The Low ROI Of Narcissists.

I've long been a sceptic of the value of Facebook Likes and Twitter retweets as measures of anything but the narcissism of the people clicking on the butons.

It's largely been a gut-feeling that's occasionally backed up by anecdotal evidence. Take, for example, the experience of the well-known blogger who was delighted to receive a huge number of retweets of his tweet announcing a new blogpost and slightly less delighted to realize later that those retweets outnumbered the aggregate number of page-views the post received in the following week.

So, I was very pleased to see that we now have a statistial analysis that showed that 16% of 2.7 million studied tweets followed the same pattern.

Meanwhile, over at Facebook, the fact that Mitt Romney has lost 100,000 of his 12 million Likes in the past two weeks doesn't mean that the GOP vote has collapsed in the same time. It's not about him, it's not about voting intentions, it's about Facebook users not wanting to be associated with a losing candidate.

 But where something is measurable (or at least countable), there will always be interested parties eager to asign their meaning to that which they've counted. As ever, make sure you understand what's being measured and, more importantly, why.

Know What You're Marketing.

Andrew Grill (CEO of Kred) is a good guy and he's got a lot of coverage recently for his posts that detail his failure to connect to the brand new 4G service launched by EE. While he makes some good points, I fundamentally disagree with his assertion that marketing did their job.

No, marketing absolutely did not do their job. They didn't do job number 1. They didn't ensure that what they were promoting aligned with the reality of the product/service and not some fatuous ideal.

Under-promise and over-deliver are the watchwords. More than that, given the vagaries of technology, they should have insisted on a soft launch, ensured that customers were delighted rather than disappointed and followed up with marketing that promoted that satisfaction.

As for his assertion, that EE would have saved themselves £260k if they'd realised he was a social influencer, well the less said about that the better.