Just because you have numbers doesn't mean you have insight | Social Signal

One of the most seductive things about social media is the way it allows us to quantify things. I have more friends than she does – I must be more popular. That blog post got more hits than this one, so that one's more effective. We have more Twitter followers this month than last month, so we're on the right track.

Numbers are lovely that way. In a world where everything seems open to interpretation, numbers offer certainty. Five is bigger than three: end of argument.

Problem is, a beautiful number can hide an ugly bunch of oversimplification. Trying to quantify the complexities of human interaction in a multidimensional matrix of influence and activity in a few simple numbers is next to impossible (although potentially very attractive to venture capitalists).

Which is why, despite a valiant effort, social-media-analysts-turned-political-prognosticators fell so heavily on their virtual fannies in trying to use online metrics to predict last Tuesday's Iowa Republican caucus.

The good folks at Trilogy Interactive summed up how woefully short those predictions fell in a handy infographic. (Only one prognostication came close - eerily so - until a glitch in the data it was based on got corrected, and then it fell into line with the others.)

So why are retweets, likes, mentions and follows such poor predictors of electoral success? As Trilogy points out, it's partly because of the difficulty of focusing that information geographically. And it's partly the way those numbers confuse conversational buzz and notoriety with support. Micah Sifry puts it well:

Saying simple, stupid things that lots of people want to tell their peers about can get you tons of followers and retweets. But it doesn't mean anything definitive about grass-roots support. Otherwise, right now we'd be talking about Herman Cain's amazing victory in Iowa.

More fundamentally, the information that Twitter, Facebook and other platforms can offer us about our relationships to brands, candidates, ideas and each other is still pretty crude. And it would take a far more subtle, sophisticated and complex reading of the things we say to each other to infer anything very meaningful from those blunt-instrument statistics.

Which is worth remembering the next time you find yourself or your organization getting hung up on the number of followers, fans and subscribers you have. Those numbers can be useful... but they couldn't predict Newt Gingrich's future, and they shouldn't dictate yours.