The tragedy of the (Social Media) gurus

In this blog I raised a number of times the red flag about the well-known phenomenon of "experts" or "gurus" etc. who mushroom when management hypes erupt. The Social Media hype could not be an exception so with a lot of interest I read the post in the blog of Stephan ten Kate titled (in Dutch*) " The public ends the deception of Social media experts". 
One thing some Social Media experts seem to ignore is that today there are no secrets, the public has the means and the will to scrutinize everything; treating the customer with respect is now the rule. In the good old days we would say that one unhappy customer might talk about the bad experiences to 10-12 others. Today an unhappy customer can reach thousands or even millions with his/her bad experience. The Social Media have made today the Word Of Mouth potential advantage but also a substantial risk factor for those making unsubstantiated and bases product (or service) claims. The post of Stephan shows clearly what the power of the Social Media is; he talks also about this in his reflection.
*For non-Dutch speakers a Google translation could help at least for the text!

Experts beware: The Prediction Markets are coming

If you never heard about Prediction Markets before don’t worry, you are not alone. Most of us did not know anything about it until recently, not even people like me who think to be up-to-date with what happens in the cyberspace. Prediction markets is an spin-off of the Collective Wisdom hypothesis, scientifically tested for the first time by the Victorian academic, polymath and statistician Sir Francis Galton and popularized in the book of James Surowiecki The Wisdom of Crowds. Prediction markets are methods based on social media functionality and applied by corporate strategists to improve the accuracy of predictions regarding the outcomes of financial, strategic or commercial decisions by tapping and averaging the collective intelligence of employees. In simple terms you can ask your employees (and even your customers or everyone for that matter) to bet about the success of your new product or the impact of the new advertising campaign. Experience so far seems to support the hypothesis, predictions of this kind are more accurate than those of experts!
The issue has become interesting enough for the New York Times to pay attention to it and for McKinsey to organize a roundtable with a number of insiders.
Web sites apply the principle in larger scale asking people to predict the news, the chance of success of Hollywood films or of new video games (see NYT above). Interesting, isn’t it?