Business managers focus on things they can measure. Income,
expenses, worker productivity and process variation consume peoples
attention. Everyone seems to be consumed with numbers. Many people fail
to consider some of the most important issues that truly drive a
business besides the numbers.
Now the “numbers” are attracting attention to social media. Subsequently everyone wants BIG
numbers. Followers, tweets, retweets, blog post, rankings, Google
juice, traffic and the obsession for numbers continues. While numbers
are important they do not always reveal the true value being created or
destroyed. All the major industries have seen their numbers go down
consistently for years. Did the numbers lead them to change their course? No, it only reflected to the effect of a cause they failed to recognize.
W. Edwards Deming used to say “The most important things in
business are those things you can’t measure, you can see but such
things can make or break your business.” When asked “What are such
things which you cannot measure? His response was “How do you
measure the value of relationships, conversations and the intangible
benefit such things produce? It is the intangible things that create
success but management wants to focus on results at the cost of the
intangible things. Doing so destroys relationships, manipulates
conversations and encourages the production of false results because
that is what management wants, results even when they are false“
What we learn from conversations, relationships and the intangible
value we all gain from being connected with people is the perplexing
paradox that many business leaders simply don’t get. The related
activities of a networked world are driven by communications and
influenced by information. The “result” is what we the people do with the information to benefit ourselves our businesses and our relations.
So What Really Matters?
Our new networked world has everyone chasing results, numbers.
Everyone appears to be rushing to engage their markets using social
technology. Advertising dollars are moving from print to digital.
Attention is rapidly moving to the intangibles and engagement is free
but the cost of trying to force results can be very high. Consider what results and the subsequent cost are to these actions.
- You can use automated technology to gain followers on Twitter. What results do you get? The need to spend more time “vetting through the useless chatter”.
- You can push the wrong message out to large audiences. What results do you get? A rejection by the audience.
- You can “play” with conversations and try and trick the market. What results do you get? Your brand equity destroyed
- You can push out a lot of messages. What results do you get? Labeled as a spammer.
- You push out fake message. What results to you get? Fake relations.
- You chase BIG numbers. What do you get? A lack of understanding the root cause of what will improve the numbers
Business leaders, marketers and advertisers, must learn how to
enhance the relationship with their markets rather than trying to
produce results through numbers. The goal is a conversation
which begets a relationship that can produce results. However, focusing
on the results does not produce relationships. Numbers do matter but
what causes the numbers to produce the right results matters most.
Don’t be misled by fake results. Get it?
What say you?