The Medium is the Message

One of the topics we cover in my strategic management class is environmental scanning and monitoring, which is less hype than it is a reminder that keeping an eye on what is going on around you is a good idea regardless of the industry in which you happen to be. Most people can grasp the idea of competitive intelligence, or keeping track of your direct competition; if your primary competitor introduces a new product or technology that renders your product obsolete it would be nice to know about it in time to make plans of your own. But the idea of watching the world for changes that will affect our company can be intimidating, and my students frequently have trouble understanding how this is even possible. After all, where can you get the data to perform such an analysis?

What they fail to consider is that, for our purposes, every report you can find on the behavior of consumers is data we can use to develop and refine our strategy – and that includes political, social, religious, cultural, fashion, sports, technology and educational reporting. A classic example is the way beef and pork futures took off when the Atkins diet was big – because somebody figured out that if millions of people were going to an all-protein, mostly-meat diet all at once there wouldn’t be enough capacity in the pipeline and the price would soar. But sometimes there’s even better information to be had just by observing what people care the most about – what they post about, what they argue about, and how often they contradict each other…

A story being reported on the Fox News site details the results of a new study of the “Edit Wars” on Wikipedia – providing in one article excellent examples of both the point I’m trying to make in this post and why teachers are always telling our students not to use Wikipedia as a research source. Apparently a team at Oxford University got access to the Wikipedia metadata and ran statistical analyses of which topics are the most often edited and re-edited in English and 12 other languages. Religion and politics were the most commonly edited topics in all 13 languages, but from there things differed – scientific topics were the most common on the French and Czech language Wikipedia sites, while Spanish-language pages on sports are the most edited, the Romanians argue about music and art, and so on…

Now, most businesses are not going to have as much traffic to examine as the various Wikipedia sites, and even if they did their own customer information statistics would probably be of more immediate use than this sort of analysis would be. But just looking at who is buying your product does not consider who is looking at it and declining to purchase it; who is looking at it and then finding ways to obtain used versions (or knock-off versions) from private sellers, who is slamming it in online discussions or defending it in comments sections, or even who has created Facebook pages (or entire websites) dedicated to hating your product and trying to destroy it and you…

By the same token, everyone who works for you is a potential source of business intelligence, based on who they speak to, who they email or text with, what they watch and what they see, just by paying attention during their daily lives. But that’s a topic for another day…