

The Sports Industry's Obsession with Meaningless Metrics - MaxWendkos
http://maxwendkos.com/2011/08/18/the-sports-industrys-obsession-with-meaningless-metrics/

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dwolfson20
As a sports fan, I wonder what's specific about the sports industry in this
analysis? Vanity metrics are an issue for any business with a digital
presence.

Maybe left unsaid is the idea that sports organizations are used to relying on
numbers to assess on-field ability, and it now permeates their social
marketing strategies as well? Still, this is a mistake I've seen many
businesses in plenty of far-flung industries make.

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MaxWendkos
You're right - this isn't specific about the sports industry. However, sports
properties do tend to be a bit behind the rest of the business world when it
comes to understanding and successfully adopting new media. It's a shame,
because they're playing on such fertile groups. Few brands are so lucky to
have such a captive and engaged audience.

This article was targeted at the sports industry because a) I'm working on a
sports startup and b) it was written for SportsNetworker - a sports business
blog.

Is there an e-mail address I can reach you at?

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pulak
I don't see anything here unique to the sports industry, just an instance of a
single sports team having a perspective of social media that I think is common
to many entities across a variety of industries.

Also, a minor note: teams can push content to "fans" on Facebook as well.
Status updates from things I like do show up on my news feed.

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MaxWendkos
Re: uniqueness, you're right. Take a look at my reponse to dwolfson20's
comment.

Re: Facebook page status updates, some do, some don't. Take a look at the
pages you "like" and check out how much of the published content has never
appeared in your feed.

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Natsu
They're in business, too. I've too often seen where management pursues some
meaningless metric with no understanding of how that number is arrived at.

Sometimes, I think that the ability to make fancy yet meaningless spreadsheets
is, at least as far as management is concerned, my most valuable technical
skill. And that depresses me.

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MaxWendkos
It's understandable that businesses are seeking metrics to measure the
effectiveness of their initiatives, but problematic when they give credence to
completely useless numbers solely because they haven't yet identified
effective metrics.

