I still remember a time when most social media presentations considered the “One Size doesn’t fit all” slide mandatory. The platforms were new, and brands/practitioners were told that aping was not really the best policy. Yes, there were best practices to learn from, courtesy early adopters, but there were many factors to be considered before they could even be adapted, let alone, cloned.
I still subscribe to that. Every organisation’s business objectives are different, even if they appear to compete in the same category and fight for the attention of the same audience. This difference could most likely stem from their different visions – from how they would scale over time, geography and even their business domain to the nuances in consumer tastes they want to target. This difference would then translate into how they conduct their business – internally and externally – how much hiring gets done in what function, what and how much of marketing is done, how customer care and operations works, what products and features are shipped first and how, to name a few.
These would then dictate what the organisation’s metrics are, and how and when they are measured. Considering that social media is the most ‘direct contact’ and ‘mass’ set of platforms, these differences are arguably exaggerated, because audiences can be sliced thinner (compared to traditional media) and some organisations might deliberately do things to keep out certain audiences eg. what they communicate and how and where too.
Why a repeat of these known perspectives? With more and more data being created by the activities of brands on social platforms, we are seeing tools that are trying to convert all this into usable information. Sometimes these tools are in human form too, and they bring their own perspectives (or lack of it) which essentially means comparison of apples and oranges just because they are fruits. I saw an example last week, which also included the brand I work on – Myntra. To quote Pico Iyer “Where once information had seemed the first step to knowledge, and then to wisdom, now it sometimes seemed their deepest enemy.” Goes for the step before too – data.
Take a couple of examples – Facebook Page and Post Likes. Thanks to the subtle way in which Sponsored Stories/Page Post Ads work, it’s extremely difficult for any tool to bifurcate organic and inorganic Likes. (I am excluding the Page Admins of course) And yet, comparative analyses are made on Like growths. Or take Engagement – semantic analysis is at such an early stage that many tools would consider 100 comments on a post dissing the brand as high engagement. And yet, ‘insights’ are delivered on Engagement. Uff, engagement! My thoughts on that mother word have been documented earlier. These are operations mind you, I am not even getting started on strategy.
Does that mean you should not consider this data/information- competitive or not – at all? Of course not! But how you use that is where knowledge and wisdom step in. Like the famous saying goes, “Knowledge is knowing the tomato is a fruit, wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.” Sadly, the way information is being used, oranges would soon be passe, apples would be compared to tomatoes because they are both fruits and are red in colour.
until next time, data diarrhea