#crowdsourcing is a #WASTEOTIME let me explain, "W-A-S-T-E" - or - How to get your lazy ass followers off their ass and actually do something!
First of all, let me conceed that there is a place for #crowdsourcing. Yep, wikipedia is build on the wisdom of the masses. BUT, don't let this confuse you. Beavers may look like squirells but one builds, the other doesn't. These people don't realize this fact (people trying to #crowdsource)
Asking your followers what they WOULD do is idiotic. Nobody does what they WOULD do. People only do what they DID.
If you have two million followers (like @aplusk) and you ask your followers to RT a story about Lee and Ling in North Korea, you'd think that with a story this important, you'd get atleast 10% of his followers to take the batton and run with it. Guess how many people did it? 10% of 2 million is 200,000. 5% is 100,000 people. Hell, 1% of Aston's followers running with the torch would be 20,000. But...
When crowdsourcing, you must realize that a crowd maketh not a crowd. Especially in Twitter, people follow because they want to be led. They want to be entertained, instructed, and told what they should do by Alpha Bloggers and Thought Leaders. There is nothing wrong with this. In fact, It's kinna smart that people will follow to let the leader do all the hard work.
Where this goes wrong is when that leader thinks that his followers are just like him. He passionately pushes a flag into the sand to find that his followers never got off the boat. In wikipedia's case, all the writers of the millions of pages were not following anyone. They are all leaders. They are the alphas who felt internally compelled to flush out another paragraph with no immediate reward but the doing.
To get anything done using Twitter or Facebook or even Youtube it's NOT the number of followers you have. It's the number of ALPHA followers you have.
Idealized and romanticized versions of yourself are strategically worthless for business projections
There are two types of people: leaders and followers. Asking perfectly happy followers to tell you "What I should blog next," is plain lunacy. After all, they ARE following YOU so that YOU can tell THEM what THEY SHOULD READ NEXT. Remember, one beaver is worth 500,000 otherwise furry woodland creatures who'd rather play with their nuts.
Next: How to actually get people to stand and fight with you... OR, how to get more RT's than Aston Kutcher
