How many times per day do you hear the word, "no?" If you work on the agency-side, you likely hear it quite a bit. Hearing "no" from clients is actually a good thing. It means we need to go back to the drawing board to tweak an idea that we had to improve its business. The days where clients approve ideas as we present them are few and far between. Again, that's OK. Part of our role is to push clients with ideas they may have never considered implementing before.Often "no" is the impulse reaction to those ideas.
"No" can certainly be constructive. It pushes us to levels we hadn't necessarily considered before. However, in an industry that's relatively "new" the word "no" can be stifling. For reasons passing understanding, digital analytics (applies to social media analytics more narrowly as well) tends to be one of those areas where we hear "no" a lot. Why? There's a significant amount of fear of the unknown at play, but genuinely it has more to do with a lack of understanding of the subject matter. Contrary to popular belief, we aren't all data analysts. Tell a marketer he/she is a data analyst in the "new world order" and wait for the reaction. All I can say is get out your shield...
Anyway, if the practice of digital analytics is going to advance beyond its current state we need to start pushing some barriers. What does that mean exactly?
- Listening needs to *actually* penetrate the rest of the enterprise - When Ken Burbary and I created the social analytics lifecycle almost two years ago, I think our assumption was that listening outside of marketing/PR was going to take hold a little more quickly. Turns out, that really hasn't been the case. It's unfortunate because building dashboards for folks outside of marketing/PR is the quickest way to spread the power of digital market intelligence.
- Understanding the value in gathering intelligence through non-traditional methods - I struggled with a way to talk about this that wasn't negative, but in the simplest terms we need to understand that with the advent of social media comes an entirely new way to collect data. It's not the same way it was done in traditional market research, and that's OK. We need to understand potential pitfalls with the data, and collect it nonetheless.
- Cohesive digital analytics teams - Traditional market research folks have a lot value in this new world order. Surveys aren't going away. Search analytics folks also have tremendous utility as the connection between search and social becomes even more clear for everyone. Ditto social and traditional media folks. You see where I'm going here...
- Avoid "dumb" measurement debates - Some colleagues may disagree with me, but measuring digital performance belongs under the digital analytics umbrella. No matter where you think it belongs, we need to move beyond dumb debates like whether ROI actually stands for return on investment in social. Or whether social media can even be measured. Or, gasp, whether influencer analyses can even be conducted (they can). Lets focus on substance over these things, please?
- Testing and learning - The best social programs are born out of testing and learning. Its been that way for quite some time now. The same must hold true for digital analytics. We need to try measurement models that incorporate all kinds of disparate data sets. If it doesn't work, we start anew. This also includes building influencer models that incorporate lots of different kinds of metrics in an effort to really understand what's driving consumers to buy our products. I could go on for awhile here, but you see the point. Test. Learn. Execute. This needs to be the new digital analytics paradigm.
What I'm getting at here (perhaps not as coherently as I had hoped) is a new analytics ecosystem that needs to be created within companies. This ecosystem involves traditional market research, search, social, mobile and web. Answering "no" to bringing these pieces together isn't a wise plan. During BlogWorld NY, Ben Edwards of IBM talked about its push to truly integrate data across the enterprise. If IBM is talking this way, it's about time we all start talking this way. Yeah, before you jump all over me...I know...It's IBM. Here's the thing though... Almost every enterprise is gathering data across those spectrums. Almost every enterprise has "someone who does that." So why don't they all sit in a room and talk? Novel, right?
Anyway, I'm hoping that the analytics ecosystem I'm talking about here doesn't take years to manifest itself within companies. If it does, it does. However, I'm going to be doing my part to talk about this idea with clients. If they tell me "no," it just means I'm doing my job to always push the envelope and that we're genuinely trying to test and learn.
What do you think? Am I crazy?
