A Numbers Game

It is very easy to feel overwhelmed by the quantity of data that is increasingly available to organizational and marketing leaders.  It is very easy to find yourself wanting to retreat to a analytic fetal position and ignore the data.

But the reality is that we value what we measure. Similarly, we should measure what we value.  There is a nuance between those statements.

The very act of collecting data on something, imparts value on it.  When my wife and I bought a new hybrid car 10 years ago, one of the things that we were fascinated by was the dashboard graphic that showed us our gas mileage at that instant.  We quickly learned how different ways of driving impacted that all important MPG number.  Our fuel efficiency was important to us in concept prior to that, which is why we bought a hybrid.  But with the graphic in front of us it became much less of an ethereal concept and much more of a focus every time we got behind the wheel.

Similarly, a long time ago, when I worked in an advertising agency, we collected the column inches of newspaper articles that appeared about our clients.  Because we were collecting that data and sharing it internally, it was a frequent topic of conversation.  Eventually, we recognized that as an advertising agency, not a PR firm, we really didn't impact our client's newspaper mentions.  We realized that we were collecting newspaper mentions "because we could," not because it was important.  We discontinued it and the topic of column inches was never discussed again.

With so much of our marketing and communication lives happening online, data collection is no longer the issues it once was. There are metrics galore available to any marketer or communicator who wants them.  The challenge for marketers has shifted from trying to figure out what information to gather to trying to figure out what, of the plentiful data available, is useful data.

Whereas before, marketers measured "what they could," now to a greater extent they can analyze what they should.  It seems to me that easily available data still has that allure of importance.  Like with column inches at the ad agency I worked for, marketers need to be careful about chasing after measures such as Facebook likes or Klout scores simply because they are available.

Just as social media options should be a tool in your marketing toolbox, not your marketing strategy, available metrics should help you measure whats important, not a measure of what is important.