Friends among robots
"Left brain…let’s see now, that’s the creative, quirky part of the brain where dreams come from, right," I asked when I was offered the opportunity to contribute to this blog.
A quick wiki search showed that no, no it’s not.
And as this blog’s logo clearly confirms, it’s the "dull, analytic, blah blah" part of the brain that only a robot would want to read about.
Looking at the analytics for this blog, our readers might as well be robots. The faceless "unique visitors" executing "pageviews" are just numbers without express opinions on our topics of choice, right?
Imagine my surprise this past weekend, when I found that several of my friends and family (who are not robots) independently mentioned that they read Left Brain. Their qualitative, sentient feedback encouraged me to explore what lies between what statistics say and what reality is.
What statistics say is one-sided. They do a good job at showing us quantitative properties (numbers), but a terrible job of qualitative ones (opinions).
For example, the top-ranked blog on Technorati is Huffington Post . But that only tells you that HuffPo has a lot of links to it, and that it’s focused on "breaking news and opinion." You may be tempted to send your client there based on its reach alone, but without taking a dive into the site, you won’t see the political motivation, post tone, and commenter vitriol commonly associated with the site.
This real life view of web statistics is imperative for formulating online corporate reputation strategies, and it’s something we work hard at conveying to Ruder Finn clients.
This is not true of everyone offering web advice out there. I’ve heard clients complain about other agencies sending them data-dump lists of every blog under the sun without a value-added proposal that goes beyond the stats.
This is hard to do. It requires at least one of the following:
- Painstaking research
- Longstanding relationships
These are valuable commodities in the web advice world, and can speak to how
businesses adopt new technology and new means of communication. Only a "deep dive" understanding of your field of interest will be able to drive digital decision making.
I think this might be why I’m drawn to human-powered services that go beyond statistics to assure me what I’m hearing makes sense.
For example:
- Hoovers provides editor-selected competitor lists for company descriptions
- Comments on New York Times stories can be highlighted by editors or readers
These gems of online human input are invaluable.
These and many other services remind us that the Internet is not just one big algorithm out to get us. The human element stands to gain online as people start to look beyond the statistics and crowdsourcing that now often dominate what we consume.
Are you a sentient being reading this blog? Make yourself known in the comments!
More from RFI Studios
Comments (2)
November 5th, 2008 at 11:46 am Posted by Becks
I am not a number!
November 5th, 2008 at 11:49 am Posted by rfdarius
i’m a free man! at least until that weird bubble thing comes along….
that was an awesome show!
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