that much different from the little advocacy groups that have been springing up since time immemorial. They’re easier to form and so there will be more of them, but dealing with them is not exactly rocket science.
If people in your profession are using Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever all those sites are to “get together” then how is it a threat to your society? You can play catchup with a similar network of your own, or else you can sponsor their happy hour and buy them all a drink. (The latter is probably a lot easier and will have a bigger pay-off.)
The problem, of course, is that people have egos and agendas and big aggrandized visions, so many of them will try to turn their little one-issue groups into something bigger that can attract corporate funding. Some of them will succeed, most will fail, and the ones that succeed, if they are in your industry or profession, will become competitors for your association.
To which, I’m afraid I must say — so what? Competition is good! Deal with them as you do any other competitors. Learn from them, steal from them, crush them, work with them if you must — though on the whole my preference is for simply keeping them in your peripheral vision while you focus on serving your market best by creating new or better things they can’t get anywhere else. As I like to say, “We’re here to learn, we’re here to grow, and we’re here to win.”
What you should not do is gnash your teeth about this new “competition” and how it will affect your association. Yes, they may use new tools — but of course, YOU CAN USE THEM, TOO. Other than that, perhaps to the chagrin of some young and eager minds, and as I learned myself when I too was young and eager — there is indeed nothing new under the sun.
Organizing isn’t new. But the means by which groups are organizing, the speed with which groups can mobilize and the number of people that can be organized has changed profoundly. In other words:
1. Social web tools (including bulletin boards and listservs) have made it radically EASIER and FASTER to organize groups.
2. Because more and more people are participating in the social web, the number of people you can potentially organize online is growing astronomically.
Shirky contends that we have reached a point where the cumulative radical changes in the way people can organize has produced not just a change in scope, but a change in kind: this is a totally new kind of organizing.
By the way, I think people are just as often right about a whole lot of different things as they are wrong about them. In advancing this judgment as fact, we have been given an object lesson that perhaps proves it to be true. And we bloggers are just as guilty of the ego thing too, eh?
Well, I never said ego was a BAD thing….
And, you are certainly correct — we are all right, and all wrong, about many different things. At least with individual blogs we can, somewhat, ascribe credibility based on our evaluation of a blogger’s personal experience and background, and eventually his/her track record over time. In some of these social networks, I worry that it gets harder and harder to do so.
For example, it’s one thing to say Wikipedia is “usually about right”, because of the sheer number of editors involved — in most cases, glaring misstatements or errors will be caught and corrected. But when I’ve looked up some fairly obscure Wikipedia entries — entries the least likely to be searched — I’ve often found not just statements of opinion or errors, but garbled sentences of juvenilia. You don’t see those, usually, on the “big” pages. These smaller pages are not getting that much traffic so the errors are less likely to be caught (or, at least, caught by those with the time and inclination to correct them).
For the same reason, when you get down to industry or professional peer groups of just a few hundred or maybe a few thousand, the scale becomes so small and in-bred that false ideas and perceptions can just feed each other. I actually see this as an opportunity, but it’s a dangerous one for the people involved.