Crowd Wisdom and Evaluation
The information availability and the reciprocity of social media is leading to a phenomenon called ‘wisdom of the crowd’. The following cases are stand out examples of crowd wisdom and its evaluation.
Crowd Wisdom
In the early 2000s, NASA invited amateur astronomers for the Mars Clickworkers project to help them identify and categorise craters on Mars. They analysed thousands of photographs taken by the Viking orbiters. More than 80.000 people identified around two million craters for scientific measurement and study. In addition, they classified the relative age of another 300.000. This task would have taken scientists years, if not decades, to complete. Furthermore, American Scientist reported that this collaborative public effort was almost as accurate as work done by expert planetary geologists.
More recently, in 2013 two collaborative projects resulted in the release of Google Maps of North Korea – a country renowned for its secrecy. ‘A community of citizen cartographers . . . came together in Google Map Maker to make their contributions such as adding road names and points of interest.’ Simultaneously a team of researchers worked on a project called North Korea Uncovered. A project based on analysis of Google Earth photos, eye witness accounts, news reports, books, and other information sources. This provided comprehensive information on North Korean economic, cultural, political, and military infrastructures.
Information Availability
One example regarding the information availability is that of the UK Government Communication Service’s (GCS) mandate. With it, the GCS started to evaluate their own strategic communication, including social media. This programme was a landmark in the adoption of rigorous measurement and evaluation of communication and public relations.
Social media evaluation is an integral part of GCS’s overall evaluation framework. It is a mandatory requirement for all UK government departments and agencies to report monthly on their communication outputs, outtakes and outcomes. The system adheres to proven international standards of measurement and evaluation.
The UK Government’s departments and service providers use a range of software tools for social media evaluation. Furthermore, they commission annual studies to evaluate public perception of all departments, and run surveys each year to evaluate government employee attitudes, perceptions and satisfaction. In addition to the previous one, they also conduct a survey on public attitudes, perceptions and expectations.
This kind of evaluation is regarded as a perfect example and should be done by all organizations that use social media in their communication. Professional PR assures that all of it is done efficiently and effectively.