The Phenomenon Of Crowdsourcing

When you have a job that needs to be done and you are not that keen to do it yourself, then you could very well decide to ask someone else to do it. This is known as “outsourcing” the job, and has been a part of business for a very long time. With the increased popularity of social networking it has become possible to get work or information from a greater number of people. This is the age of “crowdsourcing”. It is becoming very popular.

Crowdsourcing is a phenomenon which would be all but impossible without the Internet. There is no more convenient way of getting a message to a wide range of people than placing it on the Internet where it can be read by anyone who happens to stumble across it, or find it buried in the middle of their Facebook feed. Whether you need to know about good restaurants in a city you are visiting for the first time, or the lyrics in the first line of a song, posting your query on Facebook should get you a flood of helpful replies.

If this sounds a lot like placing a question or an advertisement on a bulletin board, it is. But the difference between Facebook and a bulletin board is that Facebook stretches across the world and the replies are automatic. It is bigger, and it is faster and this is just one reason why Facebook has become hugely popular and is relied upon by so many.

Share and Enjoy

Are You Tweeting Too Much?

The first time you sign on to Facebook, you will be greeted by a question at the top of the screen which may seem impertinent. The line of text says, in full, “What Are You Doing?”. The literal answer to this may not be anything particularly interesting. Indeed, it may be “Logging on to Facebook”. It may go without saying, but this question need not be answered in full every time you read it. The more basic and banal your Facebook updates are, the less likely people are to follow you. That’s not to say that you can never post basic updates, but if you tell people every time you sneeze, they’re going to lose interest.

People follow Facebook these days by a wide and varied range of means, including via a feed client which posts new updates on their desktop at graduated intervals. If someone sees that they have twenty new tweets to read, and then discovers that fifteen of them are from you talking about how your toaster isn’t working, then they’d better be very funny updates on the toaster situation or you will lose followers. Quality is more important than quantity, or at least as important.

Of course, your tweeting style should reflect the audience you want to read your tweets. Not everybody is Oscar Wilde, and not everybody wants to read Oscar Wilde anyway. Your tweets should, when it comes down to it, reflect your personality more than anything, and if that personality is simple and unassuming, then your tweets don’t need to be about rescuing people from fires or performing at Carnegie Hall.

Share and Enjoy