Crowdsourcing is typically social media driven but a focus group is a traditional approach to doing this. This certainly has the potential to provide an independent source of information, thereby increasing diversity of opinions and offering great value for risk forecasting.
When assessing consumer confidence, for example, social media offers access to a wider range of people and produces more frequent data in real-time whereas official economic figures are typically published quarterly are delayed by a few weeks.
In addition, social media can assess actual transactional data (web searches, financial transactions, web clicks, tweets) rather than opinions based on surveys which may be biased due to the particular population or in some cases contain responses from individuals without actual opinions about particular questions.