The Challenge Rambles and riff raff about all this and that

Social Media, Metrics, The trap: brain collage (part 3)

Web Marketing shouldn't be a part of marketing at all. Why so? Because Web Marketing is measurable, those holding the threads and running campaigns and initiatives can be held accountable for the failures and successes they encounter. Traditional marketing works more like a religion, companies grant faith (dollars) and hope to get something in exchange in the afterlife. That usually yields the eternal discussion of wether bucks spent on Marketing are investment or just expense.

Web Marketing, on the other hand, has a full range of tools and methods that can measure the ROI to a very acceptable degree of accuracy. So, with the focus put on dollars, measurement on web builds us the case, and, with some good fortune, gets more funds to invest.

This has become known territory for all of us working at web marketing. We spend a lot of time, effort and money to get the greatest and latest in Analytics tools because we have learnt that it pays off.

But I do get a feeling that haunts me. The knowledge, deep inside, that we have just scratched the surface; that there is a ton more that we can learn with the different metrics we can acquire, a lot of things that are more complex than cash-in and cash-out, a knowledge that can -potentially- lead to a better understanding of the web audience and, eventually, profits. (Gosh, is that phrase messed up or what?).

If you read parts 1 and 2 of this series you probably know where I'm heading. If you haven't, go back and read!!

We sin. We do the exact opposite thing to what I have suggested on this series. When looking at our facts and figures, those thousands or million visitors are just sheer numbers, abstract entities that build up the charts. They are "visitors" who make "visits" and, if planets are aligned appropriately, they generate a "conversion", else we have an "abandonment". A -> B -> C or D. Analysis can go deeper, try to determine what on the face of the earth influenced the conversion or abandonment and where and how it happened.

With some fortune, some multivariate tests can take place as well. Those determine if a rather limited set of variables building some recipes are more successful in terms of driving our visitors towards our goals.

I know I'm making this sound simplistic. Getting this much takes a lot of time and hard work. Code has to be developed, metrics tools need to be configured, campaigns and start-ups need to be tracked and measured and analysts need to make some sense out of it all.

So, what we have done so far is trying to figure out how things work from the company's point of view, but what would happen if we tried to understand the other end of the function?

What we should try to gather data from and analyze is the public "sentiment" of people reaching out to our web-based efforts. Social Media Marketing does this already, to some extent. Buzz reports, blog and forum monitoring and similar initiatives all provide insights into what's going on on the public perception end. Yet, for the most part, the public is still treated as a mass.

It is not viable to treat each of a million different visitors as a unique entity. For starters the sheer numbers are overwhelming. Then again we are not able to pick up enough data to get the complete picture of why every single individual does what it does. Thus, analyzing each individual is an utopia.

So now we stand in the middle of two opposite approaches. One too general, too broad, too focused on businesses' own belly buttons. The other an utopia, an unviable approach.

In an almost Buddhist reasoning, the truth lies somewhere in between. Focusing metrics on the users, taking advantage of the vast amounts of data we have at hand, learning how to serve them best in order to achieve better business results.

Easier said than done, since we're usually too immersed into trying to close a good quarter to stick our heads out of our own narrow vision to try to establish policies that will, most certainly, not yield results for a rather long period of time (in business terms, that is).

More on this line of thought will come, for certain. For the time being this series is done.

Social Media, Metrics, The trap: brain collage (part 1)

I am always amazed by how ideas can come from anywhere. That is one of the reasons why me reading interests can span anything from Astronomy to Linguistics.

One of Chris Locke's blogs, Mystic Bourgeoisie, had a reference to a BBC documentary called "The Trap". The 3 hour piece is far too interesting and far too long to make any good summaries in here. That being said, I shall share the concept that draw me to write this lines.

During the Cold War, mathematicians developed model of society based on game theory. For this model to work, the human beings are reduced to a simplified version of ourselves. This was latter applied as the theoretical basis for multiple government policies put in place during the 90's. I really recommend the documentary, wether you agree or disagree with the content, it is most certainly quite eye-opening.

Back in the corporate world an analogy can be drawn as well. For decades companies have regarded customers as little more than potentially-buying machines that can be manipulated into acting in the desired way by the means of advertising and marketing. The advent of Internet and social media have built greater complexity into this model. The relation between companies and customers is far more complex and far more difficult than it used to be.

For starters, the one-way communication model of traditional advertising seems to be sinking rapidly into uselessness. The never ending bombardment with TV, Radio and Print ads, billboards and, dare I say it, on-line advertising has made the mean population almost numb to such means of influence. There have most certainly attempts to insufflate some life back into traditional ads, viral being the latest. The funny thing is that Viral has to rely on the user's action to be successful, something that directly contradicts the old paradigm of "we talk, you listen (and buy)". Yet "viral" is still a traditional way of promotion in most senses.

While I was giving some thought to this concepts I couldn't avoid but thinking about Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" series. In case you haven't read it, I'd say you skip the next paragraph, I'm going to spoil the story.

Asimov thinks about a future galactic empire that is swirling down in decadence. No one seems to notice that, but a group of thinkers, commanded by Hari Seldon, creator of the Psychohistory field of thought. Psychohistorians build mathematical models that can predict the future, thus they foresee the decadence and collapse of the empire and, more importantly, the dark ages that are to follow it. Their plan to reduce this dark times is to build Foundation, an encyclopedic world, a stronghold of knowledge, guided through the ages by the sporadic recorded messages of Hari Seldon, that appear every time a crisis is faced by foundation. All goes well until something that no model can predict happens: a mutant -the Mule- has the power to manipulate human brains at will. He overtakes over foundation and puts Psychohistorians plans at stake. A Second Foundation exists to deal with such issues, their field of work is not maths, but developing human's mental capabilities.

The shifts in paradigms are not an easy thing to cope with, the belief systems associated with them are usually deeply rooted within people advocating for them. change is not easy.

Part 2 of this series will deal with the social media aspect that surfaces from this line of thought.