CivieBlog

This month's ASTD Big Question on the Learning Circuit's Blog is about Network Feedback. You might want to take a look at the question by way of background. The basic question is how do you reach out into the vast network of people to get help. A lot of my basic thoughts are captured in:

• How to reach out and find expertise
• How to use Social Media to Find Answers to Questions
• How to Learn through Conversation

Karyn Romeis has an interesting model. She goes from people she already knows who might be experts then to consider other sources. It's almost distance vs. likelihood vs. experience vs. cost. I'm sure there's a nice graph there that could explain this concept. Where's Kathy Sierra when you need her?

Karl Kapp's response sparked some things for me. First, he tells us that there's not one right place to get help. I think that's part of the question. We know of several and may have different levels of experience and we go through some process when we decide. Then he makes a great point:

With Web 2.0 and social networks, the cost of asking a question and seeking advice from several different channels simultaneously is so minimal that it no longer matters whether or not you know the right place to ask the question. Ask it in multiple places because you never know who might have the answer and the overall cost is negligible.

So, the cost graph with Web 2.0 and all the tools make it such that you can push your question into many areas. Maybe spending time choosing is not the way to go at all. Just get good at quickly pushing the question out to all the networks you have. He has an example of where he sends it to five places simultaneously.

What I wonder about sending out to all of these places at the same time is that likely the same people will see the same question going by. What is their perception of multiple questions by the same person? Do they think of it as spam?

I'm curious what people think on this.