How Wise Is The Crowd (Even If It Is Social Media Crowd)?

Earlier this week I published a post about ProProfs Polls, a new service for online polls that features some advantages over the traditional market leaders. When writing the post, I could not avoid asking myself why we already have so many web polling services already and why new ones are still launched to impress their target users with broader features.

My idea was that people just love to be able to hear what people around them think on this or that issue. In fact, the press release that I received from the ProProfs guys mentioned that wisdom of the crowd is a powerful phenomenon with “Ask the Audience” being the most popular lifeline of the “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” TV show with a near 95% accuracy. This sounded like a proof of the fact that collective wisdom of the crowd is smarter than any individual of the group.

Social media tools seem to rely on this statement a lot as well as we are all supposed to discover something (new people, new content, new music or new videos) following recommendations of the crowd that we belong to. But does it always work like it should? I have my doubts about it and I’d really want to hear opinions from the crowd around me on this issue.

Here is one example. In the email notifications of new followers, FriendFeed demonstrates exactly how many of your FriendFeed friends already follow your new follower so that you could easily decide if you want to follow this person back as well. Now, normally this is wise as it helps you make the decision whether to follow this person back or not.

But at the same time it makes it very complicated for new FriendFeed users to gain any followers at all among those of us who have been members of the community for a long time - simply because chances are we will not bother to take a closer look at this person’s profile and see if what he or she has to share is interesting enough to follow back - even though this was exactly the procedure we all followed initially. To me this sounds like an entry barrier that FriendFeed does not really need because it may be difficult enough for new members to find friends among those who are already here - even without offering yet another obstacle to them.

Yet this seems to be something of a de-facto standard in the social media world to help you make your decision on everything - be it some new content or a new friend/follower - based on how many of your existing friends appreciate it already. But does this approach work all the time?

For example, on Facebook when I get a new friendship request, I have a habit of taking a look at the number of friends that I share with this person already and if there are at least several of them, I usually approve the request even if I may not know the person myself yet. The reason is simple: the web 2.0 community is not that big and is very closely related so if a person works in this industry, he or she will always know some people that I know - and chances are we will be introduced to each other at yet another conference or meetup anyway so why not approve that friendship in advance?

But I’ve already complained that being a blond girl from Russia on Facebook can be quite a challenge sometimes because one invariably ends with numerous friendship requests from guys in Egypt and Turkey who want to marry the girl immediately. So I tend to be cautious about who I approve as my friends on Facebook - not that my content is that personal as my contact information can easily be found in numerous places online by anyone who actually wants to find it and Facebook is not the only place.

But spam on Facebook is not something I adore so when I get a request from a person who does not share any friends with me and does not provide a personal message explaining the reason of adding me as a friend (now is that really that difficult to add a short note to your request?), I tend to send a standard polite message to the person asking how we happen to know each other. Usually I am either left without any response at all (which clearly marks a potential spammer to me) or get an explanation about some post I wrote and the person liked (and this person easily enters the circle of my friends as a result).

But once this procedure got me into quite an awkward situation. I got yet another friendship request from a person who I shared zero friends with and without looking a lot in the person’s name, I sent my usual message out asking for an explanation of how we happen to know each other. Now imagine my shame when I received a reply explaining that we used to work with the person on one project together! The problem was that we never met in reality so I could not recognize her on the photo and I only knew her by her first and last name while on Facebook she added a middle name to those two which prevented me from recognizing the name easily.

Now this sounds like a good example of how the crowd around me failed to help me in this situation and I am quite certain there are other examples where one can ignore an interesting connection request or a new interesting blog simply because the connection is not part of your crowd and the blog does not have many readers. And this makes me wonder how wise the crowd and the advice it can generate actually are. So please answer, do you personally trust the social media crowd?