The Ugly Underbelly of Mass Collaboration

Mass collaboration is a form of activity that occurs when large numbers of people work independently on a single project, and as a concept it's come into its own in light of social and other sharing platforms on the internet. It's a clever, wondrous idea and one whose time is upon us. You can see it at work in the twitter-sphere, and it has been leveraged and used for numerous advances in high profile endeavors such as the human genome project. It's also a popular *new* theme for business books from various intellectuals and business boffins telling us that the future has arrived, and here's what we can expect. It's 'all the rage' as we said in the old days.

Twitter passed 106.5M users in May 2010 according to their developer conference entitled Chirp (pauses and smiles for cuteness) and at that point, there were an average of 55M tweets a day. The top 10 in terms of who is being followed make up more the 44M people, though it's probably fair to say that it may be the same 5.8M people that follow Brittany Spears, that are following the other quasi-celebs that make up the top-10. All this to say, we're talking about a sizable audience, and one clearly that has the technical means to speak and be heard which simplistically = money.

All this popularity has an ugly side too though, and one that I'll admit I don't like. Even more to the point, this less attractive attribute is not being acknowledged as such, and we're doing ourselves a disservice that could undermine the overall perceptions we have about mass collaboration.

There have been some anecdotal examples of crowd-sourcing (I consider this an informal version of mass collaboration as consent to participate isn't overt, but rather volunteered) specifically utilizing Twitter that have tended to be about a given problem or issue affecting a single individual. While there have been times that satisfying these issues is altruistic, all to often they are simple complaints and collaboration as a result turns into mass whining.

Whether it's Dooce complaining about her washing machine, Dave Carroll's broken guitar thanks to United Airlines, or this week's broken wheelchair for little Tanner with muscular dystrophy, the outcome is the same - a new phrase which I wish I'd had the foresight to trademark that I fear you'll see repeatedly in the future "Twitter Outrage".

What is twitter outrage ? This is when the bandwagon is jumped on by many people, following some aggrevious act by some company. Often, it's nothing worse than the normal lack of service any of us encounter, but those with a large following or the ability to create a sensational story can create a twitter outrage and hold some poor company hostage. When mainstream media catches on, it's a hurricane in a teacup - sans the teacup.

Is it right to do this, is this perhaps the way that the 'little guy' finally gets heard and the mistakes that companies make are for once held up to them for accountability..? Perhaps. But let's also consider the other people that have been screwed by Maytag, had destroyed baggage by United, or had a disservice done to them on Air Canada..those without Twitter or Facebook or YouTube. These 'other people' are yesterday, today's and probably tomorrow's customers and they are still going to get the same levels of poor service, as before. What they won't get is people bending over backwards for them, as the PR machines at these companies focus on the squeaky twitter wheel - the ugly underbelly of mass collaboration. We are slowing feeding ourselves this porridge of satisfying bad behavior - we are rewarding inappropriate activity, and that is wrong.

I think the onus is on the people with a large following not to whine, and not to use their interested bases for service vengeance when they need to simply get in touch with customer service. Why do I think this...? I think that while poor customer service will sort itself out with traditional market forces, over time misusing the crowd-source will compromise the very idea of mass collaboration if we let it denigrate into whinging. And that...that would be a far larger shame than a broken guitar or washing machine.