kill it with fire
May 13th, 2010 • posts i've written
Last night, BBH Labs tweeted a link to Vitrue’s new Facebook fan page evaluation tool. Explore it here (warning: nausea inducing).
They’ve taken their preposterous valuation of a Facebook fan (that link goes to my post about why it’s such a specious argument) and built a bigger gimmick with it.
Please join with me, repost this, and denounce this before we see it in every powerpoint presentation and repeated by our clients. Pretty please?
This reminds me of a paragraph from Gareth Kay,
It’s research like this that is increasingly to blame for the increasingly drunken way we make decisions (the old Ogilvy adage of people using research like drunkards use lampposts – for support, not illumination) and our attempts to predict the unpredictable. It may be ‘nice’ to have a number for the board meeting, but it is often a number that bears little resemblance to reality.
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4 Responses (add your comment)
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I hear and obey, I will spread the word. As best I can, given that I don’t tweet. A (specious) valuation of social status like that gets a 10+ on the nauseating scale. Facebook just seems to bring out the worst…what a name for the app, Virtue, urgh.
I’ll repost and give you attribution. And by the way, I love your Twitter icon, with the stubble! Nathan Yau’s Flowing Data let me here to your blog. I like it!
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I don’t know what your problem is, Bud.
I for one have had MS Word proofreading my papers for content quality since grade school, and it has led me to be the literary star I am today. Sure, machines may technically only be able to tell me when I’ve misspelled common words in their database, and let me know when they THINK I’ve misspelled a word that they just don’t know yet, but when it comes to evaluating prose, you just can’t beat a computer. You already know how well they judge your grammatical ‘errors’ – why not judge the potential of your character?
Reminds me of this scene in Dead Poets Society. I’d love to see my position on the social media quality graph. Lol. Kill it with fire.
And look out – PushKart is thinking of providing product incentives to the highest scoring web surfer contributors.
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Statistics have become a curse. It’s a surrogate for intuition, and a substitute for thinking. Numbers, I was recently telling a colleague, gives us a deceptive sense of control – even mastery.
We’ve got numbers telling us if we are healthy (see medical report), beautiful (weight/dress size), intelligent (Intelligence Quotient), or even sane (Emotional Quotient).
This absurdity will probably cause a lot of heartburn and financial damage – before it is exposed for the pseudo-statistical shite that it is.
Oh – and early in my career, I thought Ogilvy’s ‘rules’ were out-dated. Now I realise it’s just commonsense.
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NOTE: Anonymous and/or hateful comments get deleted. My blog, my rules.
I trust it wont catch on, it’s wank.