The Insight Of Why
insight [ˈɪnˌsaɪt]
n
1. the ability to perceive clearly or deeply
There's a lot of talk about insight in the social media sphere these days. Much of this talk is centered around tools that propose to deliver those insights. Radian6 for example recently launched their "Insights" product, which is an incredibly impressive tool for segmenting and layering demographic information about the social data you've collected via their platform {Full disclosure, Radian6 is a client}. And if we go by the definition above, it certainly allows you to perceive more clearly and deeply so the name is apropos.
Why?
However, much like my discussions on influencer marketing and its related tools like Klout that attempt to measure influence, a tool can only do so much. Lazy marketers and researchers desperately desire to buy off the shelf that which cannot be bought. These tools (well, some of them anyway) do a great job of uncovering the "WHAT" and quantifying it. What measurable things happened on x platform today and by whom? No matter how good the tool however, it cannot deliver the critical measurement so important to business success...and that's understanding the answer to "WHY". "Why did this person interact, post, converse, make a choice, etc.?" And that's just the explicitly discoverable measures. There are also the important questions like "why did people *not* engage?"...try having a tool measure that sometime. Demographics are great, but in the world of social Psychographics play as big if not a larger role (or if you subscribe to Sociographics then that's closer to the mark).
Asking The Right Questions
For some reason we have no problem spending $100k on a piece of software that produces a nice shiny report, but we balk at spending an additional sum on actual people...those that can make that shiny report *truly* make sense. Make no mistake, I love my tools as much or more than the next guy. I simply view them differently. To me they are the things that remove as much of the laborious, expensive, time consuming things as possible and filter them so that I can then *start* the real process of making sense of it. These tools help lead me to the most pertinent questions, they don't answer the questions for me.
I see bogus 'research' all the time that reaches the mainstream. "100% of people would not pay for Twitter". Really? What if it cost a dollar? How about one hundred dollars? What if I took it away from you tomorrow unless you paid something? Or "When is the best time to tweet?" Don't get me started on this one.
My point here is that if you simply take data alone, and try to parse it in different ways all you really get is 'filtered data'. Useful? Sure. Interesting? You bet. Insightful and/or Meaningful? That remains to be seen and is arrived at only by human investigation *and* the context of the objective.
A Scenario
To put it into a more real life context let's look at the scenario of "A person shopping for a stereo" and dig through the information in progressively more complex ways.
- The average basic demographic breakdown would be useful for knowing something like "This person is 20-30 yrs old, unmarried, lives in blue collar region". I could surmise from that a likelihood of "Lower income, but more of it is expendable than the avg. in the region, with a higher priority on having a good stereo". Useful? Of course... for direct marketing...which doesn't work so great in social, and it's going to also have a relatively high 'out of bounds' rate. It's a good starting point though.
- Now layer in some logical social filtering like only looking for people in that demographic who mention some combination of "stereo, radio, where to buy, anyone know" etc. More useful? Absolutely, this gives us an engagement path with prospects in social (or depending upon need could also be R&D, Competitive Analysis, Product Development, Customer Service, and so on). It's also roughly the extent of what you can derive from tools today even though it will still require humans to confirm and act upon the information.
- Now. What if I went through that data digging deeper layer by layer through the various "Why" questions and then answering them. Mind you, that might mean picking up the phone, going to a store, emailing a survey, reissuing a new set of filtering criteria to something like Radian6...whatever it takes based upon the potential value of the answer. What if I came back to you and said "It turns out that your ideal audience actually makes its stereo purchases as a *secondary* decision while they are furnishing their homes". That's true insight. It changes the game completely. Who you look for online and the keyword filters you use to find them, who you partner with in your supply chain (exclusives with furniture stores), your marketing efforts, the value-added content you create, etc. The only thing that can provide that is biomechanical energy expended over a period of time (aka hard work)
- There's a further step that goes into discovering motivations and behavioral analysis but frankly it's just too broad a topic for a blog post.
Critical Thinking Required
So the next time you pick up a report, do yourself a favor and see if a *why* is being attempted for each statement. If not, ask it yourself. If the response you get is a blank stare or 'there's no way to know that!' then you need to find someone else. If it's because you're not willing to pay for someone else, ask yourself what the value of knowing those answers might be.
Cheers,
Matt Ridings - @techguerilla
Image © Hans Hillewaert
